Blue Beetle 2023

I’m back to my superhero movie catch up and since I finished the MCU, I decided it was time to move onto DC going back to 2023 which was a busy year for DC and I missed all 3 movies that came out that year which were also the last Zack Snyder era of DC movies before transitioning to the James Gunn era. I decided to start with Blue Beetle which is the only of the three which isn’t really connected at all to the rest of the Snyderverse aside from a single name drop about Superman. Instead, this is a full blown origin story that reminds me a lot of a much better version of Max Steel though I’m also aware that even this version of Blue Beetle pre-dates that character, let alone the Ted Kord version. The overall tone of the movie felt like it was taking a page out of the Marvel playbook with a similar mix of action, comedy, and a bit of drama. But there’s a reason why that works and it works just as well here. They also get a lot of mileage out of this being a primarily Hispanic story with Jaime’s family all being Hispanic as well as Ted Kord’s daughter Jenny and even the henchmen of basically the lone white person in the movie Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon.

The origin story of this movie honestly shares a lot of similarities to Spider-Man. Jaime is a recent college graduate, but is also Hispanic and is living with his family in what is quickly becoming the rich part of town and while he was in college, his family is on the verge of being priced out. He gets a job working as a groundskeeper at the wealthy tech mogul Victoria Kord’s mansion but gets fired along with his younger sister when he stands up to Victoria as she argues with her niece Jenny Kord. After a series of events, Jaime ends up getting bitten by a radioactive scarab. Ahem, he gets chosen by an alien symbiote that looks like a jeweled scarab which gives him basically Iron Man nanotech armor with an insect theme along with a voice in his head that only he can hear. Off screen, he finds out that the voice is sentient and named Khaji-da and its main goal is to protect his body as its host. Jenny at one point describes it as a world-ending weapon, but based on what we see it accomplish throughout the movie, that’s a gross exaggeration.

What the movie does well is how it builds on the importance of family. Jaime’s family is clearly very close, as they all live in the same house: Both his parents, Jaime and his sister, their Nana, and their eccentric sciency and conspiracy theorist uncle played quite well by George Lopez. By contrast, Jenny and her Aunt Victoria are at odds while her mother is dead and her father is missing, presumed dead. She is on the board of directors, but Victoria feels like the mega company Kord Industries should be hers and hers alone, and is working on an OMEC weapons project which would have been something that Ted Kord would have been against. And jumping to the end of the movie, her main henchman Carapax is revealed to have lost his only family when he was recruited by Victoria as a child and somehow had his memories erased, and both seeing the love of Jaime’s family and remembering his own family causes him to make the right choice at the end which works better in the context of the movie than how it sounds here. There’s also the death of Jaime’s father somewhere in the middle of the movie which feels very superhero trope-y, but again still works in context.

The OMEC concept of the film is a nice choice for the enemy despite falling into yet another superhero trope of having the villain of the movie be essentially an exact copy of the hero. It makes sense here as they were initially using the scarab to make the OMEC suits work. It was also nice that I was at least slightly familiar with the OMECs in concept having read the novelization of Infinite Crisis which was the follow up event after Crisis on Infinite Earths. In this movie, they are basically an Earth tech copy of the Blue Beetle tech, only red so viewers can tell its evil. Victoria Kord as the villain also plays it up quite well as she initially is portrayed as the scorned sibling who initially built the company and was jealous that it was given to her brother Ted, only to take it over once Ted disappeared. But near the end of the movie, we learn that she is a full on villain, asking her tech guy to just straight up kill Jaime while using casual racism by calling him Sanchez despite his frequent reminders that it isn’t his name.

The film does have a lot of humor that falls on the darker side of the spectrum than the typical Marvel humor. Alongside a fart joke while the family is storming the Kord secret base with the classic Ted Kord Beetle ship, they also clearly straight up kill a guy when the ship impales one of the troopers with its foot-claws, something that doesn’t exactly mesh as well with Jaime’s insistence to Khaji-da that he’s not a killer (in the movie’s defense, Jaime was not on board). There’s also a fun reveal that Nana was an ex-mercenary with experience using heavy weaponry, and one of the darkest jokes when Sanchez disobeys Victoria and lets Jaime go free. He then tells Jaime not to worry and he will be ok only for that line to immediately be followed up by him disappearing with a spray of blood on the door’s window. While there are a lot of similarities to Marvel properties and other superhero tropes throughout, there’s enough unique to this movie to keep things interesting, especially with the added layer of Hispanic heritage and family spread throughout. And when it does fall into the tropes, it uses them intelligently and effectively, making for a very fun movie and a disappointment that it’s unlikely that this will find its way into James Gunn’s DCU. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.