DC's movies have been hit-and-miss to say the least, and a few of them have some real
problems.
How did Joss Whedon debase the Flash?
Which DC hero tried and failed to get campy?
And what's up with Wonder Woman 1984?
Keep watching to find out.
In the middle of a Justice League fight scene pitting the titular superhero team against
Steppenwolf and his Parademon forces, a gag occurs that will jolt most viewers right out
of the movie.
While running at super-speed, the Flash tackles Wonder Woman, and when the dust settles, it's
revealed that Flash has fallen face-first onto her chest.
This strange joke goes too far on countless levels, including the way it disrupts the
flow of the fight scene for an extended gag that isn't funny enough to justify its length.
It also reduces the lone woman on the Justice League team to just her breasts for the sake
of a little slapstick.
The moment is emblematic of how little Wonder Woman got to do in this cut of the movie,
and as a cherry on top, Justice League director Joss Whedon had tried the same gag in Avengers:
Age of Ultron.
It's unclear why a joke that was too much the first time around had to be regurgitated
here.
The opening of Jonah Hex establishes a bog-standard origin story for the titular superhero, as
the audience sees his adversary, Quentin Turnbull, brand Hex's face and then burn down his house
with his wife and daughter inside.
Hex is left for dead but later revived by a group of Native Americans — the sequence
depicting this resurrection also establishes that Hex now has the ability to temporarily
resurrect dead people himself.
In the comics, though, he doesn't have any superhuman powers at all.
There's nothing wrong with making tweaks or even generous alterations to long-established
fictional comic book characters when it comes to translating them to the big screen.
This sequence, however, arguably deviates too heavily from the source material by bestowing
Hex with supernatural gifts.
Great westerns are gritty and grounded by action scenes populated by life-like characters,
but taking this more stylized route and giving Hex superpowers challenges the genre in the
wrong kind of way.
And what does this whole new direction accomplish?
Pretty much nothing, with the film only making sporadic use of Hex's newfound abilities.
Every major superhero movie inevitably ends with a big confrontation between the hero
and villain.
In the case of 2004's Catwoman, this is the battle between the titular superhero and evil
cosmetics executive Laurel Hedare.
The problem with this sequence isn't that it's offensive or thematically inconsistent,
but simply that it tries way too hard.
All throughout Catwoman, scenes like the infamous flirty basketball game make it clear this
is a production that would love to be seen as a campy good time.
The finale, with Berry grimly intoning lines like this, is no different.
"It's overtime!"
Unfortunately, Catwoman lacks the creative unpredictability that defines great pieces
of camp arts, like, say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or the works of John Waters.
Those projects work because they follow a unique creative vision, not a rigid blueprint
for what campy cinema should look like.
The latter approach plagues Catwoman's final showdown; despite an abundance of cheesy lines
and the participation of camp queen Sharon Stone, the film's finale is dominated by predictable
action beats.
Leaning so hard into those elements delivers a climax that's uncomfortably lackluster rather
than deliriously campy.
As the original Suicide Squad film comes to a close, Harley Quinn is returned to her prison
cell, only for the Joker and his goons to suddenly show up and break her out of prison.
As alarm bells quite literally ring, Joker embraces Quinn and remarks to her that it's
time for them to go home.
This "romantic" reunion is an odd way to end an ensemble effort like Suicide Squad, since
it narrows the focus exclusively to Quinn — but it also goes too far in sugarcoating
the duo's toxic relationship.
Alterations to Suicide Squad during reshoots and post-production ended up cutting a subplot
involving Quinn abandoning and even beating up Joker in favor of her new comrades.
This development was eschewed in favor of an ending that leaves no room for moral ambiguity,
nor any recognition of just how abusive the Joker's behavior has been.
It's tidy, sure, but it fits neither the characters nor their relationship, and closes the movie
out on a note that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
It's been discussed ad nauseum, by everyone from comics writers to fans to the cast and
crew of the movie itself.
Even with this avalanche of discourse, however, the snapping of Zod's neck at the end of Man
of Steel still stands out as a premiere example of a DC Comics movie going too far.
At the end of the film that launched the ill-fated Snyderverse, Superman is forced to choose
between killing Zod or allowing him to kill a group of innocent civilians.
The hero opts for the former, snapping Zod's neck and then proceeding to wail in misery
over killing the only other surviving member of his species.
The concept behind this moment isn't inherently bad, especially for a Superman origin story.
In execution, though, it doesn't have much impact coming off a lengthy sequence of endless
fist-fighting between the two Kryptonians.
How can a neck snap compare to all this?
What's more, neither the rest of Man of Steel nor subsequent DC films pause for any length
of time to absorb the full consequences of Superman's actions.
At this point, you can't help but get the feeling that Superman was only made to do
this in order to stoke some fan controversy.
In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' original Watchmen graphic novel, the character of Rorschach
makes a comment in his journal suggesting that fellow hero Ozymandias might be gay.
This comment, along with other small details from the graphic novel, has led to widespread
interpretations of Ozymandias being queer.
Director Zack Snyder ended up also hinting at this orientation during his Watchmen film
adaptation, though his interpretation of such a character trait left a lot to be desired.
For starters, Ozymanidas's superhero costume is distinctly different from the other characters
in the movie.
The outfit's textures and accentuated nipples on the outfit evoking the superhero costumes
in the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, whose costumes are generally considered to take
cues from queer aesthetics.
More egregious, though, is a moment in which audiences glimpse Ozymandias's computer and
see a file labeled "BOYS".
This detail, implying that Watchmen's central villain is engaging in pedophilia, continues
a troubling pop culture trend of connecting this hideous act with homosexuality.
Snyder's previous movie, 300, also had troubling details that coded characters as villains
solely based on them exhibiting queer behavior; it therefore seemed hard to accept that these
new additions to Watchmen were a coincidence.
Though the concept of Adrian Veidt being queer is not new, the Watchmen movie's attempt to
depict this notion was unimaginatively distasteful.
After being away from Earth for years, it's understandable that Clark Kent would want
to check up on his loved ones.
Of course, he could do the normal thing people do in this situation, like calling up people
you care about or maybe checking out their social media pages.
Instead, though, Superman opts to go to Lois Lane's house, float in the air a short distance
away from it, and use his X-ray vision to see inside.
Now he can observe Lane and her son and what their day-to-day routine is like.
Great, right?
It's just a shame that these poor mortal human beings are totally oblivious to the superpowered
stalking going on nearby.
This moment is too much in many respects, but it's especially rough in that this was
clearly thought of as a perfect way to explore Superman's sorrow over being away from his
loved ones for so long.
Surely there could've been more effective ways of conveying this attitude than via some
light stalking?
It makes Superman, a hero too powerful to really be held accountable by anybody, seem
creepy rather than inspiring or even likable.
This scene proved so notorious, in fact, that 15 years later, an episode of Superman & Lois
devoted an entire subplot to the idea that using superpowers to listen in on your family
is weird.
In this episode, Lois explicitly mentions that Superman had spied on her years before,
and almost lost her as a result.
There's a lot going on in the third act of Batman v. Superman, including the introduction
of Doomsday and the debut of Wonder Woman's superhero persona.
But an equally important, if not immediately noticeable, development is that we finally
get insight into why Lex Luthor hates Superman.
When the Kryptonian confronts Luthor over kidnapping Martha Kent, Luthor begins to ramble
about his motivations, which include him commenting that:
"No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy, to deliver me from daddy's fist and abominations."
This line indicates that Luthor suffered from child abuse, and that these traumatic experiences
fuel his hatred for people like Superman.
The lingering aftereffects of an abusive childhood is a weighty issue to suddenly bring up in
the third act of a PG-13 superhero movie.
There's nothing inherently wrong with superhero films dealing in heavier subject matter, of
course, but the problem is that at this point in the movie, the plot is about to shift its
focus almost entirely to no fewer than two CGI showdowns.
There's no time to give this revelation the weight and breathing room it requires.
Abruptly bringing it into the fold as a way to explain why Luthor is so evil simply derails
Batman v. Superman's already complicated final act.
The quest by Maxwell Lord to utilize the wishing rock to the best of its abilities in Wonder
Woman 1984 eventually takes him across the world to Egypt to visit Emir Said Bin Abydos.
The presence of this oil baron character kicks off a deluge of astonishingly tone-deaf stereotypes
about people hailing from the Middle East and North Africa.
Every scene set in Egypt in Wonder Woman 1984, even ones in which Abydos is off-screen, are
jaw-dropping in their regressive portrayals of MENA individuals.
Naturally, such depictions were bound to generate controversy — as well as a few thoughtful
essays breaking down how these scenes were so off-the-mark.
One of the more insightful examples of these breakdowns came in a piece for Slate, where
writer Roxana Hadidi broke down some of the worst cultural misconceptions in Wonder Woman
1984.
These include characters referring to Abydos as "your highness," despite Egypt being a
democracy in the 1980s, as well as the ways in which Abydos' costume resembles traditional
attire from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates rather than Egypt.
Such inaccuracies feed into dehumanizing stereotypes of MENA individuals.
It appears that Wonder Woman 1984, a film that seeks to celebrate the cinema of the
1980s, was unable to escape the racial caricatures that were so rampant in that era.
There are countless things audiences could have been expecting to see in Wonder Woman
1984, but surely nobody was expecting a weirdly dismissive approach to sexual assault.
This shocking development emerged in a scene in which Diana Prince discovers that her wish
on the wishing rock has come true: Steve Trevor has come back to life.
Rather than just having Trevor resurrected in his original body, though, the film has
Trevor inhabit the body of a total stranger.
With Trevor back from the dead, he and Prince proceed to have sex.
What should be a passionate romantic reunion takes on all kinds of unsettling tones, however,
given that it involves a sexual partner who cannot and did not consent to be involved.
Wonder Woman 1984 never addresses these disturbing implications and simply plows ahead on its
story about wishes getting more and more out of control.
Understandably, this storytelling detour inspired an outcry when the movie was released, tragically
reflecting how even modern blockbusters can fall prey to problematic tropes.
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