WONDER WOMAN 1984 Junior Novelization's Reveals How Steve Trevor Returns and Maxwell Lord's Complicated Villainous Plan
Two junior novelizations of Wonder Woman 1984 was released for some reason. You’d think they’d want to wait until after the movie came out before they released these, but I guess the release of the book slipped their minds. Because of that, some new details for the story have come to light and as you might imagine those details are big spoilers!
The two books that have been released include Wonder Woman 1984: The Junior Novel and Wonder Woman 1984: Meet Wonder Woman (I Can Read Level 3).
Some of the things that I wanted to point out include answers to questions that people have been wondering about. Those things include how Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) comes back, how Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) becomes Cheetah, and Maxwell Lord’s (Pedro Pascal) villainous plans.
It turns out one of the big elements that the story for Wonder Woman 1984 revolves around is an artifact called the Dreamstone. This is how Steve Trevor is brought back, it’s how Barbara turns into Cheetah, and it’s at the center of Maxwell Lord’s villainous plan.
The Dreamstone was used in the 1960s by Doctor Destiny and was also used in the infamous Sandman series. In the movie, “it is a harmless-looking citrine ring that is brought to the Smithsonian, where Diana (Gal Gadot) and Barbara work as part of a seized collection of artifacts that were being smuggled into the United States.” The Dreamstone has the ability to grant one wish, and Diana says it is “an object endued with the power of the gods like her lasso.” It’s explained that the Dreamstone’s creator is the God of Lies, and destruction follows it. As you might imagine, Diana's wish was to bring Steve back and now his fate is directly tied to the Dreamstone.
When it comes to Barbara Minerva becoming the villain Cheetah, it’s explained that Barbara develops an instant girl crush on Diana and “laments how much better Diana is at fitting in than she is.” There’s a significant emphasis on popularity with Barbara and how she doesn’t fit in. At one point, she “turns against her friend of five minutes for Maxwell Lord, a man she has known and has been nice to her for all of two. Her powers are obtained by a slip of the tongue more than anything else; she wishes she was like Diana hence gaining at least some of Diana's powers. Her descent into madness felt very Batman Returns Catwoman-esque.”
As for Maxwell Lord’s evil plan, it seems ridiculously complicated. This version of the character leans more toward the “Machiavellian greedy supervillain.” He’s first introduced in a commercial that Diana sees on a TV, and she can tell he's a scam artist. He runs an oil company that the average civilian can have a stake in, but we later learn that it's all a front, and the oil wells are empty. He’s running a scam. Maxwell is in reality trying to find the Dreamstone to make his business work, and he ends up preying on Barbara's low self-esteem to entice her into giving it to him.
Things get complicated from there “as Maxwell has to find new people to make new wishes because he can only make one. So, he wishes for power, which makes his oil wells pile up. He bullies his former investor into granting another wish and another and another that eventually leads him to Egypt. He ultimately tricks an oil baron into giving up his oil fields for his wish of segregating Egypt with a giant wall so he can own his ancestral lands.” The novel says: "The wall appeared to trace an ancient border . . . the border of a land that no longer existed. The land that had belonged to the ancestors of Emir Saif Bin Abydos."
It’s explained that Russia then gets involved, and they ”recognize the new land while the United States acknowledges traditional Egypt, and now everyone is waving their nukes around. There is now a run on gas because Maxwell owns more than half of the oil in the world, causing mass riots worldwide. Maxwell eventually returns to the United States, wishes/cons his way into the Oval Office, where he gets the President to wish for more nukes, which Russia sees, and is now going to retaliate. Hence our world-ending scenario.”
Whoa… ok. I guess that explains why we see Wonder Woman fighting in the White House because she is trying to stop Maxwell from destroying the entire world.
This is such a weird direction to take the story where the villain is forcing other people to make wishes for him. What’s to stop them from wishing Maxwell Lord to be dead!? It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the film. I hope that it ends up being better and making more sense than how it’s described here from these books.
Source: Bleeding Cool