The latest trailer for Shazam! Fury of the Gods has left the majority of the fandom utterly unimpressed, with many expressing concern that it might suffer the same fate as many DCEU movies before it.
Perhaps it’s Black Adam casting an underwhelming shadow on the sequel’s prospects, or the overall ambivalence ruling the DCU amid this period of transition. But maybe cinemagoers have finally grown sick of sitting through the same superhero narrative with its tired tropes, because Fury of the Gods seems to be a film that unabashedly rehashes them all.
Frequently-voiced concerns that the superhero genre is overtaking the blockbuster scene or other, more “artistic” endeavors aren’t too hard to shrug off. One could even argue that issues that industry veterans like Martin Scorsese bring up just mask their inability to find a subject that the contemporary generation finds relatable.
After all, the prominent player in this sphere, Marvel Studios, still releases a maximum of just three movies in a year, and even considering the new Disney Plus television shows, that number barely moves above five projects. That’s fewer than two products every two months, so to ascribe all the recent criticism leveled against Phase Four to the strange notion that we’re experiencing “superhero fatigue” is a little far-fetched, just as it is absurd to suggest that people don’t watch anything besides these “theme park” ventures because they’ve overtaken everything else.
DC Films is even less productive than Marvel, having no coherent plan of action in motion to churn out these flicks at a steady pace. Yet, when it comes to Shazam! Fury of the Gods, we’re getting that same feeling of weariness toward superhero flicks that many recent MCU projects have had to contend with. As strange as you may find it, though, you needn’t look any further than the movie’s latest trailer to give you every reason why.
Formulaic scripts, bullet point narratives, and meaningless CGI battles
Movies have to set up a world, introduce its characters, make audiences give a fig about these characters, advance the plot, and somehow wrap everything up in two hours. That’s just too many elements for any one filmmaker to get right, so as a general rule of thumb, you can get away with almost everything on that list if you manage to make viewers care about the characters.
Look at every successful and acclaimed superhero movie from the last decade, and you’ll realize that they’re all following the same narrative structure. The superhero is introduced, they face a challenge, they’re almost beaten for one generic psychological reason or another, they win that eternal struggle, they defeat the villain. So, why is it that Justice League failed, while Avengers: Endgame ruled as the (then-)highest-grossing movie of all time?
With Avengers, Marvel Studios spent almost a decade building up to a single climax, which then plays out in the course of the five-hour Infinity War and Endgame spectacle. You go into those films already caring about each and every character, so the stakes are set. A sequel like Shazam! Fury of the Gods follows a movie that escaped obscurity by the skin of its teeth by completely leaning on quirkiness, so there’s not much of world-building — or characterization, for that matter — to rely on.
Audiences don’t really care about Billy Batson, because the writers have taken the character’s one tragic aspect, and use it as fodder for endless comic relief moments and cram in as many puns as possible. So, if you refrain from caring about Fury of the Gods because it’s just going to rehash all the superhero genre tropes, and you don’t care about the characters either, what exactly does David F. Sandberg’s sequel have going for itself as the means of a last-moment redemption?
Well, according to the trailer, you can look forward to large-scale CGI battles. You know the type; a superhero and a supervillain engage in a punching contest that sends them hurtling through an urban area, destroying everything in their path. First one character lands a hit, and then he takes one in return, and that goes on for about five to ten minutes until the superhero somehow gets the upper hand. The extent of their powers is ambiguous, their endurance unclear, and until a close-up shot gives you a read on the protagonist’s facial expressions, you will have no idea who’s winning this match.
What makes this even less palatable is a recent trend (e.g. Shang-Chi, Eternals) to pit these superheroes against giant CG monsters. At least with another supervillain, the fight can enjoy a fair bit of intimacy because it’s actually one person going to town on another. With a monster, like the ones we see in Fury of the Gods, that suspense is undermined because it turns into the very embodiment of “all spectacle and no heart.”
These pitfalls aren’t exclusive to Shazam! because a lot of other superhero projects are suffering from the same issues. People aren’t experiencing genre fatigue, per se, but they’ve caught up with the narrative by now and want something a little more novel, something that at least tries to be different. Shazam! Fury of the Gods not only fails to incorporate a new spin on these stunted tropes, but actually delights in doing exactly everything like we’ve seen it a hundred times before.
The marketing machine hype behind possible appearances by other DCU stars could give this sequel a fighting chance at the box office, but if it’s anticipation Warner Bros. is counting on, the company is going to be sorely disappointed when Fury of the Gods makes its way to theaters on March 17. Because if anything, the latest trailer has managed to highlight exactly what’s wrong with Shazam! 2 and many other superhero flicks in recent memory.