Black Adam

Wow. They start this off with six minutes of leaden exposition, all of which seems totally superfluous: They’re saying there’s a McGuffin and a hero waiting.

Yee-haw

Man, that was a bad CGI fight scene. It was like nothing had any mass. Even if they used the old “have no lighting” trick to have less visible things to animate, it still looked bad.

They’re the Justice Society? Is this Earth-2, then? Perhaps that was just in the olden dayes…

I’m not hating this. I mean, as super-hero movies go, I’ve seen a lot worse.

Sad Rock.

It’s very on the nose.

But I guess Black Adam is gonna fight Justice Society for a bit and then become buddies? What does that do to global stability?

This is pretty entertaining. It’s a kinda confused movie — it doesn’t seem to have much rhythm or throughline, but it’s occasionally charming. And there was one scene that had me laughing out loud, which is more than most super-hero movies.

And the CGI really isn’t that bad. The fight scenes are 97% CGI, which makes them boring to look at (who wants to watch a video game run through?), but they look better than Marvel CGI, for instance.

This was like a ⚂ until the last third, and then things become crushingly boring. There were kinda sorta slightly interesting bits — nothing big or clevery but at least something — and then the last third is just one big, mostly humourless fight scene.

So let’s go with:

Black Adam. Jaume Collet-Serra. 2022. ⚁