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Well looks like we finally got a real trailer for this, and I am very excited to see the JSA in action
This looks awesome. The JSA look great and the same time we're getting some REAL BA out of the Rock.
I do feel Hawkman ...might not be the right choice to deliver the "Heroes don't kill" line.
Other than that Super Excited for this
I mean yeah...but at the same time we need some good lines for Aldis Hodge. The man deserve some props.
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I have to say, I’m maybe cautiously optimistic about this film.
Looks like we get Amanda Waller. And Sabbac as the villain. The dude playing Hawkman was driving me crazy being familiar - finally figured out I’d seen him in a few episodes of Supernatural about 15 or so years back. Also looking forward to Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate. The other actors playing JSA members I’m unfamiliar with.
Aldis Hodge was also in the series, Leverage which was EXTREMELY under-rated but great. But yeah this should be a good movie. Especially with Sabbac being the main villain.
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So completely at last minute I decided to see this. Caveats: I'm not a fan of dark grumbly gritty murdery superhumans (though I do like the Rock a lot). I mainly just wanted to get out of the house after a really long intense work period. I had basement level expectations, and I was half expecting (largely because I'm tired) to sleep through the whole thing.
I really had a great time. Really enjoyed myself. I'm not deeply entrenched in Shazam lore and the last time I read something with Black Adam in it was during War of the Gods in the 90s. So I can't necessarily tell you if he was true to form, but based on vague memories, he seemed right to me, and the Rock of course performed him very well. The way they handled his story was really well done.
The Justice Society of Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Atom Smasher, and Cyclone was really well done. Hawkman was a complete douche; in other words, they handled him completely faithfully. Even better, while he was a douche, I didn't quite want to all the way punch him in the face, so a better rendition than most.
Dr. Fate was really good. And he looked really good, cool effects, great job with the helmet.
The two others were more vague young person interest and comic relief but fine.
Waller's role was small but very appropriately Waller.
There was a prominent, small cast of a family invested in the main plot and they were also enjoyable enough, even if the kid was... a bit too annoying kid like. They were trying too hard to make him Black Adam's Freddy.
The final act was the completely predictable, oh, but here's the REAL VILLAIN, overly long drawn out final battle, complete with millions-of-dollars Skybeam for no real reason. It was especially reminiscent of the final battle of Wonder Woman (2017) both in terms of general pacing and stakes as well as its slight out of placeness, but it had some decent moments within and landed fine in the end even if it took too long to get where it was going.
Some of the dialogue was clunky and some of the more interesting finer plot points got lost halfway through, but I don't really expect great writing from DC films these days. It was good enough, and there was a coherent plot with a good throughline, and even some actual character development.
Final cameo was not who I expected but was welcome, and the audience was excited.
Soundtrack was incredible. Pacing except at the end was decent. Thought I would nap through half of it and instead woke right the hell up.
Mostly it was a good fun time. Don't go expecting Shakespeare, but if you're a fan of the characters involved or just want to see a fun action show with some middle eastern mythological themes I recommend it.
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Overall not bad, characters were mostly on point. Brosnan frankly did a great job as Dr. Fate. Would love to see more JSA in the future.
certainly worth the ticket price (as long as you don't buy snacks...dear lord those prices are pure robbery now)
I'm beginning to think Geico is lying to us about that the fact that turning us into older people is a bad thing when prices are this high...
I had decided early on that I would see this opening weekend, and so I did. Though I did not ask her to accompany me, my wife also came along (for the popcorn, as she proclaimed).
I'm a huge fan of the Rock. I'm a huge fan of the JSA. I'm a huge fan of Pierce Brosnan. So I didn't need for the movie to be that good for me to enjoy it. I'm going to put the rest in a spoiler. Not sure if that is relevant to the thread, but I'd hate to ruin anyone's time at the movies.
Atom Smasher was sort of pointless. If he wasn't in the movie I'm not sure it would have mattered.
I liked the visuals for Cyclone, and she did some fun (though ineffective) things.
Again, why not get into any of the reincarnation stuff with Hawkman/Carter Hall and Adam if you are going to have Hawkman in the movie?
The visuals for the first battle with Adam and the mercenaries are some of the best visuals of superhero powers I've ever seen. I wish they hadn't ditched all of that in later scenes. It really showed how powerful BA is. And it was cool when he no selled other battles, but not as cool as the first thing.
The movie is very loud. I saw it with someone who has some sensory integration issues, and they came out of the showing feeling very nauseated. Also, my ears are still ringing. Like after you see a big rock concert.
I will always caveat that I do not have high standards for CG. I think it's a holdover from growing watching old Doctor Who, so I'm always impressed when the effects are better than papier mache over chicken wire and a trash bag. This said, I liked the CG in this movie specifically because the superpowers effects looked like how the superpowers would be drawn on a comic page, but 3D in a "realish" world. In other words, to me it looked "stylized," not "bad"; which is to say I can see how others would see it and be concerned it looked fake somehow but to me it looked right for a comic book movie. Plus just how they managed Hawkman's suit alone was really cool, IMO.
Bjorn, I agree for the most part on the catchphrase bit although I thought the last attempt (when he got it right) did land pretty well.
GMST, I see most of your points (I too wish they'd brought up Hawkman and reincarnation), but I believe the main reason why they didn't address a lot of these finer storytelling points is they wouldn't have had enough time for Skybeam, and we must never forget the importance and cruciality of Skybeam.
As for Dr Fate and the helmet/Nabu, I don't read a LOT of magic comic books but I did collect JLDark for a bit and I recall Dr Fate being at odds with Nabu a lot and thus not wanting to relinquish control. And Kent mentioned in the dialogue that he "becomes someone else" when he puts the helmet on with the connotation he didn't like that, so it made sense to me he was avoiding using the helmet when possible. The future of the DCU is always a big question mark these days, but I expect Geoff Johns would like to bring in one of the other Dr Fates in another movie and we'd explore more of Nabu and the helmet if and when that happens.
I heard the original story was that the Wizard threw Black Adam to the far side of the galaxy and he spent 5000 years flying back to Earth
Grey,
That's the updated post Flashpoint/Post Rebirth origin.
really...I hadn't realized it was that recent. Could be interesting potential in that, the guy would have met a lot of different races along the way home.
I thought the visuals were fine throughout. Most of the DC movies have a different, more stylized, CGI style than Marvel and a lot of other movies (Marvel has had plenty of janky effects). My only bother was that the first fight with BA was, I thought, one of the best examples of truly awesome superhero action ever, and the rest of the battles BA seemed to lose some of that edge. But being never really challenged seems about right considering who he was fighting.
really...I hadn't realized it was that recent. Could be interesting potential in that, the guy would have met a lot of different races along the way home.
No clue but apparently I misspoke about how recent since it's in his new origin comic. But that just came out...so I'm semi-right in saying post Flashpoint/Post Rebirth.
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Two more buddies of mine saw this in the last week, one of whom is a HUGE AAA comic movie studio skeptic who loves nothing more than to just hate and rant on about trivial nonsense, and both of them said it was alright and that they actually had fun watching it which honestly SHOCKED me because both of them actively disliked the last Batman movie which I thought was pretty great despite it dragging on a bit longer than needed.
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Just got back from seeing it with my boy. It was…..entertaining. Not the best superhero offering, but not the worst. Better than a lot of the more recent stuff.
The cast was pretty good to great. Pierce Brosnan was awesome as Dr. Fate. Dwayne Johnson was good as Black Adam. I wasn’t too keen on Atom Smasher being the comic relief. And I didn’t like the FX for Cyclone’s abilities. Loved Hawkman’s ship and costume. I kind of wish we’d have had more JSA members, but it’s probably best they didn’t.
The story was…..meh. Just enough to move things along, but not great. The kid was annoying as hell, and very dependent on plot armor. The chick had a good point when she was dressing down the JSA for not helping before.
Intergang - really?!? That’s it? I expected more. They kind of wasted the group.
Wow!
I mean... wow!
Can I even describe what this movie means to me? Well, I can try.
I always considered myself a bigger fan of DC Comics than of Marvel. For instance, my all-time favorite comic book is Justice Society of America, specifically its 1999-2006 run, which I first discovered around 17 years ago. I mentioned this before, like in this post, for instance. In that post, I mentioned that what first grabbed my attention about the series was a picture of Dr Fate on the cover of the first trade paperback. There's some kind of mystique about that helmet.
But - as I also mentioned in that post - I, being the cheapskate that I am, started by taking one trade paperback from that series out of the public library: the Black Reign volume. That was the only part of the series available in the library, so I assume it was the most popular part of the series. And boy, what a story! In it, Black Adam, having recruited several other supers, liberated Kahndaq. That ticked off Hawkman who led the JSA to attack Black Adam and his team. That story got me so thoroughly hooked that I gradually bought all 12 TPBs of that run, as well as many related books.
Like I said, I'm a bigger fan of DC than of Marvel... but 10 years or so ago, I was forced to admit that in the arena of movies, Marvel beat the snot out of DC. I wished DC could come out with a decent movie. I remember watching the first Doctor Strange movie four times, but mentioning to my son that I would much prefer a Doctor Fate movie. He laughed, ridiculing the idea that Dr Fate was anything like Dr Strange.
So during the ensuing years, I was thrilled when DC finally came out with some GOOD movies, such as Wonder Woman, Justice League (the Joss Whedon version), Aquaman, and, to a lesser extent, Shazam. I fantasized the existence of a major Justice Society movie, but of course, the average moviegoer wouldn't know the JSA, so that movie wouldn't sell, so no one would make such a movie. Such a thing could never, ever happen.
When I first heard of the Black Adam movie, I didn't feel interested, even though I liked Shazam. I'm not sure why, but despite my professed love for DC, I felt no desire to see Black Adam. Maybe it's because stories that focus on villains as the main characters usually don't work for me.
This month, I was looking in my local public library for other things and I happened to come across the Black Adam DVD. And there on the cover picture was the JSA... including Dr Fate! Whoa! I didn't know THEY were in the movie!
So I watched it. I finished it today. And...
Wow!
Black Adam liberated Kahndaq, and a ticked-off Hawkman led the JSA to attack Black Adam.
How perfect is that?!?
Sure, the movie had to imitate the Marvel Cinematic Universe now and then. So, for instance, Dr Fate had to have the spiel about "I'm viewing many alternate futures to find the best one", so as to capitalize on the success of Dr Strange (or his role in Infinity War, anyway). But I could live with that.
Some people say that one of the - many - reasons the Black Adam movie failed is that most moviegoers don't know the JSA. I agree; I think people unfamiliar with comic books generally wouldn't "get" the movie well enough to like it. That's why I didn't think such a movie would be made. But it was, and on a selfish level, I'm THRILLED that it was!
I plan to watch it again, within a week.