The Four Color Media Monitor

Vanity Fair's written a puff piece all about the upcoming Black Adam movie and its pretentious, overrated star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Much like in an earlier interview Johnson gave, he boasts about the violent content coming up in the screenplay. And it gets off to, umm, an awfully rocky start when they reveal:

You can tell Dwayne Johnson has absorbed some personality traits from his Black Adam character by the way he’s already starting to trash-talk Superman. Black Adam is the nemesis of Shazam in comics lore, but Johnson seems to enjoy picking fights with those who loom even larger. “When you pull Black Adam out of the pantheon of superheroes in the DC Universe, he is blessed with these incredible superpowers from the gods that rival Superman,” the actor says. “The difference is, well, a few things. Number one, Superman’s greatest weakness is magic, and one of Black Adam’s greatest superpowers is magic.”

And one of Johnson's greatest PR weaknesses is belittling the Man of Steel. It gets worse, however, with his description of Black Adam himself, and the mayhem he wallows into:

Black Adam can fly, bullets bounce off his skin, and explosions would merely muss his hair (if he had any). He can rip through stone walls and bend steel. Instead of shooting heat rays from his eyes, he channels lightning blasts from his fists. But unlike Superman, he doesn’t have any soft spots like mercy, empathy, or compassion.

“Superman won’t kill anybody. There’s a code that he lives by and he honors,” Johnson says. “Black Adam has a unique code of ethics too. He will not hesitate—and I like to have a little fun when I’m explaining this—to rip somebody in half.” Does that mean the actor is…kidding? “Literally, he’ll grab someone by the neck and by the thigh and then rip them up, tear them apart,” Johnson clarifies.

And he doesn't think that's the least bit disgusting, huh? Once again, the same guy who's part of the Hollywood crowd favoring gun control has no qualms about celebrating and romanticizing physical violence, in most classically hypocritical fashion.

That’s why Black Adam falls more into the category of supervillain than superhero—and why the October 21 movie is a heel-turn for Johnson, who built his global superstardom playing fundamentally decent men who are bulldozer tough but also have a moral core that’s solid as, let’s say, a rock. After starring as good guy after good guy in blockbuster after blockbuster, Johnson says it’s time for fans to see him in a new light. Or maybe light is the wrong word.

No kidding. Maybe moviegoers already have, if you consider how overrated he is to begin with. What talent does he really have in acting? His work has to be taken with a grain of salt, that's for sure.

It’s okay to have zero idea who Black Adam is. Few outside the hard-core geek sphere do, although the character has been causing havoc in the pages of comic books since 1945. “I did think about that a lot because I didn’t know about Black Adam either,” says Jaume Collet-Serra, the director of the movie. Johnson and producers Hiram Garcia and Beau Flynn first pitched him the project while they were making Jungle Cruise in 2018.

Collet-Serra says he was interested in leaning into the character’s obscurity, making the movie more of a mystery than a recitation of a familiar origin story. “It’s not your typical superhero movie where a guy wants to be a superhero and gets the powers, and then you spend 50 minutes trying to figure out how the powers work,” the filmmaker says. “This is a movie where you introduce Black Adam right away, and then throughout the movie you slowly peel back the onion and reveal what happened.”

Despite the part about obscurity, they still muddle things up. IIRC, the character only made one appearance during the Golden Age, and it wasn't until the mid-90s Black Adam was reintroduced in the Shazam series of the times, which Jerry Ordway worked on. In any event, the way these filmmakers don't know much about history is laughable.

The stand-alone movie will undoubtedly make Black Adam go mainstream. But for now the filmmaker, producers, and Johnson himself have some work to do, introducing him to the unfamiliar. There’s a voracious appetite for superhero stories—but in an era of reboots of reboots and multiverses uniting three actors who all played the same part once upon a time, audiences have come to believe that most of the great characters have already had at least one moment onscreen. That’s not the case with Black Adam. “I always get asked, nine times out of 10, ‘Well, what’s taken them so long? How come we haven’t heard of this character?’” says Johnson, who sees that as a plus. “We get a chance to deliver a movie, deliver a character, that’s never been seen before. There has been no other Black Adam.”

Obviously, VF's writers don't want anybody to know the superhero craze is waning due to wokeness, which this movie may not be immune to either; let's consider just how violent it apparently is, yet despite that, they'll give a PG-13 rating?!? Maybe this'll let people know what's wrong with 2022's The Batman to boot, seeing how that too builds on grisly material.

The film introduces moviegoers to the Justice Society of America—which is separate from the similar-sounding (and now more widely known) Justice League. The JSA started uniting heroes about two decades before and features the likes of Dr. Fate and Hawkman, who turn up in Black Adam, played by Pierce Brosnan and Aldis Hodge. In the comics, Hawkman flies with wings forged from extraterrestrial metal. He also dates back to ancient Egyptian times, reincarnating ceaselessly over the centuries while passing on the mantle of the flying hero. In the present day, he is leader of the JSA and leads the others in standing up to Black Adam’s aggression. Collet-Serra notes that some DC writers have forged a connection between the two over the years that dates back several millennia. But the movie isn’t going to get tangled up with that. “In the comics, there are clear references of like, ‘Hey, I saw you 5,000 years ago. You remember me?’ We’re not doing that,” the filmmaker says. “It would be too confusing. Obviously, Hawkman reincarnates, so how many times do you need to reincarnate and still remember? All these rules [are something] you don’t want to set until those characters are really established.”

Here, they seem to be building their lecture on what Geoff Johns, David Goyer and James Robinson set up at the turn of the century: while Carter Hall may have been a reincarnation of an Egyptian prince in his original Golden Age beginnings (and Shiera Sanders too), it wasn't until the early 2000s when an overrated solo book was in publication during 2002-07 that they began to put such a big emphasis on Carter and Shiera having far more than just previous lives as Egyptian monarchs. By the way, wasn't it also special belts made with 9th Metal that enabled flight for Hawkman & Hawkgirl?

There is one bit of good news here, hopefully:

Quintessa Swindell’s Cyclone hails from a family of heroes and now has to live up to that legacy, overshadowed by a grandmother who was known as Red Tornado. “It's always fun when you introduce characters in a team that have never really seen combat before, so the audience gets to experience it through those fresh eyes,” Collet-Serra says. “And the same with Atom Smasher, even though Atom Smasher is a bit more experienced. They’re close in age, and together they have a bond: We are the new ones here, let’s not screw it up.”

Well if this means they're not following earlier rumors about casting a transgender character in the role, that's lucky. Unfortunately, Hawkman appears to have been changed from white to black, so the diversity checkbox MO has still prevailed. And above all that, the violent themes are, quite simply, discouraging.

It's admittedly amazing Johnson and VF know - and are willing to state in their interview - that past Superman lore's depicted him with a weakness to magic (though they may have forgotten Kryptonite radiation). But their celebrating the potentially graphic violence in the movie ruins everything, and only makes this whole affair all the more something to avoid.

Labels: dc comics, golden calf of death, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, history, Justice Society of America, msm propaganda, Superman, violence