WONDER WOMAN 1984 and OBSESSION Are Weirdly Similar When You Look at What Diana Did
There’s no real contest between Wonder Woman 1984 and Obsession when it comes to quality. One clearly landed its ideas better than the other. Still, fans have spotted a pretty interesting connection between the two movies, and once you see it, it’s hard to ignore.
Strip the superheroes, colorful costumes, and comic book magic out of Wonder Woman 1984, and part of its story starts looking a lot like Obsession.
Both movies involve someone using supernatural power to bring the person they desperately want into their life, regardless of what that wish means for the person whose body and autonomy get caught in the middle.
Of course, Obsession takes that idea somewhere much darker and actually confronts the disturbing implications of it. WW84 mostly moves right past them.
The comparison centers on Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince wishing for Steve Trevor to return in Wonder Woman 1984. Steve does come back, but Chris Pine’s character doesn’t simply materialize out of nowhere. His consciousness takes over the body of another man, effectively erasing that person while Steve is occupying his life.
Compare that with Obsession, where Bear wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world. The circumstances and intentions aren’t identical, but both wishes involve taking away another person’s control in pursuit of something the person making the wish desperately wants.
Wonder Woman is supposed to be one of DC’s great heroes, someone driven by compassion and a strong moral compass. Yet Diana is so happy to have Steve back that the identity and life of the man whose body he inhabits become secondary concerns.
Obsession is intentionally examining the horror of having your autonomy ripped away. Bear is a villain hiding behind the image of a “nice guy,” and his wish demonstrates how little he actually cares about Nikki as a person. Nikki is forced to experience what happens while trapped inside her own mind, unable to control her body or her life.
Wonder Woman 1984 isn’t trying to tell that kind of story. Diana isn’t presented as a villain, and the movie isn’t constructed as a critique of someone losing control over their own body. Instead, Steve’s return is tied to Diana’s loneliness and inability to completely move forward after losing him.
Diana has built a life for herself in the 1980s, but it feels empty compared to the life she once knew. Steve was a major part of what grounded her emotionally, and getting him back gives her something she thought was gone forever. The movie wants us to understand why she has such a hard time giving him up again.
The problem is that the method used to bring Steve back creates an ethical issue much bigger than the movie seems interested in confronting.
That’s where Obsession and Wonder Woman 1984 head in completely different directions. One makes the loss of bodily autonomy central to its horror. T
he other uses a surprisingly similar situation as part of a superhero romance and mostly brushes aside what’s happening to the innocent person involved. One movie explores the consequences, while the other one ignores it.
Wonder Woman 1984 already had plenty working against it when it arrived, and critics and audiences found no shortage of things to argue about. Still, the Steve Trevor body-swap situation remains one of its strangest creative choices because it could have been avoided so easily.
Wonder Woman 1984 isn’t secretly a horror movie, and Diana Prince certainly isn’t Bear. But viewed through the lens of Obsession, Diana’s wish suddenly looks a whole lot creepier than WW84 ever seems to realize.