Small Details You Missed In The New Wonder Woman 1984 Trailer
This year, fans everywhere have been jonesing for some real, quality superhero movie content. Gal Gadot, goddess she is, came to provide.
As promised, the second trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 debuted at the DC FanDome event on Saturday, August 22 — and it's not all glitz and flashy action like the first trailer for the sequel movie was; there's even more substance. This trailer finally provides some much-wanted details about Kristin Wiig's Cheetah, including the first real glimpse at what her transformation from archaeologist and Diana Prince ally Barbara Ann Minerva into her villainous alter-ego looks like. Along with that, each character's motivation is more clearly summarized in the new trailer. Wonder Woman 1984 is clearly a film meant to be more about clashing personalities and dreams than about saving the world or defying the conquests of gods like Wonder Woman was back in 2017. It's narrower and more personal, but that doesn't mean the stakes aren't as profound.
Trailer editing is an art defined by cramming as much information as possible in without being too spoiler-y within a very short window. That means using a lot of visual language to get a point across — and in big blockbuster trailers like this new one for Wonder Woman 1984, that's easy to miss in between all the splashy action and sweeping gestures of coolness, like watching Diana swing herself across the sky and riding on lightning. Here are some small details in the new Wonder Woman 1984 trailer that you might not have thought through, and what they hint at for the movie at large.
Bookending cuts in the new Wonder Woman 1984 trailer
The ending of the first Wonder Woman 1984 trailer, released during Brazil's Comic Con Experience in December 2019, appears to be the beginning of the second trailer.
Early on, we see a simple enough cut of a carrier helicopter approaching a massive satellite receiver on a small archipelago. The kicker comes later, as the trailer ends with the fight between Gadot's Diana and Wiig's now-fully-transformed Cheetah. There's little doubt this could be the climactic final showdown between them, given the no-holds-barred sparring they perform (Cheetah does an incredible full-body flip at one point) and the fact that Diana is donning her slick, upgraded golden armor – but the point here is that the place the battle takes place is the same location we see at the beginning of the trailer. You can tell from the concrete aesthetic and lighting, as well as from the little bit of the smaller communications arrays that are briefly be seen.
We don't know where this is as of yet, of course, but it's the likely MacGuffin of Wonder Woman 1984 – somehow related to whatever nefarious plot that smarmy businessman Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) has in wishing his way into the Presidency with the assistance of cursed magical artifacts. Cheetah is acting as flunky for him throughout the story, so what's so critical about a satellite receiver that she must be the last line of defense against Diana?
A quick flash of a familiar face in the second Wonder Woman 1984 trailer
It's been a while, so it's understandable if you didn't remember, but it looks like we'll be seeing more than just Diana Prince's mother Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) reprising an Amazonian role. During the opening scene of the trailer, which depicts the Amazon Games (essentially Themyscerian Olympics), we see a long line of Amazonian women along with young Diana (Lilly Aspell). At the forefront of that line is someone we've seen before: Venelia, portrayed by Dutch model and actress Doutzen Kroes.
It's a surprising turn to see in a flashback, as we know Venelia goes on to assist Diana's aunt Antiope (Robin Wright) in training Diana as a warrior. Perhaps in these flashbacks incorporated in Wonder Woman 1984, we'll get to see a little bit more of Diana's sisters-in-arms and her relationships with them. And hopefully, the sting of getting blown out of the athletic water by an eight-year-old during a tense competition won't last for Venelia.
Barbara's possible reputation
The new Wonder Woman 1984 trailer also finally gives us a peek into Barbara Ann Minerva's motivation as a villain: jealousy. She tells Diana, "You've always had everything, while people like me have nothing" — which upends the presentation of her relationship with Diana in the first Wonder Woman trailer as being pretty friendly. What "everything" seems to mean to Barbara, more than beauty or money, is status and confidence. To quote the woman herself, Barbara wants to be "an apex predator."
The scene in which Diana alights from a limousine, all eyes turning to her, at some swanky gala is immediately followed by a sequence of Barbara walking into that same event while others look her up and down with obvious reluctance to approach. It's not that Barbara is ignored and that the people passing over her are simply not paying attention to her — it seems that people are noticing her presence, but are avoiding engaging with her. Barbara is nervous and it appears that no one wants to associate with her, despite her being dressed to the nines just like Diana and looking every bit a socialite. We know Barbara is an archeologist and a colleague of Diana's, but little else is confirmed about Wonder Woman 1984's take on the character. What could cause her to be so ostracized from her professional community and create all this buried animosity that she eventually unleashes on Diana, despite Diana's attempts to befriend her?
Run, Diana, run!
A slightly less-subtle small detail present in the new Wonder Woman 1984 trailer are the parallels between young Diana Prince and adult Diana Prince as the girl and the woman run — literally toward an endpoint and figuratively toward a new chapter.
It happens right at the trailer's outset, as young Diana is participating in that Olympics-esque event alongside her Amazonian sisters. We watch as the tiny warrior sprints with all her might, surpassing her competitors with a furrow-browed expression of determination on her face. That's spliced with footage of adult Diana racing down a city street, making the exact same face her younger self did all those years ago. Then, as kid Diana bolts up the curved edges of the oval amphitheatre, pumping her arms through the air and finally leaping into the open air beyond the dome, we see adult Diana slicing the city air with her gauntleted arms and then swinging her Lasso of Truth before flinging herself into space.
It's a chills-inducing bit of parallelism, and possibly hints that Wonder Woman 1984 will be digging deeper into Diana's upbringing and showing how she became the superhero she is today. (Well, in the 1980s, but you get the point.)
A reference to Wonder Woman's invisible jet?
The first trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 featured a scene in which Diana and Steve are strapped into a jet, flying through a sky bursting with fireworks. No dialogue is heard between the two, as the moment is just one of many in an action-packed montage. However, the new Wonder Woman 1984 trailer gives us additional context for the scene — during which Steve makes a comment about his expert flying skills.
"The way I fly, they will never find us," he tells Diana with a confident smile. Diana, with all the worldly wisdom she's gained over the years that Steve has presumably been dead, tells Steve about a little thing called radar, which not even Steve's prowess as a pilot can evade. "Will they — will they shoot at us?!" Steve asks in a hilariously exasperated tone.
This exchange between the reunited couple is a pretty darn adorable one, and many fans have pointed out that Steve's remark could be a reference to Wonder Woman's invisible jet from the DC comics. What's more is that the jet that Diana and Steve are seen flying features the same clear domed top that the aircraft from the comics does. Commonly known as the Invisible Plane, the Amazonian aircraft first appeared in 1942's Sensation Comics #1, which saw Wonder Woman flying Steve to his home ... in Washington, D.C. ... where Wonder Woman 1984 is partially (or perhaps event mostly) set.
Whether or not the jet in Wonder Woman 1984 is really Diana's invisible aircraft, we can't say for certain. If nothing else, its inclusion coupled with Steve's comment is a nice little callback to the comics for readers to smile about.
What's going on with Maxwell Lord?
It seems that somewhere in the course of Wonder Woman 1984, Maxwell Lord will basically wish himself into the White House with the mysterious artifact that gives Barbara her powers and lets Diana have her long-lost love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back. In the trailer, we see that Lord's big overture to the world about giving them what they want is filmed from what either literally is the White House Briefing Room or is some facsimile of it. In another scene from the trailer, we see magical gusts buffeting the artifact as Lord performs some supernatural act. Perhaps he grants the whole world's wishes to gain legitimacy as President?
Later, we see Cheetah and Wonder Woman fighting in the actual White House, and the men shown attacking Diana are almost certainly Secret Service as well as Capitol Police. Finally, we have a shot of Barbara and Lord on Air Force One discussing Evil Plans, and you can see the embroidered seal of the Presidential office on Lord's seat.
This is a sizable twist from what we understood from the original trailer: We were initially led to believe Lord was simply a billionaire businessman, which entails plenty of power all on its own. As Tears For Fears wisely counseled in 1985, everybody wants to rule the world — but what does "more" mean for Max Lord, if the seat of American power isn't enough? We can't wait to find out when Wonder Woman 1984 takes flight October 2, 2020.