After starting out strong with the initial wave of reviews, Wonder Woman 1984 has lost its Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie, once again directed by Patty Jenkins, finds Diana (Gal Gadot) smack in the neon-hued, Aquanetted decade of the '80s, working as a cultural anthropologist for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Working alongside her is new hire, Barbara Mineva (Kristen Wiig), a brilliant but awkward gemologist-geologist-lithologist. Life is quickly upended when they get hold of a gemstone artifact that has the ability to grant any wish, which results in Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) returning - sort of. Worse, it transforms Barbara into something sinister before falling into the hands of the scheming and power-hungry Max Lord (Pedro Pascal). The Wonder Woman 1984 cast is largely brilliant.
But what had first started out as a second Certified Fresh theatrical outing for Wonder Woman (the first movie sits at a 93% critics consensus and an 84% audience score) quickly soured. Initial social media reactions were glowing, but the first wave of official reviews indicated some trouble was on the horizon and that not every critic was wowed by the movie. When it dropped in theaters and on HBO Max on Christmas Day, the feedback from more critics and the audience grew even more critical. Within 24 hours of release, Wonder Woman 1984 has lost its Certified Fresh rating.
To understand why, it first helps to understand how Rotten Tomatoes' scoring works. For a wide-release film like WW84 (indies are scored differently), anything that has an initial score of 75% and above is considered Certified Fresh provided it has been reviewed by at least 80 critics. When the score drops below 70%, it loses its Certified Fresh rating and drops into the Fresh category. Anything below 59% gets the dreaded Rotten label. Currently, Wonder Woman 1984 stands at a mediocre 66% on the Tomatometer and 74% audience score. It should be noted Rotten Tomatoes' scoring system is not always a true indicator of a film's quality. Plenty of warranted criticism has been lobbed at RT's critics' system of scoring a film either Fresh or Rotten as being too restrictive and binary. And there have been multiple instances of angry fans review-bombing certain "controversial" films like Captain Marvel and Star Wars: The Last Jedi in order to tank the audience score. Still, the critical rating of a huge, anticipated superhero movie like Wonder Woman 1984 dropping so quickly means something.
Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Wonder Woman 1984.
The most glaring problem raised by reviewers was that Wonder Woman 1984's story was muddled and messy. The runtime was over two and a half hours – fine if all that time is needed, but the general consensus from fans and critics alike is that at least half an hour could have been cut without the movie missing anything significant. Jenkins, Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham are all credited as screenwriters, and, at times, it absolutely feels as though three different main writers had pieced the final draft together.
More troubling are a few of the choices made with the story and characters. Steve Trevor resurrecting in another man's body was a needlessly complicated storyline that had no effect on the rest of the movie. But the real issue is that, with him hijacking another man's body, the scene where he and Diana sleep together is frankly unsettling. For a movie that is a tacit condemnation of rape culture, the titular heroine sleeping with a guy whose body has been overtaken and without his consent is problematic to say the least. Criticism of the sequence set in Egypt has also been rampant online, with reviewers calling out Wonder Woman 1984's use of outdated Middle Eastern stereotypes and the framing of efforts to reclaim colonized land as disastrous.
Ultimately, whether someone loves, likes, or is deeply disappointed in Wonder Woman 1984 is up to them. Plenty of people found the movie to be hopeful and uplifting, the message of redemption elevating the movie beyond its flaws. Still, those flaws do exist and they're significant. It's not the home run the first Wonder Woman was, and while high expectations may factor into that, the movie's clear narrative issues knocked it from its Certified Fresh pedestal.
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December 28, 2020 at 09:24AM
https://screenrant.com/wonder-woman-1984-lost-rotten-tomatoes-certified-fresh-reason/
Why Wonder Woman 1984 Lost Its Certified Fresh Score - Screen Rant
https://news.google.com/search?q=fresh&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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