Ramble Review: Shazam

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Possibly unnecessarily long preamble

So, more than a decade ago when I was an active member of DeviantArt, I regularly wrote movie reviews. If you haven't noticed in the times I've talked about movies on this blog, I really like talking about movies, often at great length, often in minute detail, and movie reviews is a decent way to do that in a format that is recognisable and easily accessible to an audience and easy to keep focused for a writer, and focus is important because even when I am focused on a particular point I... ramble. I'm doing it right now. But, you know, I own that. That's how I do.

And right now I'm inclined to talk (or ramble) about movies again. That's where my head space is. As far as media goes, Cinema was my first love. I have always watched movies and I have always loved movies and I have always sat and picked apart why I love those movies and when I've done that, I enjoy talking to other film nerds about it and hoping that they saw something I didn't, that they picked up on details I missed. It's a great pleasure. So, for at least a couple of blogs, we're going to talk about movies and I'm going to write some reviews so that my rambling is somewhat focused and somewhat accessible.

And if you're along for the ride, great, let me sat a couple of other things up front: No numeric scores. I don't believe numeric scores at all helpful in conveying a complex opinion or distilling a core argument.  No standard length, no standard structure. I'm calling these ramble reviews because I'm not going to impose a lot of limits on how long I talk about a movie or how I go about talking about it. I don't do that anywhere else in my blog, why start now. If I don't mention an aspect of a film, assume it is at least adequate but not remarkable. I can't talk about every working part of a movie and often every working part doesn't need addressing. If I don't say it's good or bad, it's probably fine. Movies can be judged on objective metrics but conclusions are always subjective. At least, there is a commonly accepted canon of film criticism that is functionally objective, but how anybody weights those metrics is up to them. I give a lot of credit to movies for depth of theme and strong subtext and will often overlook more generic structure or plot in a script. I think these are more important in distinguishing a film, but you may disagree. That's fine. Quality is not the same as enjoyment, and it's okay to love bad movies. I firmly believe that the most important thing a film can be is enjoyable and the worst crime of a movie is being boring. 'Hawk The Slayer' is an objectively bad film but it is supremely enjoyable. There's no shame or contradiction in that statement. Difference from source material does not make a film bad. Since I'll probably end up talking a lot about films that are adaptations of other media - because even if I didn't spend a lot of time watching comic super hero films, a big chunk of all films are adaptations - let's be clear: "it's different to the thing" is not a valid criticism. It might be true, but it does not inherently make the adaptation good or bad. In a similar vein, the source material cannot fix an adaptation by filling in blanks or explaining away problems. If it's important, it should be in the adaptation.

Okay, enough rambling about rambling, let's talk movie. I'm starting with the most recent film I saw at the cinema. I actually saw it 3 times, so, you know, spoiler alert, I liked it.

Shazam! (2019)

Shazam! is a superhero action-comedy film directed by David Sandberg, released by Warner Bros. Pictures, and based on the character of Captain Marvel created by C.C. Beck and Bill Parker in 1939 for Fawcett Comics. At one point, the character was the most popular super hero comic in publication and then for complicated historical and legal reasons, he disappeared from print, the rights were eventually bought by DC Comics, but DC couldn't print comics with the name Captain Marvel, so they leaned heavily on the Shazam brand and in 2012 the character was re-imagined as part of DC Comics' company wide comics relaunch and the Captain Marvel name was basically abandoned in favour of Shazam as the character's name, but I'm a grumpy old man stuck in his ways and still like calling him Captain Marvel, so I may use them interchangeably in this review and the film only kind of suggests that the character is named Shazam, anyway. It'd kind of a running joke. This film takes most of its characterisation and plot from the 2012 re-imagined origin story of the character.

This is what Captain Marvel thinks of complicated legal histories!

Shazam! stars Asher Angel as Billy Batson, an orphan who has run away from his latest foster home in search of his birth mother who he believes is out there somewhere waiting for him to come home. He's adopted by a new family made up entirely of fostered children, but before he can run away again, he's chosen by the wizard Shazam to become his champion and protect the world from evil demonic entities known as the Seven Deadly Sins, which are possessing and empowering a man named Dr Sivanna (Mark Strong). The power Shazam gives Billy is the power to transform into an adult super hero (played by Zachary Levi) and with this new power and responsibility thrust upon him, Billy turns to his super hero obsessed foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), to help him navigate and discover his new powers.

Billy and Freddy doing what any child would do with new powers: goof around with them.

The two bond over the process of testing Billy's powers and form a friendship both of them were sorely lacking, but the fun and games are interrupted when Dr Sivanna tracks Billy down and demands he hand over the powers of Shazam. At first Dr Sivanna is able to best Billy by being cruel, ruthless, arguably more powerful, and, unlike Billy, being driven by more than self-indulgence and the desire for super powered shenanigans. But Billy is able to turn things around after finding a reason to fight in his new family, and eventually conquers Dr Sivanna. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that a super hero film concludes with a good guy and a bad guy have a big fight and the good guy wins and also learns an important moral lesson about friends and family. If you consider that a twist or a secret, I can only assume you've never watched a super hero or children's cartoon ever.

But things are going to get more spoilerific from here on out so reader beware.

Super hero films are always pretty tightly constrained by the expectations and demands of their genre and they live or die on the details, in how they do the same thing different to how everyone else does the same thing and Shazam! is no exception. 

One of the biggest ways it differs is in how it challenges, even subverts, the superhero mythology of a lone powerful individual saving the world. Superheroes have always been, at their core, a Nietzchean/Randian power fantasy about exceptional individuals who treat what makes them special as a means to become masters unto themselves, unconstrained by social, cultural, or legal expectations. Super heroes are above the law, above social norms, above day-to-day problems because they're so damned impressive and so aware of their specialness that they don't need to be beholden to the things weaker people like you and me are. But Billy doesn't just learn that family is important and that's why he needs to be a better, stronger hero, Billy discovers that he literally needs his family to defeat Dr Sivanna and that one champion isn't enough. The moral lesson at the end of Billy Batson's arc isn't just empowering for him, it is a power in itself. Without getting into the details, the climax of Shazam! is not only exciting, satisfying and spectacular, it sets it apart from basically everything else in the genre and it perfectly ties together the threads of the main plot with Billy's character arc into one conclusion.

If I can take a moment to talk to the bigger picture of DC's cinematic universe and its rocky, uneven history, Shazam! is the film that feels like Warner Bros. is finally finding their groove and figuring out what they want to do that is different from the competition without being so caught up in being different that quality is sacrificed. It gives us all hope that more people than Patty Jenkins know what they're doing. It's not that Marvel has never been about family or the need for more than a single hero. That's obviously not true. Guardians of The Galaxy couldn't be more explicitly about family if it tried, and the whole franchise has been riding hard on similar ideas of friendship, family, and camaraderie since the first Avengers film, but none of them have gone to lengths like Shazam to make it a core part of any character in a way that, as I said, challenges an idea at the core of the modern superhero as we understand them.

"Your franchise is recharged."

Not only that, but Shazam! is a dark film. Not in the edgy, everybody is constantly brooding and frowning, Superman kills people and Batman uses guns way that DC's previous film efforts have been childishly masquerading as dark, but dark in the sense that some scenes from Shazam! would be at home in a horror movie. Dark in the same way that Wonder Woman presented the blood and mud soaked horrors of war to establish a world that is dark, mean, and slightly cynical. That's the kind of dark that defines much of Shazam!'s world building and more serious moments. In fact, the world feels entirely tonally consistent with the world of Wonder Woman.

And that makes sense. Shazam! exists in the world of a sad and angry child with serious abandonment issues. 

Side-tracking (side-rambling) again for a second: it's no surprise that Shazam is a popular character. The idea of a child who says a magic word and becomes a fully grown super hero is a power fantasy that sells itself and is loaded with potential for interesting stories no matter how you want to spin it. But on another level, the character also works (especially in Shazam! and the 2012 comic that is its basis) as a metaphor for crossing from adolescence into adulthood and how frightening and challenging that is. Shazam! the film understands both those aspects of the character and uses them.

Anyway, back on being dark, it's not a stretch to say that the true villains of the film - the Seven Deadly Sins - are in every way a child's understanding of evil. You could change the story to being Shazam about fighting monsters under his bed or in his closet and you wouldn't need to redesign them at all. Not only that, but basically every adult in the film is awful. They're abusive, neglectful, suspicious of children, or patronising towards them, or cowards. And honestly, the children aren't much better. 

"I know I've got super powers, but I'll hide behind you!"

You quickly get the sense that even though the family that adopts Billy and adopted Freddy and all their other siblings are wonderful people, and the parents are really the only likeable adult characters, Freddy still feels alone in the world in spite of them, and meeting Billy is the best thing to happen to him with or without super powers. Freddy's day to day life includes being bullied by the local archetypal bullies, and ignored or scorned by almost every one of his peers, and all of that is routine. And whether or not these tropes read as true to life, they read as true to the exaggerated hyper-emotional life experience of children and teenagers. And Billy himself, hero of the film, is acknowledged as being kind of a jerk for most of the movie. A sympathetic jerk that you can like despite his flaws, but still a jerk.

So it's a cynical movie full of horrific moments and awful people. And this bleak tone is aided by the use of a lot of run down, decript, abandoned filming locations that are used for the scenes when things are at their best for the characters. The happiest moments are set against a backdrop of intense urban decay. Even Billy and Freddy's home is a cluttered, ageing, working class home that looks like it's barely holding together. Then the climax of the film - when events have reached their dramatic high point and life is at its absolute worst for Billy and his Family - takes place at a Christmas carnival, what should be a place of excitement and joy. If they could have somehow set the scene at Disneyland and undercut both the happiest time of the year and the happiest place on earth, I'm sure they would have.

In short, this world sucks for kids, and suddenly being an adult, at least in appearance, doesn't solve anything for Billy. He can choose to avoid all his childhood problems and at first finds liberation in ditching his school and his peers and his family, but those problems are replaced with new dilemmas of super powered adulthood and having nobody but himself to blame for and deal with the consequences of his actions. There's no easy solution for Billy and - as one character states very early on in the film, establishing a core theme - he can't take care of himself. Not even when he's physically invulnerable.

And all of this - this awful world where it sucks being a child and even the symbols of joy an innocence are victim to it - extends to Dr Sivanna's story. Despite being an actual adult when he steals the power of the Seven Deadly Sins, the character is portrayed as somebody who never truly grew up. The opening scenes of the film show us how Dr Sivanna came to be driven by an obsession with power, and by hate and anger at those around him, and eventually jealousy of Billy's powers. The defining moment of his life happens when he is a child and in the 40 years between that scene and the time the film takes place, Dr Sivanna has never moved on from that childhood moment. Age and super powers have not liberated him from his childhood troubles any more than they have for Billy Batson. Both Mark Strong and Zachary Levi do superb jobs playing up their characters as feeling emotions in the raw, heightened, and uncontrollable way that children feel emotions. Their actions and expressions are over stated, yeah, but that's the point. They're both big children throwing tantrums for one reason or another.

You're just a frightened and angry kid in a man's body like me!

And despite all this, the film is never dreary or overly sombre. Rather the film is ultimately hopeful and sincere in its statement that what Billy needed all along was to move on from his grief and not just accept, but actively invite other people into his life. It's an emotional arc that is triumphant against a world that is grim and terrifying.

The film is also hilarious. Comedy is always hard to judge because it's so personal and subjective, but for me, when the film was revelling in its lighter and comic moments (which is most of the time Shazam is on screen) I couldn't stop laughing. And what's most impressive about this is that the film moves easily from horror movie to comedy to super hero action and never feels tonally confused. Each shift has enough well paced build up to their tonal heights that it reads as entirely natural and consistent with the rest of the film.

To make one more Wonder Woman comparison, while Wonder Woman was a film about soldiers in a world that is terrible for soldiers, but where you can still find hope and light in the most hopeless and darkest places, Shazam! is about children in a world that is terrible for children, but where you can still find warmth and joy in the most cold and joyless places. 

In its own way, Shazam! is both a great example of the genre and a film that is deliberately subversive of the modern super hero blockbuster and it knows it. Not in the sense that it's trying to be a Watchmen style deconstruction, because it's not that in in way, shape, or form. The subversive elements are mostly done to further heighten and highlight the themes, tone, and world of the film. But it also strikes me that the film makers were aware of the omnipresent shadow of Marvel's dominance in this genre and they went to lengths to separate Shazam! from the Marvel Cinematic Universe in as many ways as they could. This is through challenging (and subverting) the superhero myth, as I said above, the choice of villains - they're probably the most horrific and inhuman villains we've seen in a super hero film since Blade -  through highlighting the world as noticeably dark and unfriendly, and through playing with and undermining tropes of the genre. The film has a strong metatextual awareness of where it exists and where it wants to exist in relation to both the rest of the DC film universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And so finally, the DC film universe is having its cake and eating it too. It has established a superhero world that is darker and more mature than the majority of the MCU, that has its own style and tone and sensibilities, but is no less fun because of it.

So while we can say it's true that the story is nothing all that new and the themes aren't exactly unique for this genre, the script is outstanding and the delivery is equally outstanding; rich with layered subtext, thematic depth, and world building that rewards observation for anybody new to the character and the story as much as it does those who are already familiar with it. There are Easter eggs and references that comic fans will get, but there's also just excellent film making and subtlety that anybody can appreciate.

Of course none of this world work as well if it wasn't carried by some practically flawless performances. Mark Strong's Dr Sivanna stands out in particular to me. He has shades of his similarly larger-than-life comic-book-esque villain in 'Sherlock Holmes', but stripped of all that Victorian sophistication and restraint. As mentioned, the character is essentially a giant child throwing a tantrum for the whole film, and Mark Strong plays it with a low boil constant intensity that is even more frightening than the Seven Deadly Sins he's carrying around. It's like he's a man who has already been pushed over the edge and snapped, but at any second he could snap more. 

Zachary Levi can barely contain the joy he's having being Shazam and that carries to his character, a 14 year old who can barely contain his joy at suddenly being grown up and super powered and revelling in it. 

Jack Dylan Grazer probably had the easiest job playing Freddy, because all he had to do is act like he was super excited to be in a super hero film and I'd be surprised if Grazer wasn't already feeling that every moment of the shoot. But I don't mean disrespect to him by saying it was an easy role, rather I want to highlight that it's particularly impressive then in the dramatic scenes where he has to be decidedly unhappy about being in a super hero film and he carries it without a problem. Also, as he demonstrated in 2017's 'IT', the guy has phenomenal comic timing.

Asher Angel does a fantastic job walking the line between the brooding loner and a kid who is consumed with sadness for how his life has turned out and trying to make it better in the only way he sees how. It's not the sadness, regret, or even frustration that drives Billy but clutching to hope that he can make it better, and that makes all the difference, and so when he goes from sulking to revelling, when he somehow weathers the biggest hurt that any child could suffer, it's entirely consistent with the characters in how Billy is written and how Angel portrays him.

They are all joined by a wide cast of supporting characters who are worthy of praise both for how they're written and portrayed as immediately distinct so when, near the end, when they become all but unrecognisable, they're no less identifiable. But I do have to end this blog eventually and can't go through and praise each one individually, much as I think they might deserve it.

What I'm saying is Shazam isn't the only strong cast member

Where the film is at its weakest is its visual style, primarily in that it doesn't really have one. For better or worse, the DC film universe up until now have looked entirely distinct and vivid in one way or another, and Shazam! is the odd one out. It doesn't look bad, there's just not a lot about the colour or framing of any part of the film that stands out. This also extends to and is probably no more noticeable than in the design of the Seven Deadly Sins which could have used a bit more distinction between them.

Does it need to be visually stylistic and distinct? Absolutely not. The film does more than enough well that it can be excusably tame in this area, but I guess I'd come to expect something more by this point. But even in Wonder Woman, a lot of that visual style had Snyder's name written all over it and now he has departed, I suspect the style will continue to be downplayed. And it's not like no thought has been given to it or that visuals don't match or don't reinforce the tone and themes of the film, so they haven't done anything wrong, and I'll gladly trade Snyder's visual aesthetic for the rest of the film being as high quality as it is, but I'll still remember that style fondly.

And maybe it's not gone forever. James Wan, director of Aquaman, similarly infused that film with a distinct style, but it was definitely Wan's style and not Snyder's style, so hopefully the future DC Comics films will see more reliably competent auteur filmmakers lend their aesthetic vision to the franchise.

Getting back to Shazam! there's also a few moments when I wish the drama had more time to breathe and develop, rather than keep moving with the rapid pace of the film (and despite its run time of 2 hours, the film is always moving quickly) but again that doesn't do much to harm the film because the actors are good enough and the script is good enough to use all that time efficiently. Basically, at this point, I'm nit picking because it's a review and I feel the need to at least try and be fair and holistic in my commentary and point out that it's not perfect.

But it doesn't need to be perfect. No movie is perfect. But some movies are great, and Shazam! is one of them.

It's not great for a super hero movie, it's not great fun but a just okay as a piece of cinema art, there's no qualifiers here. Shazam! is an objectively great film. It's the kind of film that proves what a joke the Oscars are for turning their nose up at action block busters every year.

It's just a great movie.

And has dethroned Die Hard as my favourite Christmas movie. Don't @ me.

Captain Marvel and Freddy enjoy a customary "Better Than Die Hard" Victory Drink