By Myah Hesselgesser, Staff Writer
A new movie, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, the sequel to Shazam, was released on March 17. Directed by David F. Sandberg the movie tells the story of Shazam, the alter-ego to a teenager named Billy Batson.
The movie focuses around teenager Billy Batson and his other teenage family members struggling with balancing the life of a teenager and the life of their adult superhero identities until a vengeful group of three ancient gods that were thought to be defeated come to Earth looking for the magic stolen from their realm a long time ago. Shazam and his fellow team members fight for their powers, the world, and each other through this action packed movie.
Recently, superhero movies have been slowly declining in views and enjoyment. Unfortunately, this movie was not able to shake those conditions, with a 3.6 star average on Google Reviews. Shazam: Fury of the Gods gave some insightful background on where and how Shazam came to be with unpredictable plot twists.
D.C. movies have never been known for their special effects like Marvel has but this movie’s effects definitely weren’t show stopping. At some parts of the movie I could clearly see they didn’t pay close enough attention to the effects because it looked kind of sloppy.
This movie did not contain a lot of music, it was mainly focusing on dialogue and action. The music that did play I enjoyed listening to and it fit the scene it was supposed to be complimenting.
A main highlight of the movie was the comedy. The first movie this film counteracted all that heavy action with some light hearted comedy that many superhero movies don’t Include, although many people say that the comedy in this new iteration doesn’t come close to rivaling that of the first Shazam movie. At the end, the movie contained a plot twist that I did not see coming and had me tearing up a little in my seat.
I also identified some downfalls in this movie. I felt I was getting bored of the movie at times, excluding the final plot twist. It seemed like the makers of the movie attempted to include some subplots that, in the end, went nowhere. I also felt that the main characters were very excluded and would come and go off the plot at very random times and their subplots had no relevance to the plot of the movie.
I feel like the film deserves 3.6 stars out of 5 because it was a very average movie with a lot of clichés that didn’t come close to the original Shazam in all categories: production value, comedy, and the overall plot. There were a lot of opportunities for this movie, and in the end it kind of let me down, so I wouldn’t recommend it.