(Season 8 Premiere)
I went into 2024 weary about the state of movies, not because the output of creative, challenging, original work was being far outstripped by sequels, rehashes, and assembly-line produced franchise films, but that we’re now in a state where the incentive to make such original work has been removed as well. With streaming services squeezing studios to make event films with bigger budgets, less risk is going to be taken. With studio producers making money off of company stock prices financially propped up by banks following ESG scores, the audience voting with their wallet on what they want to see means less and less than the political message attached to the film. Equally obnoxious is an internet critic culture that thrives on hate-watching, pushing their own narratives and can never remember the names of the actors in the movie they just saw. Where a movie is judged as a sum total of a number of plot holes or realistic character decisions and sunk by a single meme-able line of dialog. We’re now a decade removed from the building of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with an entire generation viewing filmmaking through the prism of Marvel and Star Wars. It’s a world I couldn’t care less about – not to mention the hideous redesign of this very website. BUT – what it isn’t is the end of movies or the end of theaters and indie talent springs up outside of the studio system every year. It’s a dry spell of generational creative bankruptcy we’ll just have to muddle through it for a while. We still have Ari Aster, Bong-Joon Ho and Art the Clown after all.
Blue Beetle | 2023 | PG-13 | starring Xolo Mariduena, Bruna Marquezine, George Lopez, Harvey Guillen, Susan Surandon | directed by Angel Miguel Soto | 2h 7m | 2 out of 5 stars |
The last movie I expected to have anything to say about, much less kick off this year, was Blue Beetle, a totally forgettable, overlong superhero film that is either the last gasp of the original DC Universe or the first of James Gunn’s new rebooted universe. But by George if this isn’t an interesting case study of how these movies are put together now and how Blue Beetle itself short circuits the traditional hero’s journey.
The story involves a piece of alien technology in the shape of a scarab that latches onto the body of young just-out-off-college-ready-for-his-first-job Jamie Reyes (Xolo Mariduena) and fights off the – you guessed it – evil corporation that wants it while trying to save his close, wacky extended family in a DC Universe near-future Palmera City. First thing’s first. If you’re here for the DC representation of it’s first hispanic hero, you’ll be shocked to hear the movie paints it’s hispanic characters with as broad and stereotypical as possible. George Lopez plays the wacky, conspiracy-theorist uncle, and he has a loved car just called The Taco. This isn’t exactly a Pixar movie that lovingly details the cultural traditions of its characters. For that, you’d have to go to Coco, Luna or Disney’s Encanto. This is just box-checking hispandering.
To plug in the rest of the formula, you’ve got the veteran actor in the corporate villain role, this time Susan Surandon as the vicious head of Kord Industries, the company Jamie is looking to get a job with and that naturally wants the scarab as a weapon. For the most part the film puts together the pieces of a superhero origin story as if by someone who only remembers Iron Man as the story of a guy who gets a super suit. It takes that story and pulls out Tony Stark’s motivations, character journey and all the growth that came with that to get to the action faster. What’s interesting about Blue Beetle is that the shortcut here is baked into the premise in a way that makes nothing matter.
In Blue Beetle the suit isn’t just a powerful exoskeleton used to fly around and fight crime, it’s an entirely sentient AI fighting machine that simply hi-jacks the body of the wearer and pilots him around. It makes Jamie as a character completely irrelevant to all of the action and it allows the movie to have its wise-cracking goofball lead (the “regular guy” that Marvel built) and its shoot-outs and fight scenes too. In any other superhero story like this, from Iron Man to Spider-Man to Shang-Chi, our hero’s ability to use the technology comes as a result of his character growth. He matures, he understands the consequences of his actions, the impact of violence and respects the power he now has. He becomes more of an adult. Yes, we’ve all seen The Training Montage a thousand times and any movie that can creatively circumvent that will get my highest tip of the hat, but Blue Beetle simply deletes it from the movie along with the attached character arc that goes with it. What’s gone is the work put into doing something hard and then gaining the strength to eventually succeed at it. It’s a short-cut, macro, completely hollow experience.
Length is an issue with the movie running over 2 hours, but tone is also an issue. The movie goes from wacky family antics one minute to the overly torturous body horror of Jamie being turned into the Beetle the next. It’s as if director Angel Miguel Soto thinks he’s tasked with making a CGI An American Werewolf in London, having the scarab burrow through the body of our hero and whip him around the room while he screams in agony. Then have the family joke about how gross it looks.
Again, I’m all for a movie coming up with a clever, innovative way to skip past the tiresome trope of the training montage (put to bed by Team America: World Police) but with the training comes learning and growth and a satisfying character arc and if we aren’t going to have that we need something better. In its desire to leap to the next big action scene, Blue Beetle doesn’t replace it with anything. The movie’s approach to its hero represents something even more Gen Z and on-brand for 2023: the emasculated hero. Our current crop of action heroes are far from the Schwarzeneggers, Stallones and Lundgrens of the 80s and 90s. They are immature, socially awkward, geeks who talk their way past authority and luck their way through fights. Everything is ironic and nothing is sincere or serious. They don’t need to learn lessons because they are already awesome. The Scarab in Blue Beetle is a perfect plot device to allow the movie to have it both ways, to have that goofy hero and keep him that way until the end.