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Black Adam

all fictions

all fictions

I hate you! (it's not against the rules!)
Location
Mons Regius
Pronouns
He/Him
I think it started as a fancast? In which case, it is now real:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0tOpBuYasI
Video blurb said:
From New Line Cinema, Dwayne Johnson stars in the action adventure "Black Adam." The first-ever feature film to explore the story of the DC Super Hero comes to the big screen under the direction of Jaume Collet-Serra ("Jungle Cruise").

Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the ancient gods—and imprisoned just as quickly—Black Adam (Johnson) is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world.

Johnson stars alongside Aldis Hodge ("City on a Hill," "One Night in Miami") as Hawkman, Noah Centineo ("To All the Boys I've Loved Before") as Atom Smasher, Sarah Shahi ("Sex/Life," "Rush Hour 3") as Adrianna, Marwan Kenzari ("Murder on the Orient Express," "The Mummy") as Ishmael, Quintessa Swindell ("Voyagers," "Trinkets") as Cyclone, Bodhi Sabongui ("A Million Little Things") as Amon, and Pierce Brosnan (the "Mamma Mia!" and James Bond franchises) as Dr. Fate.
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The movie's story is pretty much an adaptation of the Black Reign storyline, hence the presence of the Justice Society of America.
 
I think this marks the third time The Rock will be in a film where he's harassed or threatened by a Khopesh.

 
It's so funny that basically the entire marketing campaign for the film is "What if the Rock…killed people???"
 
I think what DC managed to excel at is making super-powered characters feel like demi-gods capable of annihilating ordinary people near-effortlessly. MCU doesn't sell punches and tackles thrown at super-speed nearly as well.

This movie only confirms that for me.
 
I feel like there's a grand irony in how the Rock is playing this part when he's deep in the family friendly movie star phase in his career. He would have been natural for this role a couple decades ago when he was more often playing the heel. Now... I dunno, maybe he can bring the asshole magic back, maybe he can't. We'll have to see.
 
I mean he's not actually that deep. Yeah he's been in the Jumanji movies, but by and large for the past decade he's been largely an PG-13/R-Rated Action star with the occasional dip into decidedly not family comedies.
 
Reveen said:
I feel like there's a grand irony in how the Rock is playing this part when he's deep in the family friendly movie star phase in his career. He would have been natural for this role a couple decades ago when he was more often playing the heel. Now... I dunno, maybe he can bring the asshole magic back, maybe he can't. We'll have to see.
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Yeah that's what I mean, the entire pitch for the marketing seems to be "You've never seen the Rock like this!", but it still looks like a standard superhero stuff with "You can save the world...or destroy it!" dialogue right out of Morbius.
 
Saw it, and it was pretty bad, very 2016 Suicide Squad that wants to be edgy but also PG superhero with a sky beam finale.

Dwayne Johnson and Pierce Brosnan were the only ones who seemed to make an effort, everyone else was clearly phoning it in.
 
Just saw this movie, it's a hit of a mess but I thought it had some interesting things to say.

The first half especially stood out to me for how - between this movie and Suicide Squad - the thematic through line of the DCEU appears to be "Superheroes as Military Might". I don't think that was *deliberate* on the part of Warner Brothers (I think that it is more an accident of how their only successful properties have been Realpolitik) but I do think it's interesting.
 
Gul Damar said:
Saw it, and it was pretty bad, very 2016 Suicide Squad that wants to be edgy but also PG superhero with a sky beam finale.

Dwayne Johnson and Pierce Brosnan were the only ones who seemed to make an effort, everyone else was clearly phoning it in.
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This is grossly unfair.

Suicide Squad 2016 also had a sky beam finale. :V
 
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variety.com

Box Office: ‘Black Adam’ Debuts at No. 1 With $67 Million, ‘Ticket to Paradise’ Scores $16 Million

“Black Adam,” a superhero adventure starring Dwayne Johnson as a villain who promises to change the “hierarchy of power” in the DC universe, towered over box office charts w…
variety.com variety.com
... "Black Adam," heading into the weekend, was projected to open to $62 million while playing in 4,350 theaters, but ticket sales were stronger than anticipated on Saturday and Sunday, leading the studio to revise estimates.

Internationally, "Black Adam" kicked off with $73 million from 76 markets for a global tally of $140 million.

For a superhero origin story, the $67 million start for "Black Adam" isn't Earth-shattering, though it ranks in line with its fellow DC movie 2018's "Aquaman" ($67.8 million) and above 2019's "Shazam!" ($53.5 million), which each managed to stick around in theaters long enough to validate the hundreds of millions that Warner Bros. spent to produce those films. Compared to antiheroes outside the DC space though, "Black Adam" earned far less than 2018's "Venom," which also centered on a lesser-known comic book character and opened to $80 million despite terrible reviews.
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BossFight said:
Just saw this movie, it's a hit of a mess but I thought it had some interesting things to say.

The first half especially stood out to me for how - between this movie and Suicide Squad - the thematic through line of the DCEU appears to be "Superheroes as Military Might". I don't think that was *deliberate* on the part of Warner Brothers (I think that it is more an accident of how their only successful properties have been Realpolitik) but I do think it's interesting.
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I don't think Black Adam's thesis is fully coherent because it doesn't really want to commit to the implications of what it seems to be saying at times - which is that the "good guys," America in specific, can find it so easy to say they're "good guys" because they're the ones who get to draw the line on what is or isn't "evil" and people outside of the Designated Protagonists might not have that luxury, so they'll have to deal with what they can get - especially since we know the Justice Society were working with Amanda Waller, whose actions in The Suicide Squad were unambiguously going to lead to a lot more death than what Black Adam was doing, so there's that level of hypocrisy underlying their statements.

(Or maybe the idea was that Waller expected someone else to deal with the giant alien starfish? These sorts of cinematic universes are often not fully thematically coherent either, so maybe in Black Adam's version of The Suicide Squad, Waller's plan was to get the team out to remove any trace of the operation and let the Justice Society or Justice League or whatever take care of the problem?)
 
MJ12 Commando said:
I don't think Black Adam's thesis is fully coherent because it doesn't really want to commit to the implications of what it seems to be saying at times - which is that the "good guys," America in specific, can find it so easy to say they're "good guys" because they're the ones who get to draw the line on what is or isn't "evil" and people outside of the Designated Protagonists might not have that luxury, so they'll have to deal with what they can get - especially since we know the Justice Society were working with Amanda Waller, whose actions in The Suicide Squad were unambiguously going to lead to a lot more death than what Black Adam was doing, so there's that level of hypocrisy underlying their statements.

(Or maybe the idea was that Waller expected someone else to deal with the giant alien starfish? These sorts of cinematic universes are often not fully thematically coherent either, so maybe in Black Adam's version of The Suicide Squad, Waller's plan was to get the team out to remove any trace of the operation and let the Justice Society or Justice League or whatever take care of the problem?)
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Oh yeah, it's definitely not a thesis they fully embrace. Black Adam backs off pretty hard in the second half (pivoting into this weird authoritarian thing about how Black Adam is better then heroes because he's willing to do what needs to be done), and the whole movie is kinda thematically and logically inconsistent.

But I think this movie shoes that DCEU has chosen to embrace Waller as the glue that holds their movie universe together, and that means the shared theme across their movie like will deal with the idea of superheroes as weapons.

Do I think this will be done cleanly or intentionally? Honestly not, but I think it will be the lowest we get to a coherent throughline

Edit: I will fully cop to the fact that I am engaging with the movie based on what it almost was and still could be rather then like, what it actually was. But that's because I think there's a strong possibility that we might look back at this movie 10 years down the line and see it as sort of this meta-narative of Superheros as Weapons.

And also because that first half was so strong. Hawkmans line about being here to "defend global stability" is such a great choice of words because it sounds like a good thing but also explains why they are more interested in stopping Black Adam then helping Khandaq
 
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BossFight said:
And also because that first half was so strong. Hawkmans line about being here to "defend global stability" is such a great choice of words because it sounds like a good thing but also explains why they are more interested in stopping Black Adam then helping Khandaq
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It's also interesting because Intergang are apparently perfectly content to sit there and mine eternium for the money, which both explains why the Justice Society see them as less important than Black Adam - Black Adam is a very powerful unknown, Intergang from the movie alone (I'm sure there's probably some extended-universe stuff that makes them COBRA) seem to basically be a PMC attached to a magic spacerock company. I think it also plays into the "maybe things aren't as simple as good and evil" question as well, from the other end, and a more tightly written movie would notice this - Intergang just want to chill, they're a publicly traded company, sure they might do shitty things but they don't blow up cities or take people ransom, and they probably won't be doing it even after Black Adam gets locked away.

The rebuttal of this, of course, is that this basically values other people's lives over Khandaqi ones, but it'd be a coherent rebuttal for Hawkman to make about why they're not busting Intergang - Intergang may not be great, but they're a known quantity and by 'guys who interact with supernonsense' standards "we run a military dictatorship and mine magic space rocks" is like, small beans in terms of evil, and there are so many other threats to the world they need to deal with.
 
... huh. This thing managed to make Intergang, of all things, look like a lesser evil or something? Is this a different Intergang than "early destablizing force for Apokolips" or...?
 
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