Blue Beetle

Recent college grad Jaime Reyes comes home to his loving but financially struggling family, looking to begin his life, only to find himself in possession of an ancient piece of alien biotechnology in the shape of a blue beetle. When the thing chooses to bond with Jaime, he's bestowed with an extraordinarily powerful suit of alien armor, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the superhero… Blue Beetle.

I know there’s a lot of these weirdo superheroes out there now, so most normal folks probably don’t even realize that they’re already kind of familiar with this character, but only through the Watchmen movie and the sequel HBO series, as the Nite Owl is based off of the Blue Beetle.

Also, tangentially, the character of the Peacemaker, from the fantastic film The Suicide Squad (reviewed here), as well as the equally fantastic sequel HBO series titled The Peacemaker, is the character who The Comedian in Watchman was based off of…

Just saying…

Anyway, the original Blue Beetle first appeared in 1939 in Charlton Comics.

Dan Garrett initially gained his powers from a special vitamin, but that was later changed to a "sacred” scarab. He is currently dead, probably for good, but you never know. The second Blue Beetle was Ted Kord. Created for Charlton Comics in ‘66, before moving to DC comics in the mid-80s, Ted was Dan’s successor. Well-known as a goofball who never had any super powers, Ted used science to create gear so he could fight crime, including his flying beetle car-thing, called the Bug Ship. Ted has a long history with DC comics, appearing on multiple versions of the Justice League (the Superfriends), and currently, he is also considered to be dead, but like I said, these kind of things are always subject to the stroke of a pen. Jaime Reyes, the main character of the movie, is the third and current Blue Beetle. Created in 2006, he discovered that Dan Garrett’s “sacred” scarab is actually a piece of alien technology that, once bonded with a host, morphs into a powerful battle suit.

Maybe the most important part of this film, seeing as how this Blue Beetle is one of the first Hispanic American superheroes on the big screen, there’s a lot of talk in this film about the way America treats its under-resourced communities, especially when they’re populated by people of color, especially if they’re also immigrants of color, and most especially when they’re people from Latin America. It even touches (briefly) on the CIA-backed School of the Americas, and the US’s long, bloody legacy of violence and terror in Latin America. Now, I’m not sure if casting Susan Sarandon specifically as the main bad guy was a deliberately made choice for the purpose of a very specific piece of social commentary, but either way, it certainly says something loud and clear. I was happy to see that the bad guys in the film were representative of real life bad guys… the wealthy and privileged, the corporations, and the evils of capitalism.

Also, I was really surprised to see how much Blue Beetle is concerned with the economic disparity between the haves and have-nots in this country, particularly as a result of imperialist and authoritarian powers. Jaime is depicted here as the proverbial “model minority,” a person who did all the right things: they graduated college, they remained humble, they were always smiling and always pleasant… only to come out the other side and discover that his background, the reality of him being Brown in America, will always limit him in the eyes of the powers that be, even in the fictional disadvantaged neighborhood of Edge Keys, in the fictional DC Comics locale of Palmera City (a stand-in for El Paso).

Now, all of this is important to talk about, and impressive to see in this kind of movie, and also is not subtle at all, which is great, but for the most part, the film is your basic superhero origin, with all the charm and humor and kick-assery that you’d expect. It’s not a bad film by any stretch, in fact, it’s pretty good, all told, but never good enough that it’s all that memorable.

Except for Jamie’s family.

Mom, Sis, Grandma and her revolutionary past, and Jaime’s genius Shade Tree Inventor of an Uncle are all really fun. I really enjoyed everything with the family. If there’s a sequel, which there may not being, seeing as how WB dumped this film as soon as it could, I’d be more interested in the continuing adventures of this close-knit Mexican American family, flying around in Ted Kord’s old Bug Ship, righting the many wrongs of this country, all while armed with Ted’s silly, late 20th Century “hi-tech” crime-fighting gear, then I would be anything else.

Maybe that’s just me…

The Blue Beetle movie is cute fluff, with just a tiny bit of an edge, that’s fun for the whole family, and that’s all right. There’s definitely some leaps over a few narrative gaps here and there, not to mention a liberal amount of hand-waving, but… I mean, this is an origin story of the third version of a third tier superhero, who has bonded with an alien brooch to become a Peter Parker/Iron Man knock-off, there’s only so much something on this level is capable of delivering, and the few spots where the film does go above and beyond are not just notable, they’re laudable.

All in all… not bad.