SHAZAM! Movie Reactions and SPOILER thread!

[Comic-Reader Lad]

Since this is day 1 of the official release of Shazam!, I wanted to create a new thread where those of us who saw the movie can discuss it openly without spoiler tags and those who haven't seen it can avoid this thread until they have.

In general, I liked Shazam! a lot. For me, DCEU is 4 out of 4 for great solo movies. Man of Steel, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam have all been solid and have each had a different directorial vision that the director had been able to execute without studio interference.

The 3 team up movies each had varying degrees of studio bigwigs sticking their nose into things and each was less well received to say the least. Go figure.

Anyway, I had no idea that John Glover was in this movie -- once again playing a douchebag dad in charge of a large corporation. Great to see him again. He's 74 now and still holding up well.

I liked all the kids and their foster parents. The family aspect of the movie has gotten a lot of press, and it was nice to see these people from diverse backgrounds getting along and being supportive of each other. A lot of times in movies where a new kid enters the house, he's treated as an outsider and spends the movie being morose and feeling unwanted until something happens at the end to make him be accepted. I'm glad they didn't go down that tired route and made the story arc about Billy accepting the fact that he could trust that he found a place where he is cared for and loved.

However, now that all the characters have been set up and introduced and Billy has accepted his heroic destiny, we need to have more family/character stuff in the sequels. In spite of all the praise the family got and how it reminded critics of Spielberg, I think they could have tugged at the heartstrings even more than they did.

I liked Mark Strong as Doctor Sivana, and I liked that they had him powered up by the Seven Deadly Sins. This made him more of a physical threat to Captain Marvel instead of just being a Lex Luthor clone.

It was interesting to see Mr. Mind with a connection to the Rock of Eternity and am curious to see him in the sequel.

I'm glad Black Adam wasn't in the first movie so they didn't blow their whole load like Aquaman may have. I believe the plan is to give The Rock his own Black Adam movie and then cross him over with Captain Marvel in a Shazam sequel. Maybe the 2nd sequel could be Dr. Sivana and Mr. Mind teaming up and causing something to happen that frees Black Adam from his imprisonment in an end-credits scene. Black Adam can then be the main focus of Shazam 3. The Black Adam standalone can be an origin prequel. I'm liking the idea of each DCEU movie being able to spin off other connected movies as we're seeing with Aquaman and The Trench. It's a great way to establish an expansive, shared universe that is different than the way that Marvel is doing it.

It was interesting to see DJ Cotrona as the Green Lieutenant Marvel. Cotrona was cast as Superman in George Miller's Justice League Mortal before that project was shelved, so it was nice that he finally got to play a superhero.

Some have mentioned that there were CGI had problems due to its $90 million budget, but I actually found it to be just fine. Hopefully, a sequel can get a bigger budget, not to improve the CGI, but to add another rescue scene or two. The battle scenes were fine, but I really liked the bus rescue and would want to see more of that in the future.

I'll probably have more thoughts as the thread progresses, but I was wondering what everyone else thought of the movie and what specific things did you like and not like.

For me, my initial reaction is to rate Shazam! a B+, which for me, is a very good score as I don't tend to go above A-. B+ is the same grade I initially gave Aquaman, but then raised Aquaman to A- as I had more time to think about it. Maybe some of you will convince me to reassess and score upward.