The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World – Shazam!

Written by Tom

[Previously: The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World – The Story So Far]

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Shazam! is the DCEU’s hidden gem. The sole entry in the mainline DCEU to have nothing to do with Harley Quinn or the Justice League, it seems to have become the film that’s most commonly forgotten when talking about the franchise overall. It also can’t have helped that the film sits pretty thoroughly in the shadow of Aquaman – director David F. Sandberg got the job because he had worked with Aquaman director James Wan on his Annabelle films, and it directly continues many of the techniques and tones which Aquaman brought to the table. This is very unfair on Shazam! though, ignoring the many things which are unique to it while underselling just how much the DCEU needed a “business as usual” film at the time.

You see, the story of the DCEU up until Aquaman is that of a franchise tearing itself apart. Each film either tries to encapsulate the DCEU house-style while visibly failing or is a direct attempt to reconfigure that house-style into something new. It’s not really until Aquaman that you get a film which feels like a DCEU movie while also feeling stable enough to be repeatable. As such, what the series really needed post-Aquaman was a film to successfully redo what Aquaman did while still turning a profit, proving that the DCEU finally had a workable set-up that future films could use. That’s what Shazam! did.

So what is this new aesthetic? Well let’s be honest, it’s basically the decision to be colourful and fun. Shazam! tells the story of teenager Billy Batson who becomes the superhero Shazam after being given powers by an ancient wizard. It pitches this story as a straightforward comedy, actively mining the disjunct between Billy Batson’s teenage immaturity and the hypermasculine iconography of Shazam for all its worth. This mining then feeds into Shazam!‘s thematic concerns. Upon gaining his powers, Billy’s first actions are to buy beer, go to a strip club and become YouTube famous. These are all adult activities but they’re the types of adult activities that a young boy would want to do first. So we get a film which is about combining childish spaces with adult ones, using the duality of its main character to skip from one to the other with glee.

The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: The Story So Far

Written by Tom

‘The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World’ is my series of posts looking at the DC Cinematic Universe, how it’s developed itself over time, and what its aesthetics are trying to do. We’re about to start looking at our third block of films (running from ‘Shazam!’ to ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’). Given that the series is a bit long now and was last seen about two years ago, maybe a quick recap is in order…

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Zack Snyder made a one-off deconstruction of Superman called Man of Steel. At the same time as this, DC were looking to fast track the creation of a cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s. Man of Steel, being the financially successful reboot of their most iconic character, seemed like the perfect place to start and so retroactively became the DCEU’s first film with Snyder becoming the mastermind of the universe going forwards. This gave Synder a massive problem though: his first film was about deconstructing heroism, something that would be unsustainable in a continuous superhero franchise. How do you create something which would move the franchise away from deconstruction while maintaining stylistic consistency with a film dedicated to it?

His answer was to deconstruct his deconstruction in Batman vs. Superman, setting up his usual grimdark aesthetic but using it to house a story that’s fundamentally about how grimdark aesthetics can be dull. Once filtered through Synder’s bombastic directorial style (a style which can’t do anything quietly), the result was a film that basically screamed at the audience about how non-functional it was. This set the DCEU up as a cracked mirror of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – it wasn’t interested in doing standard superhero movies as much as it was interested in exploring “superhero movies gone wrong”. As an artistic statement, this is fascinating and has been able to maintain a strong cult fanbase to this day. Many mainstream viewers and critics found Batman vs. Superman to be too messy and weird though, many of the film’s more contentious moments becoming widely parodied memes. The DCEU was already beginning to show cracks.

Cue Suicide Squad and Justice League, the films that would bust those cracks wide open. Both of them tried to capitalise on the DCEU’s “superheroes gone wrong” aesthetic – Suicide Squad by literally putting villains in the superhero role and Justice League by wrapping up Synder’s deconstructionist aesthetic with a story about the DC superheroes finally becoming the icons they should’ve been two movies ago. The issue is that they were both production disasters.

The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: Aquaman

It’s our 100th post! If you were to ask me what the bog standard Fnord post would be, I’d claim it’d be a queer-tinted anti-capitalist reading of a Sarah Jane Adventures episode. There’d be Doctor Who, kids programming, political leftism and queer theory all mashed into one – me and Dan in a nutshell. In this regard, having our 100th post be a 2,000 word defense of the hyper-macho Aquaman probably seems a bit off-brand. Then again, I think by this point another significant part of the blog is our inability to do any of it quite right. As such, let’s have this oddly deferred milestone stand as a cracked mirror celebration of both our successes and failures. It was either this or another review of A Dogs Purpose.

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Written by Tom

Batman vs. Superman and Suicide Squad set up an aesthetic for the DCEU to follow. Both became critical punching bags. Justice League ran away from the aesthetic as fast as possible. Wonder Woman showed that the DCEU would be better off abandoning the aesthetic. Team Titans GO! to the Movies showed that the aesthetic would be better off abandoning the DCEU. The DC high-ups gave up and started rebuilding the franchise from the ground up. And stuck in the middle of this was Aquaman, the final movie of the DCEU as Zac Synder imagined it and the first released into a post-Synder DCEU landscape. Which, like Man of Steel, made it into the film whose main job was defining the DCEU going forwards, despite this never being the intention at any point during its production.

For what it’s worth, Aquaman does a much better job of the task than Man of Steel does. This is mostly because it tries to be fun while Man of Steel… doesn’t. Man of Steel is very much a film which belongs to the time when The Dark Knight was the best superhero movie ever made. This means that everything is very gritty, greyscale and serious. Of course, this is then filtered through the aesthetics of Zack Snyder, the man who took the pitch of “low-scale character study of Superman” and used it as an excuse to level cities and snap necks. This gave the film a critical edge and resulted in its weird self-destructive campness – there is the feeling that Synder doesn’t want to be directing a Superman film and is putting his effort into breaking it from the inside out – but it also resulted in a film which focussed its audience on its flaws, parading the shortcomings of its Superman around as the point of the exercise, its best and worst qualities becoming the exact same things. The fact that Man of Steel is a bunch of competing aesthetics revolving around a character no-one likes is both the point of the movie and the reason why few people think it’s good. No wonder a lot of people got turned off by it.

Aquaman and Wonder Woman represent two very different ways of trying to make this aesthetic likable. Wonder Woman‘s way is to try to make a film that’s actually good as opposed to making a very good film about how bad it is. The issue with this, as we’ve discussed, is that what most consider to be “good” by the standards of superhero movies is very limiting. So Aquaman picks the opposite tack: it throws away the question of quality entirety in favor of being fun.