The initial reviews of Wonder Woman 1984 or WW84 (which, director Patty Jenkins said, was set in that Orwellian year because it was “the height of Western civilization [and] our current modern belief system”) spoke gloriously of its optimistic script, Gal Gadot’s magnetism and the zaniness of supporting work from Pedro Pascal as Trumpian villain Maxwell Lord and Kristen Wiig as archaeologist-turned-apex predator Barbara Minerva.
Writing for Vulture in an early dissenting opinion, Angelica Jade Bastién mentioned the film’s “genuinely weird accounting of Middle East politics,” but barely any other initial reviews mentioned the Egypt storyline that drives the film’s second major action sequence. It was only when viewers started streaming the film on Christmas and started posting their reactions to social media that a different consensus began to emerge. Many elements of WW84 feel like deliberate homages to both the ’80s and its movies.
The opening obstacle course during which the young Diana learns the importance of truth has elements of Chariots of Fire; the mall where Diana saves two girls from jewellery store robbers evokes the pleasant capitalist buzz of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The body possession storyline that allows Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor to reunite with Diana was a common feature of ’80s comedies including All of Me. The decade’s tropes have become so commonplace in the ensuing decades of pop culture — Stranger Things did the mall thing; Freaky did the body swap thing — that viewers are able to spot them, nod in polite recognition and move on.
Jenkins and her co-writers Geoff Johns and David Callaham craft their version of Egypt and the grander MENA region out of the same oversimplifications we’ve heard about this part of the world for years. It’s a strange about-face for the franchise given how 2017’s Wonder Woman acknowledged prejudice against MENA people with the character of Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), a soldier who had to give up his acting dreams because “I’m the wrong colour.”
WW84’s clichés might feel as integral to the period as fanny packs and leg warmers, but breathing new life into orientalism and Islamophobia is a little more unforgivable than a fashion faux pas. In his quest for world domination, Pascal’s Maxwell Lord visits Emir Said Bin Abydos (Amr Waked), an Egyptian oil magnate whose holdings Lord plans to seize in exchange for granting a wish with the ancient magic stone he now controls.
But apart from a magazine cover identifying the emir as the “King of Crude,” it’s not really clear who the character is supposed to be. The movie presents him as a monarch, and he is referred to as “your highness”, but Egypt was a democracy in the 1980s. What’s more, emir is a Muslim term that hasn’t been used to describe Egyptian leadership in a thousand years; emir is almost exclusively a descriptor used in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. His character’s costume, like his identity, is confused, with a headscarf and a three-piece gray pinstriped suit underneath an open blue robe with gold trim.
Although traditional Egyptian male dress includes garments binish, a long, dark overcoat, the emir’s look is more in line with the styles of Saudi Arabia or the UAE, where it is customary to pair a head wrap (shemagh) with long robes or thobes (at the time, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak often appeared in tailored suits). The women of WW84’s Cairo, including a young girl whom Diana saves from a speeding truck, all wear hijabs and niqābs, but during that period in Egyptian history, wearing those items was actually a topic of widespread debate as the country struggled to determine how much of a role the Islamic faith was to take in public life.
None of this is to say that showing characters in a binish, a shemagh and thobe, or a hijab and niqāb is inherently wrong. But in too many American films, these costume choices are tied to regressive characterisations that serve to elevate Western ideologies above those of MENA countries, leaving WW84’s retrograde portrait of Egypt more in line with Temple of Doom’s Thuggees than with actual Egyptians.
Add to this how the emir tricks Lord by selling the Saudis oil the American businessman had hoped to acquire for himself and his one true wish being the expulsion of all “heathens” from his country, a desire that causes the creation of a ‘Divine Wall’ that keeps Egypt’s poorest citizens from clean water.
Theories popped up on Twitter over the weekend suggesting that it’s the emir, and not Lord, who is the film’s Donald Trump stand-in, because his ‘Divine Wall is an analogue for the Mexican border wall, but having the emir use ‘heathens’ as a descriptor is a deliberate evocation of Middle Eastern leaders as Islamic zealots.
That isn’t even touching upon the tone-deaf scene in which Gadot, an Israeli actress who served in the Israel Defense Forces, saves two Egyptian children playing soccer from an incoming truck. The film doesn’t want you to remember Gadot’s July 2014 Facebook post in support of the IDF a week after an Israeli strike on Gaza killed four Palestinian boys who were, in an uncomfortable alignment with WW84, playing soccer at the time of their deaths (Lebanon responded to Gadot’s comments by banning the first Wonder Woman, which one group referred to as “the Israeli soldier film”.)
WW84 continues this strange rearranging of historical fact when the narrative leaves Egypt. When an Iraqi man tells Lord, “The Soviets have sided with Iran. Iraq is preparing to defend ourselves, as unrest spreads,” Lord grants his wish by giving him weapons to defend his country. No matter that 1984 was the middle of the Iran-Iraq War, during which both the US and the USSR backed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who didn’t need the assistance of a magic stone to purchase fighter jets, combat helicopters, mortars, tanks, guns, missiles and thousands of other arms from the Soviet Union. Why even include this throwaway character? O
r another scene later on, when a well-to-do white woman in DC ushers her husband inside their apartment, telling him, “There’s a riot at the Saudi Embassy.” The entire world seems to be descending into chaos, but the only specific place that gets a mention to hammer home how bad everything has gotten is a location populated by brown people.