Shazam! Strikes in Theaters


Would you prefer to have a flight or electricity superpower? Shazam makes an excellent retort to this: why not have both? Shazam is the new 2019 DC Comics superhero movie about a teenager (Asher Angel) who receives superpowers every time he says Shazam, while also gaining a 30-year-old’s-body(Zachary Levi). However, Shazam does contain scenes with unnecessarily unpleasant monsters, which can distract from important aspects or actions of the movie and characters. In fact, while I’ve never seen Alien, my mom tells me the monsters reminded her of Alien. The CGI in general was not necessary, and in a couple of spots it’s way behind what you’d expect from the technology available. Furthermore, I felt a lack of character development and story line. While DC always makes characters with intentional flaws to appeal to the humanity within us, there were numerous spots for character development and growth that would have made the whole movie much more enjoyable, not to mention improving the individual characters. It also felt as though they tried to cram in so much action that it ended up lacking so many things, like the character development. However, these issues aside, the movie was very funny, always having another punchline. One of many examples of this is that on the back of the foster mother’s car was a bumper sticker that said “I’m a foster mom, what’s your superpower?” These bits of humor did make the movie a much better experience. Movie companies are trying more and more to express diversity, and they are doing better on ethnicity and sexes being more even. However, one thing that never seems to occur to the action film community is to include a wider range of age diversity. And I think this was an excellent idea to express more diversity by using a child as a protagonist. Even if no one knew they wanted it, many teens will be cheering at their newfound representation. Earlier I beat up on the CGI, but while certain spots that were not up to par, other parts were exceptionally good, and did add to and enhance the experience. This may seem odd, but before the actual movie, during the opening screen page, they did exceptionally well on its animation. Also, the scenes with lightning were exceptionally good, with the lightning looking very convincing. All in all, it was a very funny movie, even if it didn’t get up to par on everything, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone squeamish or young/afraid of monsters.