One day the universe will collapse, but rest assured: that day is stillbillions of years away. The DC Extended Universe, on the other hand, seems tous already in its death throes.
Erik StockmanThursday 20 October 202209:13
‘Wonder Woman 1984’ walked on crutches, ‘The Suicide Squad’ was a commercialflop, Adil & Bilalli s ‘Batgirl’ was coolly relegated to the forgottenpit, and now lead actor Ezra Miller no longer seems to have them all inone place, it is highly uncertain whether ‘The Flash’ will ever be releasedagain. And ‘Black Adam’, the umpteenth attempt by DC to keep up with the asyet smoothly running Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a super debacle in allrespects in our opinion.
The film opens with one of those typical headache-inducing mythologicalintroductions that not even Peter Parker could manage: a voice tells us aboutthe city of Kahndaq, about the Crown of Sabbaq that harbors the power of sixdemons, about one Akh-Ton , about the Council of Wizards, about a Hero whowill one day rise and free the people from their chains, and about the magicalore that can only be mined in Kahndaq: Eternium, that’s the name of that blueglowing stuff (in superhero movies, magical minerals light up usually blueon). Six minutes away, and we already wanted to exchange that Akh-Ton for aBeer-Ton, but oh well.
In present-day Kahndaq, three figures have been searching for some time forthe above-mentioned Crown of Sabbaq, which according to legend has been buriedsomewhere in the interior of a mountain for 5000 years. Why those figures arelooking for the Crown of Sabbaq? In an unintentionally hilarious scene, one ofthem, a tough lady, provides the answer to that question herself: ‘To be ableto bury the Crown somewhere else’. Excuse me? As if she herself realizes thatthe answer sounds somewhat absurd, the lady gives some extra text andexplanation three scenes later: ‘No one may use the Crown! If we ever findhim, we’ll dig him up and bury him again!’ Twelve minutes away, and the ‘Duh!’quality of ‘Black Adam’ had already reached unseen heights.
The demigod who then rises from the mountain, called Teth-Adam – a name which,like the pectorals of Dwayne Johnson begging for a brassiere – we thoughtit was a boring piece of shit: it’s just a superhero who, like hundreds ofother superheroes, soars aloft, shoots lightning, bounces bullets, and pluckssurface-to-air missiles from the sky as if they were maple seeds. yawn. We’realso sorry to report that Johnson is slightly disappointed in the role he’sbeen hoping to play since 2008: it’s laughable when Dwayne pulverizes anopponent during the first action sequence and makes the remaining spine snaplike a twig, but in the In most other scenes, Johnson seems hopelessly tornbetween bone-dry seriousness and self-relativistic fancy. The villain on duty,on the other hand, is a particularly dull horned brush that deserves to besent to oblivion by Thanos at the flick of a finger.
It’s common knowledge that superhero movies usually have little to offer innarrative terms, but ‘Black Adam’ must be a low point: for two hours you sitwatching masked figures who cleave through the sky and who, now above a cityand then again above a mountain, firing all kinds of bolts and beams at eachother in an accumulation of weak CGI. Come back, Zack Snyder all isforgiven and forgotten!
A kind of creative desperation even winds through the images; and concretelywe are talking about the desperation-smelling way in which DC tries to imitatethe MCU in ‘Black Adam’. As if the makers also sensed that Johnson would notbe able to carry the film on his own, after 20 minutes they put on a team offour other superheroes: the Justice Society. Hawkman is Iron Man with realwings instead of a suit, Atom can make himself as colossal as Ant-Man, Cyclonecould be the niece of Storm from the ‘X-Men’ franchise, and with Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan!) they stage a wizard who can peek into the future. Rings abell, doesn’t it? Now those in the know will rightly argue that Doctor Fateentered the comic book world much earlier than Dr. Strange, and that Dr.Strange is actually a decoction of Doctor Fate, but that doesn’t really matterhere: the oversupply of providential doctor-wizards in the superhero genrecontinues to point to a lack of ideas.
Question: Could the DC Extended Universe, and by extension the entiresuperhero genre, be in a creative stalemate? Or will ‘Black Panther: WakandaForever’, out on November 9, restore our faith in the genre?
‘ Black Adam’ is now in theaters.