A Fancy Hat posted:

This movie was great and super fun. Everybody was perfectly cast, it had a good message, and the jokes all landed for me.

When Mr. Mind showed up at the end it got a HUGE reaction from my audience, with one kid going "THE WORM!!!!", so color me happily surprised that ordinary people are into a very weird and very comic booky concept

Guy A. Person posted:

Probably my main complaint is they could have gone a LOT more cartoony with it, especially in places like the initial look through the Rock of Eternity and when they find the room of doors. The Mr. Mind reveal gave me hope that they can probably lean into that more next movie, and that they were more testing the waters with that

A Fancy Hat posted:

The reveal of the Crocodile Men in the doorway was wonderfully weird and a little spooky, so I'd expect some more of that in the sequel.

Now that they've revealed magic is real and based on Mr. Mind's dialogue at the end, there are multiple Lands of magic out there to explore I think we'll see some crazy cool stuff.

El Grillo posted:

I may go and see this because I really like Zachary Levi from the old days of Chuck, is it worth paying for cinema tickets

McCloud posted:

also what was up with the spell to find a chosen one? That never led anywhere did it? Was that just a setup for a future movie or something or just to show that there is no one pure of heart left?

Guy A. Person posted:

Are you talking about the one where he released a bunch of balls of light after meeting Sivana at the beginning of the movie? It was implied that all the people who had "abduction" stories that Sivana was funding research into were a bunch more people who tried and failed the test, after he did that.

I got the impression at least that he had been following and testing people one at a time more methodically but it was taking a long time and the Sins were growing more powerful, so this was an attempt to speed things up. Then of course he was basically forced to even forgo the test by the time Billy arrived and just gamble that he was a good successor

McCloud posted:

Yeah all that is correct, I was wondering if the spell wad ever mentioned or seen again

BiggerBoat posted:

Yeah, "settling" on Billy was shown to be an act of desperation by the wizard based on how he was running out of time to find someone. I don't see how that was hard to miss but OK.

I dig this movie and whoever said it was "corny" was spot on but it was "corny" in a good way I think and mostly captured the child like nature of the subject matter and the power fantasy narrative. Most of the jokes landed but some didn't and overall I wanted more of them. My theater was into it and seemed to enjoy themselves plus my 8 year old had a blast. It's been fun showing him...I dunno..."kid friendly" superhero movies like Superman 1 and 2 plus this one. Incredibles 1 and 2. He gets a kick out of them in ways that TDK or BvS don't provide and it's neat watching movies I grew up with fresh eyes.

True story: we got there about 5 or 10 minutes before showtime and I was psyched that we only got one preview (Alladin) before the feature started. About 15 minutes in (sometime around the car crash with young Sivana), the movie just rebooted and we got previews again. A couple of us went out to complain and/or alert the theater that the movie was loving up. Apparently, someone actually bitched that they MISSED the previews or something and the feature started too fast so the management rewound the film so we got had to watch the first 15 minutes of the movie twice, along with the popcorn and coke commercial and Alladin again..

Yeah. We live in an age where someone will actually bitch about a movie not showing ENOUGH commercials and genuinely starting on time.

DC Murderverse posted:

"well, our showtime is X:XX and if you show up after that time we're not responsible for you missing anything, because ad/trailer times fluctuate depending on the day/movie". that manager was a coward.

surf rock posted:

For most of the movie I was enjoying it reasonably well because of the kid-superhero hijinks, but all his siblings getting the same superhero treatment at the end made it go from good to great in my opinion. What a cool moment, super-fun idea, and the execution was pretty good. Darla and her Shazam version were total scene-stealers. The oldest sister, Mary, was also pretty good although I didn't love that they put her up against the tentacle monster at the end, gross. I also thought the two brothers who weren't Freddy were super-undeveloped; I don't even remember their names.

surf rock posted:

I do wonder: after doing a bit of poking around on Wikipedia afterward, I have to imagine that for someone who's familiar with the comics that some of the stuff was really telegraphed. For example, the sister being named Mary giving away the awesome "they all get powers!" twist. Captain Marvel seems like a hero that 0.1% of people would know enough about these days for that to be the case, though, so maybe that doesn't matter and those folks were just having fun spotting the Easter eggs.

BrianWilly posted:

One of the greatest differences of theme between the the recent DC films and the films of one Zachary Snyder can be seen in how the two types of films treat the very concept of "having superpowers." The very short answer is that the former treats them as empowering responsibilities, while the latter treats them as cruel burdens.

Broadly speaking, the superhuman capabilities of Diana, Arthur Curry, and Billy Batson are directly correlated with their own emotional, personal, and spiritual maturity. The more that Diana travels and discovers and emerges from her childlike perspective of the world, the more powerful she becomes. The more that Arthur unpacks the personal issues holding him back -- including but not limited to unlearning his former brutish and merciless worldviews -- the more powerful that he becomes. "Power" is a fixed metaphor for personal growth in these instances, for emotional clarity, for maturity and the acceptance of the responsibilities that this maturity entails. Until they learn the lessons that their journeys are intended to teach them, they are not yet Wonder Woman or Aquaman, nor are they as powerful as Wonder Woman or Aquaman should be.

In Billy's case, the personal maturation metaphor is...well, outright literal; hello, his main superpower is turning from a child to an adult. He first gains his powers after choosing to help his foster brother against bullies, and discovers the breadths of these powers alongside this newfound family member. But then he forsakes Freddy for selfish reasons, which leads directly to him getting curbstomped by Sivana and literally turning back into a scared child in mind as well as body. But then he transforms into an adult again after he's able to let go of his comforting yet childish fixation on a mother who abandoned him. And finally, after he has the emotional clarity and wisdom to realize and accept that his new family is his real family, Billy is able to unlock the true powers of Shazam and use them like they were meant to be used.

There's a throughline here with all these examples: growing up is tough. Becoming an adult, working through your issues, becoming the person you're meant to be, becoming as good as you can be?...it's a bittersweet affair, it's not going to be all fun and games. It's seeing the darkness in the world where once you only saw light, it's having to take responsibility for things you never dreamed of taking responsibility for, and it's letting go of things you love because those things are keeping you from moving forward. But nontheless it is rewarding, and the rewards are well worth it. Self-improvement is literally empowering, and yes, with this great empowerment comes the expected great responsibility...but that is also not a bad thing.

This part is key: in the purview of the current DCEU, the great powers and responsibilities that are part and parcel of living up to your own personal heroic potential are Good Things. They are desirable outcomes. They are well worth the cost you paid for them. Never once do these films suggest that our superheroic leads should become anything other than what they have become. On the contrary, these powers and responsibilities are the rewards that they deserve for having made it through the crucibles that they did and growing into the best version of them that they can be. Being Wonder Woman, being Aquaman, and being Shazam is your happy ending. Congratulations, kids. You've made it. You've done good.

...Now. Let's take a look at Zachary Snyder's work.

He himself has made no secret of it: realistic superheroism means ugliness and violence. It is a brutal and pitiless affair and can only ever be a brutal and pitiless affair. There is no room in Snyder's worldview for personal enlightenment as an empowering process, because coming to understand the world, coming to learn duty and responsibility, learning to be a hero, is all just going to lead to someone else's horses drowning in a river because there is absolutely no unequivocally good thing in this world that isn't also being dragged down somehow by something bad that it caused. True wisdom, per Snyder, is coming to accept that this is true: Make it through the cruelties of the world and there is only more cruelty waiting for you on the other side. Grow up and dill with it.

Because there is, in fact, a growth metaphor attached to Snyder's works as well, but it more corresponds to the concept of "growing into your power" as something burdensome and traumatic as opposed to something elevating. Not only is Clark's entire childhood encapsulated by superpowers that cause him literal physical pain, but the more that he grows as a person and in personal power, the worse that things are. All of which climaxes during the Zod fight, wherein Clark is arguably at his most powerful, having stepped fully into his role as a protector of the planet. It is not a celebratory moment however, but one marred solely by violence and brutality and destruction and neck-snapping. This is what growing up is like, per Snyder. This is what personal developments leads to.

There are shades of the same concept in Snyder's treatment of Batman; namely, the longer that Bruce acts as Batman and, in fact, the more effective a Batman he becomes, the worse that things around him become as well. All things trend towards entropy and corruption in Snyderworld, and the Batman of BvS is the final form of the Snyder hero, one who has lived through this world and learned its wisdoms: a torn down, worn out, compromised old man. He's what Superman is going to become at some point. He may even be what Billy Batson will become at some point, if we follow Snyderian logic to its conclusion.

Now, ostensibly, BvS is the story of Batman...recovering...from this entropy. But the only glimpse we get of the "recovered" Batman is still one who kills his enemies without restraint. And from what we know of his original Justice League treatment, it's doubtful that we would've seen this Batman become any noticeably less dark. Again, Snyder himself emphasizes that this is the only way it can be. This is the best case scenario Batman. Snyder's world does not allow room for self-improvement as an empowering process, much less a super-empowering process; there is no version of this story where Batman learns a valuable lesson and thereby becomes powerful enough to not have to kill, where Batman becomes as powerful as Batman deserves to be. You kids wanna be Batman? You wanna be Superman? You fools. You absolute imbeciles. This is what you get instead.

It is a...shallow worldview. A world that does not allow for consequence-free self-improvement is not a real world. A world that does not allow for heroism as catharsis, as transformation for the better, is as cartoonish as any you'd find in any children's program or, hey, maybe in a comic book. You could tell that story if you wanted to, perhaps. But you cannot claim superiority or profundity for it. And when I refer to the vast unbridgeable chasm of execution and presentation between the recent DCEU films and the world that Snyder had created previously, when people take issue with Snyder's stuff for being dark while declaring what a breath of fresh air the more recent entries have been, it's going to be mostly in regards to this sentiment: that Snyder has a view of superheroism that is fundamentally unrewarding and handicapped by entropy, while his fellow directors see superheroism in an of itself as a desired outcome that is rewarded to those who have earned that privilege.

ElmerTheWasabi posted:

I'm not as big on Shazam/DC, but I knew who they were. This was just really cool to me because I figured that would be sequel bait. The fact that they did it in the first movie instead was awesome.

Desperado Bones posted:

I loved all this little nudges to Mister Tawky Tawny, I was probably the only idiot smiling wide whenever the plush toy tiger was casually brought in the scenes were Billy was younger and when he gives it to the scared little girl. If we get the sequel I hope they go full silly and bring the anthropomorphic dapper tiger.

Gnome de plume posted:

Also the two school bullies were 80s/90s characters in the whole thing. Park their truck right up at the front curb, knock over a crippled kid in the process and then beat the poo poo out of him? How are they even allowed to show up at school?

BrianWilly posted:

surf rock posted:

Oh, yeah, that part didn't really work for me. Kids can be jerks, but we had a couple of disabled kids in my school growing up and not even the most rear end in a top hat-ish kids would've taken a swing at one of them, let alone do so after HITTING HIM WITH THEIR TRUCK. Jesus Christ! Those kids were like serial-killer evil.

surf rock posted:

Oh, yeah, that part didn't really work for me. Kids can be jerks, but we had a couple of disabled kids in my school growing up and not even the most rear end in a top hat-ish kids would've taken a swing at one of them, let alone do so after HITTING HIM WITH THEIR TRUCK. Jesus Christ! Those kids were like serial-killer evil.

MonsterEnvy posted:

Tawny is cool

garycoleisgod posted:

Watched this last night. It was OK. I mainly want to talk about something mentioned upthread about how Shazam is the worst wizard ever and probably a total moron. I'll just spoil all of it.

Literally every person he ever tested to be champion failed and he only gave Billy the power because he had no choice and the Sins weren't even there to tempt Billy. We can then see throughout the movie that Billy really isn't ready to be a hero and only becomes one after being allowed to fail and grow and learn about family etc.

Maybe if any of the other candidates had been allowed to grow into the role they could have turned out OK like Billy did in the end. I get that the bad experience with what I assume was Black Adam made Shazam create a more stringent test, but if it is a test nobody can pass, it's a poo poo test.

Maybe his "find me a hero!" spell was broke and it only found people who are like 50/50 or something. The test never found Superman?

TLDR - Shazam needs to refine his recruitment and training processes, thank you for reading.

Gnome de plume posted:

This should go without saying: all wizards are assholes.

Gandalf? Bit of an rear end in a top hat. Dumbledore? rear end in a top hat.

DC Murderverse posted:

Daniel Craig('s voice) for Tawky-Tawny

i think it was pretty obvious that The Wizard Shazam is an rear end in a top hat.