Movie Review: Superman (2025)

Superman (2025)

Mmm, yeah. This review was in the editing pile for forever because I just don't know how to talk about the brand-new 'DCU / DC Universe'. Not to be confused with Zack Snyder's 'DCEU / DC Extended Universe'. Even though some characters/actors and events may be ported over, it's mostly a brand-new reboot. 

It's a bit silly, honestly. I really do feel a bad taste from how poorly the DCEU has been handled in general, and while I appreciate the fresh start, I can go a bit on a rant of how reboots should be. 

And 2025's Superman is the Man of Steel's first solo movie in more than a decade after the, well, Man of Steel in 2013. And David Corenswet's Superman is... a remarkably different take from Henry Cavill's. For one, he's got the outside-underwear back! But for another... this movie isn't so much just a Superman movie, but rather a soft 'Justice League' pilot episode. 

Now, do I like this movie as a DC fan, who grew up on Silver Age and 90's comics, on the DC Animated Universe with Justice League, Justice League Unlimited and Superman The Animated Series? Absolutely. The Justice 'Gang' was great, Guy Gardner was great, Mr. Terrific was terrific, I thought that the secondary heroes didn't overstay their welcome. Krypto was fun. I laughed out loud at the Supergirl cameo at the end. 

As a reboot and reintroduction of a franchise? I felt like the movie probably should've focused really hard on Superman himself, for the simple nature that, well, it is a reboot. We are trying to get to know this version of the iconic Man of Steel. 

And the parts that are Superman-centric were great as well. Most importantly, we've got the supporting cast back! Lois is there as Clark's secret-keeper and love interest, of course, but we've got Jimmy Olsen being a dork (and getting a fun subplot with Luthor's girlfriend Eve), and Ma and Pa Kent showing up for a short but memorable scene, giving their son some very human wisdom. The Kryptonian parents also show up as traditional holograms and I'll talk about the big twist a bit later, but I've always been of the opinion that Superman is relatable always because he was raised by some farmers on Kansas, America, Earth... and never because of the manifest destiny given by the Kryptonians. So I'm happy about the focus that this movie goes to. 

Lex Luthor is also excellently portrayed as a smart, intelligent, super-insane man without resorting to being a nonsensical giggling manchild. He is suave, he is calculated, he is vindictive... but the neuroses and cruelty doesn't actually appear until he gets pushed. I feel like this is particularly well-shown when he actually threatens to kill Clark Kent in front of Superman. So hyperfocused is he in hurting Superman, his rival, that he doesn't care or is willing to entertain the idea that Superman is Clark Kent. 

Luthor's plan with his insanely powerful and useful portal device ends up being used to service him creating a private prison for all the people who did petty slights against him. He created a clone of Superman, Bizarro Ultraman, and instead of using it as his own personal showcase of a human eraching the level of a 'supposed god', Ultraman instead dresses up in Hammer of Barovia armour and beats up Superman to discredit him. Again, that massive flaw of being so utterly petty is what Luthor is all about. So smart, but so short-sighted. 

Krypto... Krypto is adorable. Krypto acts like an actual dog, but I do admit that he is in the movie for perhaps a bit too much of the screentime; again, for a reboot and reintroduction. I cannot argue with Superman finally going full rage mode when Krypto was kidnapped, though. I must say I am happy they didn't kill the dog in this movie. 

The political storylines... it's serviceable. It's hard to discuss it without bringing up actual real-life conflicts, and I'm not really in the mood to do that here, but it does feel like an old-school Superman plot. At least the evil president Ghurkos was actually involved in Luthor's plans, which I appreciate. 

The Justice Gang is there to provide some contrast as other heroes on Earth, which... again, feels a bit too crowded in the movie. Guy Gardner's Green Lantern is perfect casting, and Hawkgirl is a bit of a flat angry mace-to-the-face superhero, but I appreciate the execution. Mr. Terrific is the show-stealer, being essentially a 'good' version of Luthor  and receiving an amazing solo action scene when he goes to save Superman with Lois. 

There's also the subplot about public opinion against Superman -- a plotline that would be much more poignant without the one glaringly stupid part of the movie, the monkeys-on-typewriters. It would be much more thematic, even if it is simple, if it truly is just public opinion swaying back and forth. Luthor hacks into the Fortress of Solitude, and decrypts the Kryptonian message from Superman's parents. In a new for the character's history (Elseworlds incarnations notwithstanding), turns out that Jor-El and Lara actually sent Superman to Earth to conquer and rule, not to protect. That's a twist all right, and Superman falls into a bit of a despair after this. Throw in the dognapping incident, and Superman ends up being vulnerable and captured by Luthor. 

That is an interesting take on the character, highlighting his emotional insecurities and a nice way to get a loved one in distress without subejcting poor Lois to being kidnapped. I also like the argument that Superman has with Lois during their interview, which is an excellent distillation of Superman. He will never let his mask drop in public, not when he's inspirational. He's secure that interfering in global politics to save lives is the right thing to do, consequences be damned. But when Lois pokes holes and prods his story, he actually shows off that beneath it all is a farmboy from Kansas who really is just trying to do his best. I like that. 

I'm not really recapping the movie particularly well, but suffice to say that the movie eventually goes into a series of action scenes. Superman convinces another captive metahuman, Metamorpho (I like him! He also came out of nowhere in the movie!) and inspires him to let him escape. Lois and Mr. Terrific rescue Superman, and they rescue Metamorpho and Krypto. There's some action scenes as theey fly through some CGI environments and avoid a black hole, and return to the real world. Superman also gets back his grove from Lois and his parents. 

The Justice Gang and Metamorpho go off to deal with the Barovia/Jarhanpur crisis, with some images of kids and whatnot being inspired by Superman. Superman himself, meanwhile, deals with Luthor's portal malfunctioning and creating a rift that splits the city in half. In the middle of this huge world-ending crisis, Superman fights and defeats Luthor's two metahuman goons, the Engineer and Ultraman. It's all right. I felt like there could've been more about Superman and Ultraman, and whether this is just Ultraman being saved for a sequel where he returns mutated as Bizarro or not, I still feel like the final moments could have been a bit more drawn-out, particularly with Superman being on a full 'no-killing' rule in this incarnation and being angry when the Justice Gang killed the random kaiju in the middle of the movie. 

Luthor and Superman's confrontation is fun, even if the ending is predictable with the Daily Bugle gang exposing Luthor's schemes to the public. It's more of a clash of words and ideology anyway, with Superman, as with all of his best-written incarnations, simply refusing to play into Luthor's 'who is better, me or you' game. 

The movie handles Superman and his supporting cast well, I must say. Having grown up with TAS and a lot of the '90's-00's era comics, this is the exact take of Superman I want. And I even really like the 'wider universe' stuff introduced here, like Guy Gardner, Mr. Terrific, Hawkgirl, Metamorpho and Ultraman. It's just...  it's just a bit too much in a movie that already has to do a lot. In a vaccuum it's all right for a movie to do a lot. James Gunn made his career with movies that do too much but still manage to work regardless. But outside the vacuum, with the pedigree that Superman and a full DC universe reboot brings... it's a bit unfortunate that yes, the movie does feel a bit too overstuffed for its own good. 

Movie Review: Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

So this is how the DCEU ends, not with a whimper, but not quite with a bang either. I really wouldn't rate Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom as being a worse watching experience than some of the honestly rather forgotten later-released DCEU movies like the Wonder Woman and Shazam sequels, and it stands rather comfortably among the echelons of movies like Black Adam, Blue Beetle and Harley Quinn as a movie that's... okay to watch. It's dumb, loud fun like a Transformers movie that I don't think it's actually terrible...

It's just that there's so much other stuff going in real life around the production and abrupt termination of the DCEU that it really is hard for this movie to appeal to anyone that's watching superhero movies as a serialized format. Again, as a generic punch-up huge CGI special effects movie, it's an all right one. As a sequel to Aquaman? As a part of a shared universe? As what's essentially the final movie for the DCEU?

I talked about it in my review for Flash and Blue Beetle, but it really is hard to be invested in a series of movies that concludes a theoretically long-running series of movies that... isn't even meant to conclude the Aquaman stories, let alone the entire DC universe. this is a movie that was released because people did work on it and it's done, moreso than any other reason. And... throw in the fact that we've got unexplained absences (Willem Dafoe's Vulko is just randomly killed off), the whole saga with Amber Heard as an actor, a whole lot of shoved-down-your-throat 'climate change' moral stuff (I agree that climate change is bad, but the movie had less subtlety than Golden Age comics), and a generally confusing plotline that doesn't have much to do with the more epic first Aquaman movie... yeah, this isn't the most coherent movie.

I will give praise where praise is due -- some of the CGI is pretty rough, but there were moments like the many-hand-armed desert creatures, the locusts on the random island, or the monstrous squid-creatures in the Lost Kingdom, or the way Black Manta's octopus robots moved, or Topo... those were pretty great. The budget of trying to make Atlantis as colourful as possible with wacky sea animal ships and whatnot makes this feel very cartoony in a good way. But the movie doesn't have consistent CGI throughout the movie. Our main villain, King Kordax, looks like a bad World of Warcraft CGI model (that's without the obvious Lich King ripoffs) and there were many moments where there's just something off with the lighting or how light reflects off of stuff underwater. And you don't really look too hard to compare this to the first Aquaman movie. 

I would also like to praise the Aquaman/Ocean Master team-up. It's weird, I didn't expect it coming into the movie, but they put a fair amount of effort into it. Not all the dialogue and jokes land, and I honestly don't feel like the Ocean Master we saw in the first Aquaman movie would be capable of the character development here (he doesn't quite have the same excuse-plot motivations as Marvel's Loki did) but they did... okay with him. Orm essentially takes over as Aquaman's sidekick for the entirety of the movie, edging out the rest of his supporting cast, and it does admittedly feel a bit forced but they did okay with it. Awkward as it was, there at least was a character arc.

(And I realize that the real-world reason of Mera not being as involved in this movie is due to the allegations against the actress, but it is still a noticeable and jarring shift regardless)

The movie itself? The plot's rather confusing, and honestly kind of a waste. The first Aquaman movie gave us two villains that survived the movie and had sensible motivations to continue menace Arthur in the future. Ocean Master, disgraced brother who believes the kingdom is rightfully his; and Black Manta, a terrorist who blames the brutal Aquaman for his father's death. Okay, they want to make Ocean Master into an antihero. That kind of leaves Black Manta, who's pretty, fun, right? 

Except... Black Manta spends 90% of his screentime possessed by a magical trident that came out of nowhere. He just comes across it, and when the ghost of a dead Atlantean king with less personality than a cardboard cutout starts talking to Manta, he just... he just spends the whole movie as the minion of a fucking ancient fork. This is worse than Hawkeye in the first Avengers movie, because that movie at least had Loki as an interesting antagonist. But Black Manta spends the entire movie just... just doing generically evil stuff, which has very little to do with his established motivations (which the movie event takes time to recap before ignoring them entirely) making the entirety of Black Manta's screentime in this movie no more interesting or impactful other than having a cool enemy for Arthur and Orm to fight against. 

King Kordax himself? The titular Lost Kingdom of Necrus was just vaguely shown to us in flashbacks, before we get like a five-minute exposition around one hours and twenty minutes in while the movie runs around and lets Aquaman and Orm fight against random CGI monsters without any names, and... I'm just so confused and uninvested with all the talk about the 'seventh missing kingdom' and whatnot when the entire movie has been about Black Manta's something-something toxic-orichalcum secret-base climate-change plot. Kordax, when he actually gets resurrected, hilariously lasts a grand total of a whole minute before Aquaman one-shots him. 

And... yeah. I really am struggling to find much to talk about the plot. We get introduced to some stuff like Aquaman struggling to balance his kingship and wanting to introduce Atlantis to the world; some stuff about climate change; the whole talk about Black Manta's vengeance... but so little of the movie is spent on the topics they build up and instead we keep going from one wacky location to the next, from the mysterious island of giant mutated animals to the underwater Mos Eisley Cantina to the desert prison. And don't get me wrong, again, as a punch-them-up Saturday morning movie I didn't mind having it play on my television when I'm folding laundry or whatever, but the movie itself really isn't the most coherent one... which was at least something that other sub-par superhero movies like Blue Beetle, Black Adam or Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania can claim. 

Anyway, that's really all I have to say about this movie. I was entertained enough by it, but at the same time I felt like the movie is a huge pile of missed concepts that could've easily been far more well put together. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the comics, Kordax was one of Aquaman's ancestors and the originator of the "Curse of Kordax", which states that royal children born with blond hair and the ability to communicate with sea creatures would bring doom to Atlantis. Kordax himself waged war against the ancient kingdoms, and it was this curse that caused comics!Aquaman to face a fair amount of prejudice from the Atlanteans in addition to the whole half-human thing. 
• In the comics, Aquaman's baby son was infamously killed by Black Manta, who suffocated him in a bubble of air. Of course, the same thing doesn't happen to Arthur Jr in the movie but it was clearly going for it. 
• While the origin of it is completely different, the toxic oricalchum trident does originate from the comics, created by the supervillain Devil Ray to combat Atlanteans. 
• Topo is noted to be able to 'play a variety of musical instruments', and he was infamous in the Silver Age comics for being able to be a one-man band. In fact, Topo's brief cameo in the first Aquaman movie does the same. 

Movie Review: Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle (2023)

Poor, poor Blue Beetle. I honestly do think that it's a superhero movie that's... okay? But it's just really circumstance that led to its abysmal box office performance. There was so little marketing done for this movie, Warner Bros. and DC are in the process of closing up shop and shooting out what's left of their original 'Snyderverse' or DCEU continuity movies -- Flash, sequels to Aquaman and Flash, and Blue Beetle. And it really is a shame that this happened at the height of superhero movie fatigue because Blue Beetle is just... 'another' origin movie. 

I like Jaime Reyes and consider him one of the best 'reinvented' legacy successors, revitalizing the original Ted Kord (who I also like!) and generally just being an interesting spin on the original name without disrespecting it. The story told in the movie adapts most of Jaime's backstory in the comics, right up to the fact that he's a successor to two different Blue Beetles (Dan Garrett and Ted Kord), and we get some really good visual effects -- the horror show of the Scarab merging into Jaime's body, as well as the Kamen-Rider-on-a-movie-budget transformation sequences between the Blue Beetle and OMAC armours. The fact that most of the suits are practical effects add to the delightful action sequences of the movie. Oh, and Ted Kord's big beetle ship also shows up. That's cool!

But... that's really it, and for a movie that runs for slightly above 2 hours, there really is scant little that sets this movie apart from the others. And I get that not all movies need a 'twist' to the formula, but Blue Beetle just takes all of the cliches and plays them straight. Which would be fine if the movie is somewhere between the 45-90 minute range, but this movie feels like it's a pilot to a superhero show that is stretched out over two or three times that the runtime deserves. 

More egregiously is that as someone familiar with Jaime Reyes from the comics and from cartoons, they could've actually added something interesting -- exlpain more about Ted Kord's legacy as a superhero (or what he is as a person, instead of just someone who leaves behind giant bug-ships), or even adapt and confirm the fact that, yes, the Scarabs are actually part of an intergalactic horde of invading aliens. Even if they didn't fully adapt the Reach, some hints to the Scarab as being something malicious would've been appreciated. 

While I appreciate Jaime's family and the themes of family as a supporting cast, it really feels like this is something we've seen, and done better elsewhere, yeah? The dad is very supportive and dies; the younger sibling is smart and mouthy; there's a wacky older relative that the movie thinks is way funnier than he actually is; the grandma is secretly hiding some badass skills... none of these are bad in isolation, and I enjoyed Alberto, Rudy, Milagro and Nana Reyes in isolation, but they also bog down so much of the movie and at some point they get irritating. Particularly Rudy, who the movie basically saddles as Jaime's babysitter-turned-sidekick. This really feels like it has a bit of the problem with the Shazam movies, except that movie at least knows to keep the focus on Billy and Freddy. 

On the other side of the story are the Kords. The movie reinvents the Kord legacy and uses a gender-flipped version of Ted's evil uncle Jarvis Kord into his evil sister Victoria. Again, the plot that she's doing isn't terrible. It's pretty serviceable superhero material. But all she's doing is to try and get the super-awesome plot device, the Scarab, to make her super-awesome robot suit army, the OMACs... and she doesn't care how many people she has to trample to get to it. Again, between Aldrich Killian, Norman Osborn, Carlton Drake, Dr. Sivana and many more I'm probably not thinking of on top of my head, the 'evil CEO is evil and doesn't caer about the little people' trope is kind of an easy enemy trope to use... except that Victoria really doesn't do anything with it. Her villainy borders on one-dimensional as she cackles while she invades the Reyes household and shoots up civilians. There's some attempt to inject some complexity to her with her vague mentions of being driven by sexism/favouritism because her father picked Ted over her, but it's glossed over so quickly that it might not have even been there.

Far cooler and far more interesting is her badass minion, the 'main' OMAC who is also able to 'suit up' into a robotic suit, Ignacio Carapax. In addition to having one hell of a cool name and a very cool robot form, it turns out that Carapax is basically a child soldier abducted and groomed by Victoria and manipulated for her own needs with some clearly-bogus promises of being 'fixed' by the end of the day. Carapax is probably the more interesting villain, which is a shame because he spends most of the movie kind of in a daze.

Rounding out the cast is the main love-interest and the good Kord, Ted's daughter Jenny, who is trying to stop her lunatic aunt from doing her crazy supervillain plan. I really can't tell you much about her other than she's heroic and that she ends up getting it together with Jaime. 

Which brings to us Jaime Reyes, the Blue Beetle himself. He's very fun! Again, some of the hero motivations are cliched and kind of generic, which is no fault of the actor. Xolo Maridueña plays the character well, pulls off the charming-bumbling vibe well, and the movie sets up the 'poor Peter Parker' opening act well, with Jaime's family being at threat of losing their house thanks to redevelopments (a plot point that is interesting but ultimately kind of gets brushed aside), Jaime being a good son who's trying to do good, and eventually gets embroiled into the Kord drama when he decides to, despite common sense, try and rescue Jenny. Jaime's increasing desperation as his family gets thrown into the line of fire of people with big sci-fi guns and robot suits is palpable, and I think that's one of the better-executed parts of the movie. Perhaps not the death scene itself, which is kind of overwrought compared to some of the other 'mentor deaths' and Uncle Bens that we've seen in other DC and Marvel works, but Jaime's reaction to it and his growing horror as, at various points in the movie afterwards, his 'muggle' family members are put in danger. This leads to a very telegraphed but well-acted moment as Jaime finally manages to beat the shit out of Carapax, and unlike before, it's now Khaji-Da the alien Scarab who has to talk Jaime out from killing Carapax -- especially with the context that Carapax isn't doing everything out of shits and giggles. 

Eventually Carapax blows up Victoria in a suicide that also takes out the OMAC factory, Jaime and Jenny become a thing, and the community and Jenny's Kord Industries band together to rebuild the Reyes house. 

Again, the movie isn't bad! Other than maybe a couple of Rudy scenes, the movie itself is perfectly fun superhero fare. It's just that it's so... it's so basic, there aren't really any huge twists or revelations, and some of the scenes that they play straight -- like Papa Alberto's death, or the 'loser Jaime' establishing scenes -- are drawn out for a fair bit longer than it needs to be. Of course, that's not getting into the fact that Warner Bros is in their "let's wash our hands of this and hope for a better reboot" mode and barely cared about promoting or editing this movie. It really is kind of a shame, since they did have some pretty nice talent (particularly the visuals!) in this movie.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The opening shot of the movie shows multiple different-coloured Scarabs being shot out throughout the galaxy, foreshadowing the true nature of the Scarabs and their connection to the Reach.
  
• OMAC (One-Man Army Corps) specifically takes its portrayal in this movie from the reinvention popularized in Infinite Crisis, as an army of humans mutated by nanotechnology and controlled by the satellite Brother Eye. Anyone can be injected and transformed into an OMAC, becoming a superhuman cyborg. The original OMAC is a standalone hero that didn't really interact with the rest of the DC universe.
• The name of the OMAC bearer, Ignacio Carapax, is based on the Blue Beetle villain, Conrad Carapax, who originally fought the original Blue Beetle (Dan Garrett) and had his consciousness uploaded into a robot body. 
• Victoria Kord is a gender-flipped version of the comics' Jarvis Kord, though Jarvis was Ted's uncle instead of his sister. 
• Dan Garrett (Blue Beetle I) and Ted Kord (Blue Beetle II)'s costumes can be seen in the Beetle Cave.
• The Scarab is passed to Jaime in a Big Belly Burger box, a fictional fast food chain that's a recurring staple in the DC comics and its adaptations. 
• While Jaime no longer lives in El Paso, Texas like he did in the comics, he lives on El Paso Street instead. 
• Batman is mentioned several times by the Reyes family. Superman and Flash are also name-dropped several times. 
• A LexCorp logo could briefly be seen in the buildings next to the Kord Industries tower.

Movie Review - The Flash (2023)

The Flash (2023)

Yeah, my attempt to write a review for this movie was as troubled as the movie's creation. At this point I've lost like three drafts to this movie, so I'm just going to give a quick impression about the movie and be done with it. 

So this is kind of the swan song to the rather sad fate of the DCEU. I think there are a couple of projects that are technically tied to it, like Aquaman 2 and Blue Beetle, but... the DCEU just had terrible luck, huh? From simply being outpaced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe in terms of the quality and frequency of movies, in terms of scope and scale, and the sheer erratic quality and tone of the movies. Not to mention WB already losing faith in the DCEU, releasing multiple independent DC comics property movies like The Batman and Joker. But The Flash, originally titled Flashpoint, really is just the final nail in the coffin. 

And... it's kind of a shame, because on the surface it's not a bad movie. It's just one that's released after the relevance of Ezra Miller's version of the character almost six years after his debut in Justice League, and... knowing that this is basically both the first spotlight and the final spotlight for this actor and the character (in no small part due to Miller's own real-life crimes) does make this movie feel kind of... it feels like it's building up to nothing, basically. 

The movie itself just feels 'competent', and I actually feel like it's nowhere as bad as people made it out to be. There are some spotty CGI, yes, but I really do feel like the movie's biggest problem is a lack of relevance. It's hardly the first adaptation of 'Flashpoint', which was already done by a cartoon movie and the CW Flash show, and both of those did the legwork by giving much more impact and weight behind Barry's backstory. The Marvel TV shows and movies have already done the multiverse angle, and it's really not helping matters that Flash debuted around the same summer that the much more excellent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse did. 

The opening of the movie, questionable baby CGI aside, is pretty good. We get to see a quick exposition-dump of Barry's situation with Henry Allen being wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of Barry's mom Nora; while Barry is kinda-sorta flirting with Iris West. Oh, and Batman and Alfred is using him as kind of a gofer, telling him to evacuate citizens while Batman goes around chasing terrorists. We get a short cameo from Wonder Woman as well, which is nice, though it's all just glorified cameos sine none of these guys actually matter compared to the already-maligned 'basically a cameo' roles in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness. 

(Superman and Aquaman not being available; and Cyborg's actor leaving in bad terms with DC, probably didn't help matters either). 

In the midst of it all, Barry accidentally runs back through time, and we get to see him angsting a fair bit before he finally returns to the past and prevents Nora's death from happening by swapping out the can of tomatoes that his father went out to buy, leaving Nora and Barry alone in the house. But a monstrous speedster attacks Flash as he tries to return to 2023. Instead, Barry shows up in 2013, meeting his younger self and realizing that without all the trauma and drive from Nora's death, he's an irresponsible hippie. 'Our' Barry tries to get 2013!Barry to get his superpowers, but the meddling with time causes lightning to strike both of them, robbing 'our' Barry of powers and giving 2013!Barry powers.

And admittedly, I actually do like what they are doing from a writing standpoint. Giving the older Barry a younger self to pal around with gives him a 'mentee' figure of sorts, while also actually being a foreshadowing for the Dark Flash we see in the climax of the movie, which I thought was somewhat obvious when we reach the climax but a welcome buildup as well since 2013!Barry is an impulsive, dumbass twit. It's just that... well, 2013!Barry is annoying as all hell, and while some of his antics are okay, I did really feel like he overstayed his welcome by a fair bit. 

Also, the timeline has changed -- both the past and the future -- as Barry later explains with strands of spaghetti. We find this timeline in the climax of Man of Steel, and... it's an interesting but ultimately watered-down version of most adaptations of Flashpoint as the Barrys learn and try and figure out what is different in this timeline. The other members of the JLA either never existed or haven't gained powers yet, while the changes in the timeline has caused Bruce Wayne to... well, he goes from being Ben Affleck to Michael Keaton. 

And now, I absolutely adore Michael Keaton in this role as Old Man Batman, even if the movie itself really isn't super-clear on whether this is the same Batman from the Tim Burton movies, or if it's an altered version of Affleck's Batman, or... well, our old actor is back, don't question too much! I mean, I enjoy the cameo as much as anyone who grew up on the Tim Burton movies!

Batman and the Flashes go on the Batplane to Siberia to recover the Kryptonian pod, only to find that instead of Kal-El, they find an emaciated Kara Zor-El, who's far less happy to help out humans after being tortured in Siberia. It's an... interesting twist, to replace the starved and tortured Superman from the comics' Flashpoint with a female version of herself. And despite looking rather sub-par in the trailers, I actually think that Sasha Calle plays a 'bad future' Supergirl pretty well. 

Again, there's always some fun action scene to break things up, with Batman and Supergirl both being easily the highlights of the show. Eventually through some shenanigans, Present!Barry also gains his powers back while earning the friendship and respect of Supergirl and Old Man Batman respectively. I actually do like this part of the movie a fair bit, I must confess. 

However, the climax happens, and... and it's not the most interesting thing in the world. General Zod is reduced to a boring unbeatable villain. There are a lot of fun visuals here and there, and I'm not complaining. My favourite has to be all the scenes with the Batplane, as well as Supergirl and Zod's initial beatdown... but there's also something neat to see when present!Barry straight-up murders a Kryptonian to save 2013!Barry. 

Ultimately, though, Zod kills Kara and Bruce dies flying the Batplane into a forcefielded Kryptonian ship. This causes the Barrys to travel back in time... only for Kara to still die to Zod, and Bruce gets killed by Nam-Ek this time. And 2013!Barry just keeps going back in time again and again, gathering more and more Kryptonian debris grafted onto his body and telling us who the true identity of the Dark Flash is. In a neat twist, however, 'our' 2013!Barry hasn't completed his transformation into Dark Flash thanks to time paradox shenanigans, leading to a triple-Barry confrontation in the Speed Force. 

(We also get cameos by other Batmen, Supermen and Supergirls, including a surprising one from the never-made Superman Lives starring Keanu Reeves)

Ultimately, we get a rather interesting moral about 'responsibility' and 'time is unchangeable'. Dark Flash kills 2013!Barry, and 'our' Barry goes back to the past to put back that damn can of tomatoes. And... this is where the movie falls short. I don't necessarily mind the fatalistic moral that 'time cannot be changed, accept your fate', because while it does run contrary to most optimistic superhero shows it is a responsibility-related moral and arguably causing just enough of a change to free Henry thanks to time-travel mumbo-jumbo would be enough to give us a flawed but consistent moral. 

But then that's ignoring the fact that the 'Nora lives' timeline is... kind of fucked. None of 'our' Barry's actions are going to save Keaton-Batman and Supergirl, who I guess are just doomed to die with little fanfare after the Flashes return to the Speed Force. And then at the end of the movie we learn that Barry might've fucked up the timeline anyway with George Clooney's Batman showing up for a gag... and then the end credits close? 

It's just... it's just messy near the end, despite the relatively earnest acting done by Ezra Miller. And really, a good chunk of this movie and how good it is really does depend on how much you tolerate Miller's version of the Flash. It's an okay movie at the end of the day, albeit with an odd, truncated ending, but with better adaptations of Flashpoint and a definite lack of followup to the climax of this movie, it really does feel like a gigantic oddball. I did enjoy the cameos, for what it's worth, and Michael Keaton is always fun to see, but otherwise... yeah. This movie sure does exist, and I think the confusing tone really dose make it a rather apt epitaph for the DCEU in general. 

Movie Review: Shazam! Fury of the Gods

SHAZAM! Fury of the Gods [2023]

Well, yeah, this movie just kinda... came and went with very little fanfare, huh? Both Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Flash kind of... well, it really is kind of hard to get excited for the DCEU material when we get the confirmation that everything is going to be rebooted soon. While I don't think this one suffered as badly as The Flash did, I did also feel that the studio favouring The Rock's Black Adam to the exclusion of not allowing Shazam and Black Adam to really reference each other to basically be another nail in the coffin in this entire 'shared universe' venture. It really is kind of a shame. 

Ultimately, Shazam: Fury of the Gods is... it's honestly a pretty simple movie, one that was a pretty nice (if more childish) watch for an airplane ride. It doesn't really follow up on the Sivana/Mr. Mind stuff hinted at the end of the first movie, or tie in any meaningful way to the rest of the DCEU, but tells basically its own story with three new villains (taken from Greek mythology, but basically not originating from the comics), the Daughters of Atlas -- Hespera, Kalypso and Anthea. They steal the Wizard's staff from a museum and regain their magical power, unleashing a blast of petrification that kills everyone there. There is some nice nods to the origins of Shazam that the first movie glossed over -- like the fact that Shazam draws his power from several Greco-Roman gods (and a Judeo-Christian king, Solomon). The children of one said god, Atlas, wants their birthright back, and also to restore their realm that has been left barren.

On the good guys' side, after the initial action scene of the 'Shazamily' (god, that name) saving people from a collapsing bridge, the majority of the focus is still on Billy and Freddy, with Freddy taking a bit more central stage this movie. Billy has his own smaller arc of dealing with impostor syndrome, realizing that his family is growing up and drifting apart with his other foster siblings having their own lives, him about to outgrow the foster system and generally worried that he's going to lose another family. Meanwhile Freddy feels suffocated by the 'all or nothing' aspect of Billy's leadership, and ends up wanting to branch out on his own, eventually befriending a cute girl at school, Anne... who turns out to be the third daughter of Atlas, Anthea. Oops!

The Wizard Shazam turns out to have survived the events of the first Shazam movie and is merely banished out of the Rock of Eternity, which is honestly a bit of an ass-pull that the movie itself somewhat acknowledges. Billy is trying to figure out the intricacies of the weird dream he had (Djimon Honsou's head photoshopped into Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman body is hilarious!). We get some absolutely top-tier rotating environments CGI effects when Anthea uses her power of 'the axis' to rotate around buildings and whatnot, which honestly does provide the visual highlights for this movie. If nothing else, the movie is visually stunning for Anthea's abilities alone. 

The Daughters of Atlas kidnap Freddy, create a magical dome around the city, and fly off into their own realm. We get some more hijinks as the Shazam Family (that's what I'll call them instead) return to the Rock of Eternity which they made up to be a more homey lair and discuss with the aid of the sentient magic pen Steve on how to outsmart the Daughters of Atlas. 

We get a rather fun fight between Hespera and the Shazam Family, with some good points about how Hespera's actually rather pissed off that the 'lifeblood of [her] father' is being treated as if it's something that the mortals are owed to. There's the fun bit of seeing an old woman in a Greek warrior suit fight against a bunch of superpowered people. In the fight, Pedro gets zapped by Calypso and loses his ability to transform. Hespera does the 'Loki' trick from Avengers, being falsely imprisoned only to break out of jail while the kids are patting themselves in the back, and then steals the Golden Apple... which, uh... isn't a plot point or objective that was mentioned at all prior to this. 

Also, while all of this is going on, Freddy and the Wizard kind of befriend each other. When Calypso has the two of them tossed into the pit where the giant dragon Ladon (he looks like the World of Warcraft Dracolich but made out of wood) is supposed to eat them, but they're rescued by Anthea, who allows them to escape. In an attempt to steal back the Golden Apple, however, Freddy and the Wizard accidentally alert them. There is a nice attempt at giving the villains some personality -- Anthea clearly loves the humans (or at least Freddy), Hespera doesn't care about the humans and cares more about the restoration of their realm, while Calypso just wants to murder everyone. 

Simultaneously, the Shazam Family arrive after chasing Hespera through the hall of magical teleporting dolls, take Freddy and the Wizard, and escape. And... they show up in front of their foster parents, and rapid-fire tell their secret identities to them before being forced to escape because Calypso arrives with Ladon and blows up the house. Okay, Ladon's pretty visually cool, too!

The rest of this climax is just... an extended action scene. Basically everyone other than Billy loses their powers in the fight, while Calypso gets pissed off at her sisters and fatally stabs Hespera. She plants the Golden Apple in the human realm, causing roots to grow everywhere and birth a bunch of Greco-Roman monsters like manticores and harpies, and we get a frankly rather eye-rolling subplot of Darla using skittles to befriend a unicorn herd to murder these random monsters. 

Freddy and a depowered Anthea get a nice little moment that ties up their little gods-vs-mortals storyline, and Billy finally gets some resolution as his foster parents turn out to want him after all, while the Wizard tells him that he's the right champion after all. Billy manages to talk to the dying Hespera, managing to convince her to help him trap Calypso and the dragon Ladon inside a shrinking dome. We then get a big fight as Billy uses the staff to blast Ladon, using the dome as a way to amplify the energy like a battery/bomb and blowing up the tree, Ladon, Calypso, and causing a magical chain reaction that kills off all the monsters. 

Oh, and Billy dies, a moment that is actually well-acted by Freddy's actor as he and the rest of the Shazam Family grieve for him... and then we get around 20 minutes of screentime as Wonder Woman very randomly shows up out of nowhere, reactivates the staff, resurrects Billy and the god realm. It's a literal deus ex machina, and while I get that every mystical thing that we saw originates more from Wonder Woman's Greco-Roman myths in the comics as opposed to Captain Marvel's, it really does feel like an unearned plot-twist.

We later get to see Anthea hanging out with the Shazam Family, the Wizard (who ditches that ridiculous mustache) wandering the Earth, a mid-credits scene where the two normal guys from Suicide Squad and Peacemaker try to recruit Billy (I did like the JSA/JLA confusion) and a post-credits gag with Sivana and Mr. Mind. 

And... I dunno. I do feel like this movie does have some visuals, but ultimately the plot is rather paper-thin. It doesn't make it un-enjoyable, if you want my honest opinion. It feels like a Transformers or a James Bond movie or something where it's just... it's just action with very simple characters. I do think that the ending of Billy getting randomly resurrected does come out of nowhere, and for this being their second outing, I really can't even name any of the movie-original (New-52-original? Same thing) Shazam Family members. I don't think it flows quite as well as the first Shazam movie, and... well, it's honestly rather clear that with so much other problems plaguing the rest of the DCEU at this point in time that this movie wouldn't really have much put into it. It's a fun self-contained adventure, and that's basically it. I did enjoy myself watching this one, for what it's worth. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We still have a lot of jokes being made at the fact that Billy Batson doesn't have a superhero name. The Wizard names him 'Shazam' at the end of the movie, which is the characters' lawyer-safe name.
• Freddy continually goes around as 'Captain Everypower' and calls Billy 'Captain Everypower Junior'. In the comics. Freddy is actually 'Captain Marvel Jr.'. 
• A random citizen (played by Michael Gray, who is the actor for Billy Batson in the 70's TV show!) actually does name-drop 'Captain Marvel' as a name for Billy, which I'm surprised Marvel allowed!
• Yet another civilian calls Billy 'Colonel Cheese-Steak'. Captain Marvel's in-universe nickname is 'the Big Red Cheese'.
• Michael Gray's civilian character also wears an outfit that resembles Billy's outfit from the 70's TV show. 
• The public school that they attend is Fawcett Central. In the comics, Captain Marvel operates out of Fawcett City, a fictional town. 
• The cat that Darla borrows from the bridge is given the name Tawny. Captain Marvel in the comics has a talking tiger-man sidekick called Talky Tawny. 
• The burning violin is actually from the comics, wielded by minor villain Nero.
• After being confused with 'Justice Society' and 'Justice League', Billy gets impressed with 'The Avengers Society', yet another cross-company reference to Marvel comics. 

Movie Review: Black Adam

Black Adam (2022)

So yeah, I think we have reached that saturation in terms of superhero movies, and with the Marvel Cinematic Universe kind of floundering and just churning out obligatory movies, people are looking at the DC machine to do something. Unfortunately, DC's rather... eclectic movie release order hasn't really done its storytelling any favours, feeling less like a cohesive universe and more of a bunch of independent, standalone stories that sometimes feature a couple of shared actors and characters. It does solve the problem of heavy continuity that alienates a lot of people from jumping into the MCU, but it also means that... well, you really can skip large amounts of DC movies without missing anything too significant. 

That is to say, Black Adam is... it's a solid movie, in the same vein of the second Suicide Squad movie, or the Robert Pattinson The Batman movie. It's also a movie that isn't really 'necessary' watching since a lot of the tropes and story beats in this movie are ones already covered by so many other superhero movies out there -- and especially within the DCEU itself. In the comics, I've always found Black Adam to be fun because, as the movie's promotional material insists, Black Adam is an anti-hero that doesn't think twice about killing his enemies, unlike those squeaky-clean DC superheroes...

...except, y'know, the DCEU has (rather controversially) built itself on the brand that its flaghsip superheroes, Batman and Superman, do kill. Aquaman and both Suicide Squads both had rather violent heroes as well, making it a bit less of an innovation to have it be the core concept for the Black Adam movie. Black Adam's traditional foe, Captain Marvel (or 'Shazam', as we're supposed to call him now) would be a great counterpoint, except other than a brief cameo from the Wizard, there's scant little to tie Black Adam to his traditional nemesis. 

But anyway, I digress. The movie itself is a pretty great distillation and adaptation of Black Adam himself, and it's rather competently done -- most of the action scenes are neat, and the scripting is solid enough without being anything particularly spectacular. Dwayne Johnson is clearly enjoying himself as Black Adam, which I think is pretty important. There is a neat little plot twist that genuinely surprised me in the middle of the movie, while the Justice Society showing up as secondary characters is a fun touch -- though obviously the main bulk of the interesting characterization fall to Dr. Fate and Hawkman. 

I actually don't really care about the supporting civilian cast of Adrianna, Amon and Karim, even though I acknowledge their importance to having Black Adam some civilian mortals from Kahndaq to care about. It's just that their characters are rather flat and one-note and nowhere as funny as the movie thinks they are.

Speaking of which, I would add that while I do appreciate some of the jokes being told, not all of them are funny? I don't think it's quite as bad as the theatrical version of Justice League had, and Black Adam's constant confusion with catchphrases and modern-day sarcasm is neat, but I didn't really care for Amon and Karim's comedy bits. 

We start off in prehistoric times, in 2600 BC, where the tyrant-king Ahk-Ton brutalizes his people and force them to mine Eternium, our plot device items, in order to create the profane artifact known as the Crown of Sabbac, which would allow him to attain great power. We get to see a young boy end up inspiring rebellion and eventually being summoned by the Wizard and granted the power of the gods to be able to transform into a Champion by chanting the word 'Shazam'. 

We then smash-cut to present-day Kahndaq, and it's rather surprising to see it be a bit more... futuristic? The criminal organization Intergang has used its technology and soldiers to essentially oppress the entire nation of Kahndaq, and we follow the family of archaoelogist and rebel Adrianna Tomaz as she goes around looking for the Crown of Sabbac. Again, these characters aren't the most interesting ones, and I wasn't particularly engaged at this part of the movie. Adrianna has a skateboarding son Amon (who obviously befriends Adam later), his dorky brother Karim, the shifty Ishmael and a couple of others. Long story short, some of Adrianna's other friends get killed, Adrianna unleashes Black Adam by reading the incantation, and Black Adam is unleashed upon the soldiers. 

And it is a pretty fun moment as tanks and helicopters start to roll up and attack Black Adam, who seems more baffled than anything as he slaughters all these soldiers. It's a pretty neat action scene, even if I'm not the biggest fan of some of this movie's background music choices, which I think clash rather hard with the tone it's trying to convey. The action scenes are cool to watch, of course, and there's a very fun adrenaline-inducing moment as we see Black Adam use his super-speed, super-strength and lightning bolts to take out the faceless baddies. 

Black Adam is wounded from an Eternium missile and recovers with the Tomaz family, and generally acts all evasive about his history and how they insist that Black Adam needs to be Kahndaq's Champion. 

While Ishmael reveals himself to be alive and basically the leader of Intergang as far as this movie is concerned, we get the arrival of Amanda Waller from the USA, who sends the Justice Society -- comprised of veterans Hawkman and Dr. Fate, as well as two younger ones Atom Smasher and Cyclone -- to stop Black Adam before he destroys Kahndaq and the rest of the world. 

And... the Justice Society members are rather basic. Cyclone doesn't really have a personality beyond being a peppy smart girl, Atom Smasher is the butt of a lot of the jokes because this is his first superhero outing and his gigantification kind of causes a fair bit of collateral damage. Hawkman is a bit more gung-ho at completing his mission, though later on we do get a fair bit of ideological debate between him and Black Adam. Dr. Fate channels all the charisma of Pierce Brosnan, clearly knowing certain ways of how this conflict is going to end, and trying to avoid the worst of it. The CGI for these guys are pretty competent, with Dr. Fate's sparkly, mirror-like magical effects being easily the most impressive.

And while the movie does have a segment where Adrianna calls out the Justice Society for only showing up when Black Adam is wreaking havoc and ignoring Kahndaq when it's being oppressed by Intergang, there... really isn't any huge reconciliation or deconstruction of the Justice Society's stance beyond that. They decide to work with Black Adam, and while there are a couple of fun little moments between Hawkman and Adam about killing enemies, interrogating soldiers and the like, it all takes a backseat when Amon gets kidnapped and everyone important decides to shrug, and decide to put saving the boy as the priority. 

Anyway, Ishmael is the descendant of King Ahk-Ton, which was kind of obvious if you were paying attention to the fact that the two of them were played by the same actor. Ishmael does some evil villain ranting, before we get an honestly rather ridiculously long slow-motion rescue sequence of Black Adam deflecting a bullet. Adam kills Ishmael and the Intergang goons, but wounds Amon in the process (non-fatally, they've got some Nth-Metal stuff on Hawkman's ship) and the guilt-ridden Black Adam flies off to the ruins of the throne of Kahndaq. 

Oh, and in the movie's best moment, Teth-Adam reveals to Adrianna and Hawkman that he wasn't the real Champion, and this was a moment that I thought was pretty cleverly done. The boy in the prologue that was turned into a champion was actually Teth-Adam's son Hurut, and the real Teth-Adam was Hurut's dad, who kept telling him to keep his head down. Hurut was the true, pure, heroic champion that the Wizard chose... and he ended up giving up his powers and giving them to Teth-Adam to save him from certain death at the hands of Ahk-Ton's assassins.

Not the most revolutionary plot twist, but one that really did feel clever, giving Black Adam's "I'm not a hero" insistence a good reason. 

This realization ends up causing Black Adam to give up his power, and the Justice Society takes the now-mortal Teth-Adam into a Task Force X black ops site where he's kept in stasis. However, Dr. Fate's premonitions about Hawkman's death doesn't disappear... and we see that Ishmael's spirit has arrived with the Crown of Sabbac to hell the Rock of Finality. The demons transform him into Sabbac, a muscular demonic being, who... doesn't look anywhere as impressive as any of the other special effects in this movie, I'm sorry. 

Sabbac unleashes some skeleton demons on Kahndaq, and the civilians get an obligatory 'rally a block of people to fight the faceless goons' scene. The Justice Society fighting Sabbac is a bit more fun. Again, the movie focuses mostly on the two adults, Hawkman and Dr. Fate, whose action scenes get a bit more focus. Ultimately, Dr. Fate creates a shield that locks out the other three JSA members and fights Sabbac one-on-one to prevent Hawkman's death, with a very cool speech about how he doesn't see the future anymore and it's liberating. As he uses clones and Nabu seals to knock Sabbac around, Dr. Fate uses his magic to remotely open Teth-Adam's cell, releasing him and giving him a motivational speech. Teth-Adam beats up some soldiers and somehow swims through the Antarctic ocean to reach the surface, before transforming into a full gold-plated Black Adam form. 

Black Adam arrives to fight Sabbac alongside some assistance from Hawkman, and ultimately Black Adam rips Sabbac right in half and stops the big demonic portal in the sky. The Justice Society leaves on good terms with Black Adam. We close the movie with Black Adam sitting on the throne of Kahndaq as the Tomaz family watch him... then decides that it feels wrong. He flies up, destroys the throne, and declares that Kahndaq needs a protector instead of a ruler, adopting the name Black Adam. 

The mid-credits scene show Superman (Henry Cavill's Superman, that is) arriving under Amanda Waller's orders to meet Black Adam, suggesting that they talk. 

And... that's it. It's a pretty okay movie for the first half, even with the rather one-note civilian cast. It's just such a shame that any ideological questions about interfering with another nation, or to keep the status quo, or killing enemies, end up being handwaved aside to 'oh shit, we've got bigger problems'. Sabbac is also a rather weak villain come the end of it, and while we do get a pretty neat action scene between him, Dr. Fate, Hawkman and Black Adam, Sabbac doesn't quite feel as engaging as an antagonist. The movie does a pretty good job at basically building up Black Adam and the basics of his mythos, and it's done rather competently. Not a bad action movie to watch, honestly. 

Movie Review: Suicide Squad 2021

The Suicide Squad (2021)

I tried making two different versions of this review, but my computer kept crashing and deleting it, so... I'm sorry, you guys are getting a very truncated version because I'm kind of tired of writing about this movie over and over again. 

Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed The Suicide Squad. The 2021 movie, of course, not to be confused with the abomination that is the original Suicide Squad movie from 2016, which missed every single point that the Suicide Squad comic is all about. It's just such a shame that Suicide Squad 2021 came out both in the middle of the pandemic, and also right when people really didn't give a shit about the Suicide Squad. 

The movie opens up wonderfully, and since I didn't follow the lead-up to the movie, I had no idea which characters were in this movie... and we get to see the movie from Savant (played by Michael Rooker) as he gets sent to a mysterious island in the South American island of Corto Maltese alongside a bunch of DC comics' Z-lister villains, like Mongal, Javelin, Weasel, TDK and Blackguard. I only know the first three in that list, which is impressive of them to pull out some really random characters. All of whom who die! Including, to my shock, Captain Boomerang! But I guess anyone can die. 

In fact, the only two survivors of this team is Rick Flag and Harley Quinn, and Harley really does have main character/franchise mascot plot immunity. Again, the idea that people are dying by the droves, and that the mission is politically sensitive and set in another country, really makes so much more sense than 'oh hey crazy magic woman unleashed a demon in the middle of the town, let's send criminals'.

Meanwhile, the real Suicide Squad is led by the assassin Bloodsport (basically a rewritten Deadshot complete with him being a dad), the insanely patriotic and loyal to USA Peacemaker (a character that I have no idea about before this movie and I'm surprised I don't), and wacky colourful characters Ratcatcher 2, Polka-Dot Man and King Shark. King Shark is a shark! All three of the wackies are fun ones, with Polka-Dot Man having some of the best lines in the movie, King Shark being adorable by dint of existing, and Ratcatcher being pretty damn zany in her own right. 

Team B of the Suicide Squad are pretty brutal as they massacre a bunch of rebels, and as they regroup with Rick Flag (who they mistakenly thought was captured by the guerilla in the island) who had befriended the rebel leader Sol Soria. A major appeal of the movie is Bloodsport, Peacemaker and Rick Flag all being very diametrically opposed in what they view to be the right thing to do, with Peacemaker being the insanely loyal attack dog to Amanda Waller and the U.S. government; Peacemaker seeing it all as just a job to get out of jail (but developing a dad instinct towards Ratcatcher) and Rick Flag being more 'good' than 'lawful'. They decide to infiltrate the mysterious lab 

Harley Quinn, meanwhile, has her own bizarre subplot where she gets kidnapped and brought to the Corto Maltese dictator Silvio Luna, who is a manchild who falls in love with her and eventually gets killed by Harley Quinn after some sex and intel. Silvio gets replaced by the bird-burning bastard Mateo Suarez, an even more military-minded dictator than his predecessor. 

Harley regroups with the rest of the Suicide Squad, who after some wacky hijinks and murderizing, ends up entering the Jotunheim project to find the Thinker, who is experimenting with 'Project Starfish'... which, of course, as any DC fan would know, is the gloriously dorky Starro the Conqueror, a giant-ass starfish alien that uses smaller versions of itself to telepathically possess humans. There are some rather honestly unnecessary rape jokes tossed in for the Thinker, but I guess we're supposed to root for him when Starro ends up ripping the Thinker apart during his escape.

Starro is a fun B-movie giant kaiju monster threat, but the best part of the movie has to be the confrontation between Rick Flag, Peacemaker and Bloodsport. Rick Flag finds a hard drive with evidence of how Starro was brought to Earth by the US government, and was secretly sponsoring the experiments in hopes of creating a superweapon. Meanwhile, Peacemaker, who wants peace but only for the US, ends up killing Rick Flag to cover up the evidence. 

As Starro escapes during the resulting battle and causes the Jotunheim facility to collapse, the drive falls into the hands of Ratcatcher 2. Peacemaker, jackass that he is, tries to execute the young adolescent woman... but Bloodsport, who developed a bond with Ratcatcher 2 during the earlier scenes, ends up confronting Peacemaker, shooting him (seemingly for dead, though Peacemaker is revealed to be alive after the credits to star in his spinoff show) and takes the drive. 

Starro leaves and starts going Godzilla on Corto Maltese. Amanda Waller orders the Suicide Squad to leave, but, of course, it can't be a superhero show without the giant threat being taken down. Waller gets hit in the head by her subordinates, allowing Bloodsport and company to try and fight Starro. For all the good it does, because poor Polka-Dot Man gets squished by it. Ratcatcher 2 eventually manages to kill Starro by using the flood of rats in the city and feeding them all into the hole Harley Quinn pokes in Starro's eyeball. Corto Maltese is freed, Bloodsport forces Waller to release his team in exchange for the contents of the drive.

And... it's a short summary, but the movie itself is pretty fun with its gory sense of humour. I really do think that the Harley Quinn subplot is kind of redundant -- but Margot Robbie is always fun in her role as much as I really do feel mostly disdain at the modernized Harley. Lots of great moment especially if you are a fan of dark, gory comedy like I am, and definitely a movie that's underrated. It's certainly one of the entries of the DCEU that I would genuinely feel is a strong movie through and through. 

Movie Review: Birds of Prey

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)

I am just very slowly going through the backlog of DCEU movies that I haven't reviewed in the past. Birds of Prey probably holds an interestingly special place in my heart because it was the last movie I watched in teh thaeters before the huge pandemic. 

And, well... it's an interesting movie? It's definitely not a bad movie on its own merits, but as part of the expanded DCEU continuity it kind of is a rather odd choice to slot into the movie series' lineup... though I could rant a whole day about the poor choices that the DCEU had done in terms of choosing which superhero movie to make when. So.

I guess my biggest problem with this movie is its branding as a 'Birds of Prey' movie, when the movie is all about Harley Quinn. And it's a pretty great post-New-52 Harley Quinn movie, all things considered. It's just that they kind of tossed in/shoehorned in the Birds of Prey and with the exception of maybe the Huntress's backstory, none of these guys really are adapted well into the big screen. And I don't mind liberties being taken during an adaptation of superhero material, that's for sure, but... but when you change a character so much that really the only common thread is the name -- like Cassandra Cain, who practically has nothing in common with the mute assassin Batgirl from the comics, I really wonder why they decided to even use the character name at all. 

Again, as mentioned above, the movie itself clearly takes a lot of the complains about the very... sexualized and vapid Harley Quinn from the trainwreck of a movie that is 2016's Suicide Squad, took the fact that Margot Robbie is actually a good fit for the character, and ran with it. We go through a pretty solid character arc as she goes all cuckoo, going from her breakup with her abusive boyfriend Joker and then trying to make it on her own as her own woman with a pet hyena. 

She comes into conflict with club owner and gangster boss Roman Sionis (Black Mask in the comics, played by Ewan "Obi-Wan Kenobi" McGregor) who, like most of the underworld, views her as a washout now that she's no longer associated with the Joker. We get that rather glorious scene where she blows up the ACE-Chemicals plant to announce to the world of her moving on from the Joker. And... again, not 100% faithful to the comics, but that's okay. It's a neat little setup not too dissimilar from the recent, well-received Harley Quinn animated series. 

But then the titular Birds of Prey come in and... they're... again, I don't think their individual stories are bad. The actors are serviceable, and the way they're integrated into the Harley/Sionis plot is pretty competently done. It's just that... there's a mixture of them feeling rather obligatory to the movie as a whole (just to make it an ensemble cast and "adapt" another DC property) and their stories kinda being basic. 

The only one who I feel actually gets a pass is the edgy vigilante Huntress, who they actually played up super-seriously. Her Bertinelli mafia family drama is shown to the audience and treated by the Huntress herself as a brooding, badass backstory; her outfit and crossbows are handled reasonably well, and Huntress herself takes herself seriously too... when Harley and the rest of the cast really don't give a shit about her backstory and continually mock her Huntress moniker. It's something that shouldn't be funny -- particularly because I've spent years bitching about superhero adaptations being ashamed of their origins -- but it is. 

The main plot involves a diamond engraved with account numbers tied to the Bertinelli crime family, which is the sort of ridiculous James Bond style plotline that I feel is nice. Said diamond gets stolen by a little girl, Cassandra Cain, who proceeds to swallow it. Sionis and his goons hunt down Cassandra, who befriends Harley Quinn, and... we basically get that as the rather typical 'oh, jackass befriends a young child' plotline. Again, the acting is competent enough to not make the movie drag, but it's also nothing super special at the end of the day. 

Meanwhile, Dinah "Black Canary" Lance is a burlesque singer in Sionis's nightclub who basically gets forced into being his bodyguard... with the rather creepy implications that Sionis has an unhealthy amount of interest in her. This gets Sionis's previous goon, Mr. Zsasz, super-duper jealous in an interaction that some people have read as unrequited romantic interaction? Eh. The two kind of antagonize each other throughout the movie, and also at the climax of the movie we get the revelation that Dinah has metahuman Black Canary powers, which... it's something that the comics character has, but considering how much everything about this movie is toned down to the 'ground-level' superheroes and supervillains, it's a revelation that isn't foreshadowed and doesn't make sense beyond 'it's from the comics'.

Rounding out the cast is GCPD Detective Renee Montoya, who's just this jaded, older lady cop who's the token lawful good member of the cast who tries her best to get everyone that's not evil on the same side. 

And... the movie basically goes through a bunch of action scenes, and a lot of them are just stylish and ridiculous. Your tolerance of the second and third acts of the movie really depends on how much the wacky fireworks-cannon raid of the GCPD and the climactic wacky hijinks rollerblade action scene at one of Gotham City's many, many abandoned funhouse theme parks are. It's a stylish action scene that I won't begrudge since it fits the tone of the movie. There is the typical 'Harley angsts on whether she would sell out her young kiddie friend' storyline, there is Dinah being caught between her status as a Sionis gang employee and an informant to Montoya... again, none of these plotlines are bad at all. It's just... kind of obvious that everything leads up to 'okay, we all hate Sionis, let's team up and beat up his army of masked goons'. 

The movie ends with Sionis dead, while Montoya, Huntress and Black Canary think about starting off a superhero vigilante agency, only for the final shot to be Harley and Cass stealing all the money and driving off into the sunset. 

And... again, it's not a bad movie on its own merits. Playful, wacky, stylish in the action scenes. Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn displays a lot of the fun, lunatic energy that the character has in her solo outings, and free from the terrible 2016 Suicide Squad script and the association with the worst live-action incarnation of the Joker, she gets to shine and be the protagonist of her own movie. Unfortunately, I really do think that the movie would probably work a lot better if it actually went all-in on its focus as a Harley Quinn movie, since a lot of the storylines revolvinga round the Birds of Prey ends up being kind of superfluous and distracting since none of the characters ever grow out of their archetypes. The movie's usage of characters also deviate rather wildly from the source material that it actually is even more baffling when Black Canary utilizes her sonic screams. Again, I don't really like criticizing this movie since it's still a fun watch, but it's just another mediocre movie to tack onto the messy pile of DCEU's portfolio. 

Movie Review: Wonder Woman 1984

Wonder Woman 1984 [2020]

Huh, yeah. I just... never really reviewed this movie, did I? It's just so... underwhelming. And it really shouldn't be. Out of all the movies to come out of the DCEU, Wonder Woman in 2017 had the right blend of seriousness, faithfulness to the source material and the modernization and condensing of so many comic-book elements that made the movie still one of my favourite superhero adaptations ever. Sure, it's not perfect, but it was such a breath of fresh air to the otherwise dark, gritty mess that was the DCEU at the time.

So obviously Wonder Woman was going to get a sequel, and interestingly, instead of a sequel set on the present day after the events of Justice League (the way Aquaman was), we go back to... 1984. And the only real reason we do that, seemingly, is just for the film-makers to reference a whole bunch of 80's tropes. I can respect that, but... but the setting and the time period -- especially since this movie is still ostensibly within the DCEU -- makes the movie basically forced to already answer its stakes. Some movies can kinda-sorta work in this constraint, kinda like Black Widow, but most of the time there's a characterization moment that needs to be answered. Diana's pretty much already kind of set in stone, with the bulk of her character development already happening in the first Wonder Woman movie. Not to mention the obvious plot point of having Wonder Woman active in the 80's despite the fact that she's supposed to be hiding and only working as a civilian as per BvS and Justice League. 

But even then, the plotlines of this movie is pretty messy even if we don't go to its pretty disappointing ending. There's an opening scene with the Amazons in Themyscira with young Diana where the whole moral is for Diana to be patient and not take shortcuts, which does have some vague tie-in with the motivation of the villain. One of them, anyway. 

The movie has two primary villains -- the first is Barbara Minerva, or the Cheetah. One of Wonder Woman's most notable and recurring archenemies in comics and adaptations, they do a rather okay-ish job at showing Barbara's shyness and her growing psychosis before she eventually gets morphed by the plot device of the movie into a feral cheetah-woman. Barbara gets her wish granted of being 'just like Diana' by a museum artifact called the Dreamstone, and ends up... basically being completely irresponsible with those powers. Hence, the 'shortcut' theme before. But while the interactions between the two actresses are pretty okay, the comedy and the tone really didn't sell me too much on it. (Also, it is pretty much an obvious cheat to get away from CGI to have Barbara not be in Cheetah form for 80% of the movie). Barbara herself isn't portrayed terribly, but we've seen a lot of these 'obsessed with the main hero' villains (Batman Returns' Catwoman is probably the primary comparison here) and I'm sorry to say that Cheetah just isn't that interesting.

Diana's wish, meanwhile, revolves around her dead lover Steve Trevor, who is resurrected in another man's body in a completely pointless sub-plot other than to get actor Chris Pine back. Steve's ghost/spirit is resurrected within the body of another man, which... which leads to the very uncomfortable moment where they make love and Diana kinda gets a bit reluctant to send Steve Trevor back -- the man he's inhabiting has a life and everything, and... I don't know. A lot of people out there clearly feel the same, because this whole Steve Trevor storyline does feel a bit creepy. Which... it could have been good. It could've tied into the whole 'no shortcuts' theme that's supposed to run through the movie, but Steve's resurrection and Diana's dilemma is tied more onto her letting go of Steve instead of the moral implications.

The secondary villain in this movie is Maxwell Lord (or Max "Lord" Lorenzano, played by Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal), who really is adapted in name only. Maxwell Lord steals the Dreamstone to save his dying oil company. And... again, credit where credit's due, the scenes shot with Max and his son and his company and how he's becoming an increasingly distant father are pretty well-done. They're just... not very interesting as story concepts. 

The Dreamstone itself is also very vague beyond being a typical magical mumbo-jumbo plot device. Max merges with it, Diana later discovers that it's created by a god called the Duke of Deception, and as usual with these wish-granting artifacts, they exact a toll unless they renounce the wish or destroy the stone. And... again, Diana's supposed to be conflicted about Steve being back, but all throughout this the script and the pacing makes her feel a bit more self-centered than the movie-makers probably intended. Plus seeing any hero pine for their love interest so badly is honestly never been all that interesting, doubly so when it's something so haphazardly done as Steve Trevor's 'resurrection'.

We do get a couple of (honestly rather samey) action scenes. Max gets more and more insane and tries to escalate nuclear war in order to... uh... broadcast his message to all the world so he can grant all their wishes? And then that's all so that his powers won't cause his body to deteriorate? Again, with better pacing this plotline might have a comic-book charm to it. Now it just feels incoherent. Barbara also hangs out with Max at this point, becoming his henchman. 

After being beaten down by Barbara a bit too much, Diana finally lets Steve go and she gets restored to her full strength. And it happens kind of so late into the movie, and the dramatic tension just feels more stretched out than anything. Diana dons the Armour of Asteria from the movie posters, which looks cool and shit, leading to a pretty badass fight with the mutated, fully-terribly-CGI-Cheetah Barbara. The transformation involves some wish-sharing property of the Dreamstone that's never explained before. I would've praised this movie a bit if we get some character catharsis from a villain that used to be the main character's good friend, but Cheetah just gets electrocuted, knocked out and out of the picture. Then... Diana pulls out the Lasso of Truth and basically and literally cures the mass wishing all throughout the world with the power of friendship. 

No, really. She just gives a speech, and somehow everyone who had their wishes granted renounces them all in time for the Dreamstone's cosmic devastation or whatever to stop. Sure, the wish had something-something about not taking shortcuts and wishes, but... not everyone's wishing for something selfish. And we're also meant to assume that any destruction caused by these wishes are just... reverted? I don't mind optimistic superhero movies. I like my optimism. This is over-the-top saccharine.

Also, Max gets to reconcile with his son in a plot twist that you could see from a mile away. There are some random scenes that show that Max Lord is a victim of child abuse himself, but the movie just hurriedly wraps him up and shoves him into a hugging scene and never follows up on it, making that revelation feel pretty detached.

Also also, we get the out-of-nowhere reveal that Asteria is living in the human world, but it doesn't really lead into anything other than a Lynda Carter cameo. 

And... yeah. The setup for the Dreamstone storyline is just not very good, and neither villains are particularly interesting enough to follow. They had the bare-bones of stories, but it isn't followed up on! In the case of Cheetah, or just plain executed in the cheesiest, most eye-rolling way in Maxwell Lord's case. Diana herself goes through a very cliched and dragged-out characterization of 'moving on'... and the message at the end isn't particularly well-suited for the year that this movie is released in, right smack dab during the Coronavirus pandemic, where there's a fair amount of people that probably found the message of 'all you need to do is to have some hard work and everything will work out' to not be the message they want to hear.

And, yes. The Coronavirus pandemic was a major factor to why the movie feels so unfinished in the first place. But its bloated 152-minute runtime really didn't need to be this long, making all the padding moments of Diana and Steve, or Diana and Barbara, or Max and his kid, feel even more dragged-out when the final product of these characters all ended up still being one-note. Kind of a shame, because the DCEU really needed all the wins they could get with their limited amount of movies per year, and this certainly wasn't it. 

Movie Review: Man of Steel

Man of Steel (2013)

I reviewed and rewatched the rest of the... what was it they call this set of DC movies? The DC Extended Universe? A couple of times. Even if sometimes it's just to rewatch the action scenes, or when they happen to be playing on the TV. But I've never rewatched Man of Steel since 2013.

And... and I don't know. For all of its faults, at least Batman v. Superman isn't boring, y'know? And I'm not just talking on the merits of whether a superhero movie must have a certain quota of action scenes or whatever, but this movie and its 143-minute runtime really got me really tapping my foot impatiently at many times during its first act. 

There's a bunch of things that this movie does right. The casting is pretty spot-on -- Cavill's pretty great, Adams is pretty great, Crowe is clearly enjoying himself, Shannon is fun... The soundtrack is great. There are a lot of nice shots, and the special effects is A+ even if the climax does run for a bit too long. The fight in the small town with trains and fighter jets flying around is pretty phenomenal, and the effects showcasing Kryptonian super-speed is pretty awesome. Also a fan of the display of the conflict on Krypton.

Otherwise, though... it runs for over two hours, with very little to show. At least Zack Snyder's Justice League and its mammoth 4-hour runtime had the excuse of telling the multiple different stories and the worldbuilding of the whole Apokolips and Mother Box thing. Man of Steel's exposition is actually relatively concise in its Krypton-centric prologue and a later villain monologue on General Zod's part. So for the most part the movie just sort of feels kind of bland. I think the movie tries to do too much -- it clearly wants to be an origin story of Superman, it needs to have a plot where Superman fights a villain, and it also wants to distance itself from the previous DC projects. And honestly, I feel like it tried a bit too hard and what we got is an hour and a half of just the origin story, before we get to the Zod-invasion story honestly rather abruptly. 

The movie is also sprinkled with a lot of flashbacks, not all of which are relevant, and when they're interspaced between the relatively slow scenes of Lois Lane trying to investigate the mysterious reports, or Clark/Kal trying to figure out his destiny... it's not the most interesting part of the movie for sure. I do think the first act could've used a fair bit of trimming, because some of the flashbacks do feel redundant, and I'm still very iffy on the honestly preventable and questionable way that Jonathan Kent dies in this movie. 

The cast of this movie is pretty great, too, but at the same time watching the movie just feels... exhausting. For all my complaints about the slow start of the movie before the plot goes on, Superman himself doesn't get a whole ton of character development. I'm not sure if this was because of studio pressure or rewrites or whatever, but Superman feels kind of confused for most of the movie instead of introspective. He's got speeches from both Jonathan Kent (via flashbacks) and Jor-El (via advanced A.I.) that talk about how he'll be a guide to humanity and a symbol of hope and all that, but ultimately the climax of the movie is a rather typical 'fight the alien invader' climax. And, yeah, he sure is a symbol of hope, but it really does feel like a lot of the more heavy-handed speeches in regards to Superman's destiny ends up being followed up upon only in later movies. Plus, there's still the rather iffy undertones of the movies (that doesn't show up as much in the comics) that Superman's basically just following the orders of his space dad's god complex. On the other hand, Russel Crowe does give us a pretty fun Jor-El, so...

A lot of critics note that this movie 'missed the mark' with Superman himself, though honestly, that's not something that I would complain about too much. Sure, he's a bit more grim and dour, and I don't quite enjoy that as much, but as far as interpretations go, he's still ultimately heroic and he still chooses humanity over his supposed legacy or his homeworld. It's just that the tone of the movie is so depressing at times that it's hard to realize that. 

Oh, yeah, Superman also totally kills Zod at the end of the movie. And the whole 'Superman causes massive amounts of collateral damage' complaint. Both are much-maligned and much-argued-about part of the movie that the internet has dissected far, far more than I am honestly willing to. There are merits to both the 'Superman should not kill and should find another way to resolve this' camp and the 'Superman learns killing is bad in this movie' camp. Honestly, I'm already pretty exhausted after sitting through the movie that I'm just going to shrug and say that they're hardly the biggest problems here.

Honestly, despite the tone of my review, this isn't a bad movie at all! The story is solid if formulaic for a Superman story, and from a filmmaking standpoint it's pretty well-done. And honestly, as far as adaptations go I've certainly seen worse. This is definitely a solid movie, especially to those who like a darker and more serious tone (which I personally don't get for superhero movies, but there's certainly a market for them and I'm happy that some of the superhero movies cater to them). But if we're being honest it's certainly not something that I'll be in a hurry to rewatch any time soon.

Movie Review: Shazam

Shazam [2019]

-deletes five paragraphs of a diatribe about the older DCEU movies and Zack Snyder-

Okay, my first attempt of trying to frame Shazam in the greater context of the pretty horribly failing DCEU franchise/shared universe ended up just being nothing but a diatribe against Snyder, and that's not particularly fair. Let's just ignore all that and focus on Shazam, the movie about one of DC's most wholesome superhero, Captain Marvel!

No, not the lady one. And not the one owned by Marvel comics. Billy Batson was Captain Marvel first, and I've known him as Captain Marvel for a couple of decades now, and it's really, really hard to mentally call him "Shazam" instead of "Captain Marvel". To the movie's credit, the fact that Billy Batson never actually settles on a proper superhero name, going back and forth from nonsensical names like Thundercrack and Captain Sparkle-Fingers, is definitely a hilarious nod to how DC lost the right to call Billy Batson "Captain Marvel".

Still, this movie is... it's very fun. It's earnest, it's got a solid storyline, it's very predictable and not super derivative at all from what you'd expect from a Shazam movie. I do love some of the retoolings that they do to the mythology of the character, like giving Dr. Sivana a whole new motivation that's involved with him being rejected as a child and fused together as the host of the Seven Sins -- I think it's drawing a little from New 52 material that I am not too familiar with, but it's still neat. The themes of this family is utterly cheesy, but cheese is that Captain Marvel is built upon, and honestly, considering that Billy Batson is just straight up a young teenager who suddenly finds out he can transform into a musclebound lightning-magic wielding superhero... it's a movie that's not afraid to ramp up the dramatic stakes when it has to, but it boils down to a far more simple superhero origin story.

And you know what? I really, really loved it. The direction was amazing. The tone of the movie is great. The special effects are pretty neat, too, and the final battle has a little twist I did not expect. The themes of the story centers around Billy as an abandoned child who's looking for a family, and the moral of the story is... it's pretty simple "family is who cares for you, not who you're related by blood to", but it's earnest and genuinely effective. The supporting cast walk the thin line between being annoying and being adorable, and I'm frankly pretty sure that a good chunk of them fall into the latter category.

While the movie does feature a pretty supporting cast, the main characters are definitely Billy (Zachari Levi plays a kid-trapped-in-an-adult-body very well) and his crippled best-friend-slash-adopted-brother Freddy Freeman. Their dynamic is just a bunch of teenager kids that don't really care at all about this whole "saving the world" or magical destiny business, and just want to make Youtube videos and think up of all the cool shit that superheroes can do. Supervillains! Secret lairs! Helping catch a bus! Arguments about responsibility and showing off end up causing a bit of mid-movie drama between Billy and Freddy, and by all rights it should be annoying, but it genuinely ends up being entertaining.

Throw in some fantastic acting on the part of Mark Strong as Dr. Sivana, who admittedly isn't the most well fleshed-out of villains. The little bait-and-switch to those who aren't as familiar with Captain Marvel's lore (and let's be honest, due to the legal problems with the character, he's basically non-existent from cartoons until the last couple of years) to make it seem like the little kid in the cold open is going to be our hero is pretty well done, and while he menaces our heroes as an adult, the fact that his ultimate motivation ends up being a pretty childish angry rage against the world is pretty nice parallel.

Ultimately, there's... there's not a whole ton more that I can say about the movie without going too deep into spoilery discussions or a scene-by-scene breakdown, and I don't really have the time today. But while other DC movies try to play up the epic, sprawling mythology as being the huge focus of the conflict (even Aquaman and Wonder Woman aren't immune to this), Shazam just uses the mythology and backstory as mostly backdrop and hijinks, while focusing solely on the inter-personal dynamics between Billy, his adopted family, and his arch-nemesis.

Oh, and that scene where Billy jumps off the side of the building and announces SHAZAM! and gets struck by lightning, and transforms mid-flight? Amazing. Most of the budget for the movie ends up going to the CGI demons, which look surprisingly scary for a movie with a lighter tone, but that scene is just A+ for me.

Ultimately, Shazam ends up harkening back to a simpler age of superheroics, and in a movie series where everything is so dry and dull, Shazam is a pretty great reminder at what these superheroes should be -- something for children to aspire for, heroes who try their best to maintain their morality in a cynical world without being cynics themselves. None of this "Batman must kill because it's otherwise unrealistic" nonsense.