DC Movie Roundup.

This was written several years ago on another site and has been reposted with some updates to the writing.

I fell behind on my rewatch so I’m going to do a quick round up of a few movies that I am not going to rewatch right now (if at all).

In order of release:

Suicide Squad:

This movie is a train wreck. It really is, I know it was a mess behind the scenes with reshoots. However at least it’s not a boring train wreck. It’s not a good film but I found it enjoyable enough to watch. I hate Jared Leto, he’s a fucking creep and I wish he wasn’t in this franchise. Funny how we only hear about method acting asshole characters…. Anyways I’m amused that narratively he’s just a flight of stairs. Seriously, outside of the flashbacks he shows up on the roof, takes Harley and crashes and she rejoins them on the ground. I think there was a missed opportunity here, Will Smith has a history of playing snarky military/cop characters so I think he would have been a better Rick Flag than what we got. Further Joel Kinnaman basically played Deadshot in season 1 of Altered Carbon. Swapping those two actors would have made for better performances from both.

Aquaman:

This movie is basically the first of the new phase, when WB wanted to shift away from the dark but didn’t quite know where to go yet. I’d describe it as clunky but fun. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to do with the material but it sure as hell tries. Where it really excels is the visuals, this movie has a lot of cool underwater visuals and it’s a pretty fun time. I do want to rewatch it and maybe write more on it later but there’s not a super amount of depth to it so we’ll see.

Shazam:

This is pretty much the closest DC has gotten to doing a marvel style superhero movie, reminds me a lot of Ant Man for tone actually. Honestly I think right now this might be the best made DC movie. It has great performances all around, good villain, great arc for our heroes with real stakes while still making it a very personal story. I really can’t wait for both the sequel and the movie where we get Dwayne Johnston playing Black Adam, please let that happen. There’s one thing I want to really praise about this movie and it’s the family angle. So often in media foster parents get crapped on, shown to be in it for the money or awful people however in this film we get 2 amazing foster parents that genuinely love their children and are good parents. I think that’s a really important thing to put out there.

Birds of Prey The Emancipation of Harley Quinn:

The film itself is excellent. They managed to take a character from Suicide Squad who was kind of annoying and make her entertaining. This film I think somehow managed to thread the needle between the darker more serious tone of the DC films and the jokey never serious Marvel films and create something special. I’m not a fan of the scene where she feeds a person to her hyena but overall this film is great. I do have issues surrounding the film though.

1. I’m sick of Harley Quinn, overexposed in media. I get she’s popular but dial it down.
2. Cassandra Cain. In the comics Cassandra Cain is raised by her father David Cain into being the world’s best fighter and assassin but she ran away and became Batgirl eventually before the comics decided to screw up her character. Further she was mute and couldn’t read creating a disabled hero which is something we have so rarely. This movie has a character named Cassandra Cain that aside from being Asian has absolutely nothing to do with the comics character. I don’t mind the character in the film but I really don’t like that choice.
3. Content Warning Sexual Assault. In the comic story The Killing Joke, The Joker shoots Barbara Gordon paralyzing her, then sexually assaults her while taking pictures. He uses these pictures to torture her father. After her recovery (still paralyzed) she becomes the hero known as Oracle. A spymaster who gathers intel for the DC heroes, fights other hackers and organizes a special ops team of female heroes called The Birds of Prey. She created and molded the team, it was a response to her trauma and showed how a disabled hero can style fight in their own way. She’s not even ever mentioned in this film. They took her team and gave it to the exgirlfriend of the character that paralyzed her. Fuck that, Fuck DC. Harley was never on the team before this movie. Apparently the writers wanted to have her in it but were told no. oi.

Wonder Woman 84

This movie was awful. Plot holes with the first Wonder Woman, shitty Cheetah costume, Wonder Woman rapes a man*, long boring sequences, a nonsensical villain, and more. I just honestly really did not like this film and actually reached a point where I was like “oh my god, there’s still almost an hour left”. Never watching again, easily the worst DC Film.

*if you want to have discourse on whether or not sleeping with that dude while he was possessed was rape or not feel free to take that somewhere far away from me. fuck off.