So much is happening right now, everyone can take a day off. Seriously, roll it up, go home, and give us all a break from, you know, the EVERYTHING of it all. But no, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson must always do The Most, so he dropped a new trailer for Black Adam during Thursday night football (an abomination - 1, it’s too hot for football, American football is an autumnal sport and the seasons shouldn’t start until the leaves begin to wither and die, thus signaling Persephone’s return to the Underworld, and 2, football is for weekends + Monday, Thursday night football is and always has been a ploy for attention that the NFL does not need or deserve). I will say this for the new trailer: at least it doesn’t look unfinished anymore.
Still looks bland as f-ck, though. We are entering the THIRD decade of superhero cinema dominance, and we are really running into a problem of all these things looking the same. That shot of the Justice Society’s jet lifting out of the ground looks pretty much exactly like the X-Men’s Blackbird jet from X-Men, 22 entire years ago. (Also, Justice Society = B team Justice League.) We saw a similar problem in the teaser, in which Noah Centineo’s Atom Smasher looks nearly identical to Scott Lang in Giant Man form. (The sameness is what’s going to kill superhero movies, in the end.) The movie itself just looks whatever. Pierce Brosnan is the most interesting person in the trailer, though Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone does mark the first time an out non-binary actor has appeared in a DC film. Black Adam looks like a rehash of half a dozen superhero movies that have come before, and Johnson is in dour mode, so Black Adam himself is a charisma suck at the center of the whole thing.
I mean, here’s hoping the movie is good, but I’ve just about given up hope. I have seen nothing to get excited about, and with Disney’s D23 kicking off today, and bringing with it an inevitable series of major announcements from Marvel, this trailer drop feels like an attempt at taking some shine from the MCU, but like. You’re gonna have to come a lot harder than “The Rock scowling at people” for that. Especially if Kevin Feige announces the cast of the latest iteration of the Fantastic Four. That will wipe Black Adam and every other pop culture thing off the nerd news cycle for at least 24 hours.
