From the outset, there’s a comfortable grasp of what the film is and who it’s for, base level skills that were missing from Batman v Superman, Justice League and Suicide Squad, Sandberg managing to outdo far more experienced directors by doing the bare minimum.įast forward to the present and we meet wayward teen Billy Batson (Asher Angel) who bounces between foster homes, trying to track down the mother he was separated from as a child. Maybe it’s the Stranger Things effect, one of the many pop culture references made in Earth to Echo writer Henry Gayden’s zippy script, but there’s something engagingly old school about both the film’s tone and visuals.Īimed at a far younger audience than any DCEU film to date, Shazam! actually starts off with a cold open that reminds us of Sandberg’s more adult-leaning genre roots (at one point later on, there’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo for the evil doll from his Conjuring spinoff Annabelle: Creation) as we travel back to the 70s to see the origin of Doctor Sivana, first seen as an embittered child who grows up to face the titular hero. In need of another surefire hit, both with audiences and critics, he’s been dragged out of development hell and handed to Swedish director David F Sandberg, whose prior work has been more horror-focused, but whose vision for the film errs closer to something Amblin would have made in the 80s. Shazam, previously known as Captain Marvel before legal intervention, is a hero whose story has plagued DC’s cinematic arm for years, multiple aborted iterations littered along the way, with the late, Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman once involved in a draft in the early 2000s. But both, for me, were still pale comparisons to even Marvel’s lesser offerings and the company remains in need of a more radical left turn, a brighter light to shine through all of the aggressive darkness. It led to a minor internal rehaul with Wonder Woman adding a modicum of levity before last year’s Aquaman embraced the character’s kitschier elements, becoming their biggest global hit to date. The genie is out of the bottle.Audiences grew weary fast and mammoth opening weekends turned into rapidly, embarrassingly diminishing returns. Maybe that is actually Shaquille O’Neal, not Will Smith, in the new Aladdin. But good luck finding a copy of any of these movies to prove it: the offending frames have all been removed from reissues. Rumours of a hidden message in the original Aladdin saying “good teenagers take off your clothes” turned out to be untrue, but The Lion King really did feature the words “S-E-X” spelled out in dust (well, the animators claimed it said “S-F-X”) there really was a photo of a topless woman in the background of The Rescuers and we really did see that Jessica Rabbit was wearing no underwear in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Forrest Gump never says the words “life is like a box of chocolates”.ĭisney films are no stranger to this territory, either. The Amityville Horror is not based on a true story. Bogart never says “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca. Having outsourced our pop-culture memory bank to the web, we can no longer separate myth from fact, especially when it comes to movies. You could also call it the “internet makes us all dumber effect”. This collective misremembering is known as the “ Mandela Effect” – based on the fact that many people (supposedly) believe that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. Then, in 2017, excerpts emerged online from a “rediscovered” VHS copy of Shazaam! – with the actual Sinbad playing a genie! Unfortunately, the clip was an April Fools’ spoof, courtesy of US website CollegeHumor. Or at least the internet says he did – who knows? As a result of the Shazaam! chatter, someone Photoshopped the fake video box cover. Contributing factors include the time in 1994 when Sinbad introduced Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger on cable TV, dressed as a genie.
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