Wonder Woman 1984Save

Themyscira flashback. Young Diana (Lilly Aspell), age ten, is competing in the Amazons' annual athletic tournament — a multi-event competition that combines running, archery, swimming, and equestrian challenges. Diana, against larger and older competitors including her aunt Antiope (Robin Wright, reprising her role from Wonder Woman (2017)), is winning. Halfway through, her horse trips and she falls. She remounts and pushes through. Then she realizes she has missed a flag-checkpoint. The shortest route to get back on the course is to swim through a freezing lake — the longest route is to ride back around and clear the missed flag legitimately. Diana chooses the shortcut. She wins. Antiope catches her in the cheating. She tells Diana her victory is invalid because she didn't earn it honestly. Hippolyta — Connie Nielsen — tells Diana the lesson: "Greatness is not what you think it is. You will know when you've earned it." The opening sequence is a 12-minute pre-credits set piece that mythologizes Themyscira and establishes the film's thematic core.

Washington DC, 1984. Sixty-six years after the events of the first Wonder Woman film, Diana is now in her late 30s (or really, her hundred-and-twelfth year — Amazons don't age like humans). She's a Smithsonian Institution archaeologist by day, in her professional role as Dr. Diana Prince, head of the museum's cultural-artifacts division. She's been operating as Wonder Woman secretly for sixty years — never publicly photographed in costume, performing low-key heroic interventions in DC. The opening Smithsonian scene is the film's set-piece — Diana saving a mall full of shoppers from an armed robbery at a jewelry store, swinging across the mall's central atrium on her Lasso of Truth, taking out three armed criminals, vanishing without a trace.

Barbara Minerva. The Smithsonian welcomes a new staff member — Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a recently-hired cultural-anthropology specialist who has been bumped from a junior associate position. Barbara is socially awkward, professionally invisible, and quietly desperate for friendship. She idolizes Diana for her confidence, her elegant Italian-style wardrobe, her ease with men. The two of them become unlikely friends. Then the FBI arrives at the Smithsonian with a delivery — a series of stolen antiquities recovered from a Smithsonian mall jewelry-store robbery (the same robbery from the opening). One of the stolen items is a small etched citrine-amber gemstone with Latin inscription. Diana and Barbara are tasked with identifying its origin. The inscription reads (in Latin): "Place upon this stone your wish and your wish shall be granted." Both women initially dismiss the inscription as superstition.

The wishes. While alone in the Smithsonian lab that night, Barbara — who has just been mugged in a Smithsonian parking garage and was saved by Diana in costume — handles the gemstone and idly wishes "to be like Diana." The gemstone glows. The next morning, Barbara is stronger, more confident, more attractive — she has been given a transferred version of Diana's powers, with the gemstone subtracting from Diana's strength as a price. Diana, holding the same stone in her own hand the next morning, also makes a wish — she wishes for Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), her dead WWI lover, to come back to life. Diana's wish is granted. Steve appears at the Smithsonian's lobby that day. But the gemstone has placed him in the body of an anonymous human man (with no identifying information). Diana sees Steve. Only Diana can perceive him as Steve. Everyone else sees a random Washington bachelor. Steve is alive and Diana is in love again. The price: Diana's superhuman strength is gradually being drained.

Maxwell Lord. The actual thief of the gemstone — and the figure whose presence drives the entire plot — is Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), a 1984-style failing television-evangelist and oil-baron-aspirational con artist. Lord has been broadcasting a TV-program called the Black Gold Coalition that has been selling investors fictional oil futures on land he doesn't actually own. He's deeply in debt and his eight-year-old son Alistair is at risk of being taken by Lord's ex-wife. Lord has been searching for the gemstone for years — he's read in ancient Babylonian texts about a Mesopotamian wishing-stone called the Dreamstone that grants any wish but extracts a cost from the wisher. Lord's con: he plans to wish to become the Dreamstone itself so that he can extract people's life-force as payment for each new wish he grants.

Lord becomes the Dreamstone. Lord, after manipulating Barbara Minerva into trusting him, steals the gemstone from her. He uses it to wish that he himself "become the Dreamstone" — and the wish is granted. Lord can now grant any wish to any person who touches him while making the wish. He charges them a price taken in life-force, money, beauty, or vitality — whichever they value most. His scheme accelerates. He grants thousands of corporate wishes across the United States in days, racking up vast extracted wealth. He becomes a powerful media figure. The U.S. President of the time — a recognizable Reagan-style cigar-and-suit figure — wishes for unlimited nuclear missile capability to deter the Soviet Union. The wish is granted; ICBMs are appearing in U.S. Air Force bunkers globally. Cold War tensions escalate into a real-time nuclear-strike threat by July 1984.

Diana weakens. The cost of Diana's wish — Steve Trevor's return — is her power. Every additional moment she's with Steve she loses more of her superhuman speed, durability, and combat strength. Steve, seeing her weakening, urges her to renounce the wish. Diana refuses. She's been alone for sixty-six years. She finally has Steve back. "This is the only thing I've ever wanted." Steve has hours, then days, of conversation with her about Themyscira's lesson on shortcuts. Steve persuades her that the only honest path is to renounce the wish.

Steve sacrifices himself. Diana, in a Smithsonian office, makes the choice. She kisses Steve goodbye. She renounces the wish. The Dreamstone-Lord's energy reverses through her — Steve disappears in a flash of light, the borrowed body returning to its rightful owner (who emerges confused, no memory of the past month). Diana's powers fully return. She's now at peak strength for the first time in weeks. She has lost Steve again. She accepts the loss as the price of doing what's right.

Barbara becomes Cheetah. Meanwhile, Barbara Minerva — having gained Diana's powers but having continued to absorb Dreamstone-energy — has been transforming. The Dreamstone's accelerating-corruption arc has been triggering her latent predator-instincts. Maxwell Lord, sensing Barbara's frustration with her remaining limitations, offers her a second wish: "become an apex predator." Barbara accepts. She transforms into Cheetah — a humanoid cheetah-woman with feline claws, super-speed, and savage instincts. She emerges from a Smithsonian rooftop covered in cheetah-spotted fur. Cheetah is now the film's secondary antagonist, allied with Maxwell Lord.

Maxwell Lord broadcasts globally. Lord has been preparing for weeks. He learns of a classified U.S. satellite communications-array system called the Satellite Broadcast Network — a Cold-War-era military system that can simultaneously broadcast video to every television receiver in the world. Lord plans to travel to the satellite uplink station in Cairo, broadcast himself globally, and grant a single global wish to every person on Earth simultaneously — extracting life-force from billions at the same time to rejuvenate his rapidly-deteriorating body (the Dreamstone has been eating Lord from the inside out for weeks).

Final battle. Diana, in full Wonder Woman armor — and wielding the Golden Eagle Armor of Asteria (a legendary Amazon hero whose pre-historic golden armor Diana has had hidden at the Smithsonian for sixty years) — flies the Invisible Jet to Cairo. She fights Cheetah on the satellite uplink station's roof. The Cheetah fight is hand-to-hand combat that destroys most of the satellite array. Diana defeats Cheetah by trapping her in an electrified power line. Maxwell Lord begins his global broadcast.

The wish renunciation. Diana, using her Lasso of Truth, lassoes Lord in mid-broadcast. The Lasso of Truth's compelling-honesty effect transmits through the broadcast itself — every person watching Lord on television, every person in his audience worldwide, can now hear Diana's voice directly in their heart through the Lasso's truth-compulsion. Diana addresses the world directly. She tells everyone — every single person on Earth — that their wishes are being granted but at hideous personal costs. She begs them to renounce their wishes voluntarily. One by one, billions of people across the planet renounce their wishes. Lord weakens as each wish is reversed. He sees a vision of his own son Alistair, who has been broadcasting from Lord's office, crying for his father. Lord renounces his own wish to become the Dreamstone. He returns to being an ordinary, frail, sixty-year-old failed businessman. He reunites with his son.

Coda. Six months later. Diana, in a winter sweater, walks through a Smithsonian-adjacent food court in DC. She bumps into the man whose body Steve Trevor temporarily inhabited. The man is now back in his own life — he doesn't remember anything from his Steve-possession. He smiles at her politely. She smiles back. He gives her a warm scarf and walks off. Diana looks up at the sky. "Goodbye, Steve." She walks alone through falling snow.

Mid-credits. Lynda Carter — the original 1970s television Wonder Woman from Wonder Woman (1975-1979) — appears in costume on a Themyscira-style cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea. She introduces herself to a child as "Asteria" — the original mythological Amazon hero whose golden armor Diana wears in the film. The Lynda Carter cameo is widely-celebrated as a generational tribute to Wonder Woman cinema. Cut to credits.