I admit I am not a huge Blue Beetle fan; not because I don’t like him at all, it’s just because there’s just so much comic content that there isn’t any possible way I could keep track of it all. I did see the latest version on, I think, Justice League Unlimited or the Teen Titans or maybe one of the movies, and he felt, to me, very like Spiderman… different bug, same mixing of being a teenager and dealing with his uneasy relationship to his powers.
The move opens with a brief history of the character. Cop Dan Garrett was the first Blue Beetle, who later handed the mantle over to Ted Kord, the second Blue Beetle, who used beetle-themed devices and weapons to battle evil. Blue Beetle was sold to DC Comics along with all the other Charlton Comics characters, and inspired the characters of Night Owl and Night Owl II in “Watchmen”.
In the movie, Ted Kord has gone missing. His wife, Victoria, has taken over the company and is using it to build cyber suits based on alien technology derived from an alien scarab that fell to Earth decades ago. These suits — One Man Army Corps (OMAC) — are legendary in DC comics. Kord’s daughter, Jenny, wants to preserve her father’s legacy of peace, steals the scarab, and when security is on her tail, hands it to a surprised Jaime Reyes, who’d come to Kord Industries for a job.
Jaime brings it back to his family home in the barrio of Edge Keys, where he, his sister, mom, dad and nana, debate what to do with it, when it comes suddenly to life, jumping on Jaime’s head like a headcrab, taking him over and taking him everywhere from orbit to buses. I just re-watched Invincible and… the city looked a lot like Chicago after that.
I’m not a movie reviewer, I’m just a fan. I like DC movies so I try to support them by seeing them the first weekend.
I have to say that I am over origin stories. I really don’t care. That said, I liked Jaime’s family. George Lopez as his uncle was pretty funny, and his Nana steals the movie in the third act. His sister was suitably snarky. Every member of his family had their own moment in the sun.
But still, this is an origin story. It takes awhile to get to the plot. Susan Sarandon’s villain was extremely one-note. Secondary villain Carapax had his own mini-arc that ended in a surprising place. I’d have liked to have heard more about his story. Xolo (“Cobra Kai”) Maridueña’s Jaime Reyes was perfectly inoffensive.
When I think of decent origin story movies, I think Batman Begins and Iron Man — perfect. Man of Steel and Aquaman — not bad. Blue Beetle… probably around the same level.
I want to compare this to the Tobey McGuire “Spiderman” movies, most of all, assuming this movie gets the trilogy it clearly wants. The first of those was okay, the second amazing, the third was overstuffed. Maybe Jaime Reyes and his alien symbiont can do better than poor Tobey.
To be honest, I’d much rather have spent more time with the Ted Kord Blue Beetle, if only because he seemed, by the devices he left behind, to be a wacky inventor. If there is a second movie, a mid-credit scene implies we might meet him yet.
I’ve mentioned before that I own some DC comic NFTs. They come out with the first issue of a comic run as NFTs. I typically sell them as soon as I read them, and so I get to coast along, reading a lot of comics for a quarter. It’s just like the old days.
They have the first issue of the 2006 Blue Beetle run that introduces Jaime. So I bought it with credit (plus $0.25) and will sell it in a little bit for the same price I paid. The comic starts in media res with Green Lantern Guy Gardner vowing to kill Jaime in the Blue Beetle suit before switching to teenage Jaime walking to high school with his friends (he is a college graduate in the movie, which gets him the plum opportunity to scrape dried gum from a rich person’s patio furniture).
Not sure why film makers never seem to want to just use the comic plots….
Origin stories make sense for the episodic comic book format but they’re the absolute death of super-hero movies. Maybe it might be acceptable if it only happened once but since the entire movie business operates on the expectation that you have to acclimatize an entire, new audience to the characters at least once a decade and it takes two or three years to make each movie in a sequence, we’re lucky if we get two non-origin films for each titular hero for every time we have to sit through the blasted origin again.
If they’d just allow the audience the respect of being able to pick up a plot as it’s happening – something that’s absolutely the norm in most other movie genres – none of this would be necessary.
Also, with all the characters DC has to play with, they’re going with Blue Beetle?!
Blue Beetle is fine as a character. Kinda obscure, but it’s fine. As I mentioned, I’d liked to have seen the previous Blue Beetle, but we kinda saw him in Watchmen, so that’s fine, too. If they were going with more obscure DC heroes, I’d clearly have chosen Booster Gold, a kind of hero we haven’t really seen before. (Yes, I know they will be doing something with Booster, and he was even name-dropped in the actual first issue of the comic).
Booster Gold is a time traveler from the 25th century who went on a one way trip back in time to cosplay a hero in the mythical Age of Heroes with a stolen super suit. The Justice League sees right through him, of course. Nathan Fillion was born to play Booster Gold and I kinda hope he gets that chance.
But yeah. Did Indiana Jones have an origin story? Did James Bond have an origin story? More to the superhero point, did Thor or Loki get origin stories — even though Loki’s origin story is actually pretty important to his character? In Black Adam, did Hawkman or Doctor Fate get origin stories? Heck, we come in at the END of Doctor Fate’s story and not one thing is explained about him. Black Adam’s origin was explained in flashbacks.