Shazam movie spoilers
I hate spoiling movies, especially before other folks have a chance to see them. But, there is a bit in the new Shazam movie that really spoke to me a lot and I am going to talk about it.
If you don’t like spoilers, then skip this and come back after you’ve seen it…
Billy, the main character, spends a lot of the movie looking for his parents.
He got lost as a kid, was taken by child services and put into foster homes. He feels that if he can just find his family again, things will be good. And, blames himself for getting lost and losing his family. He’s afraid they’ll think he ran away, not got lost.
Over the course of the movie, he finds his mother. And, it turns out he didn’t get lost he had been abandoned.
And, they show him realize that it had never been his fault. That he had done everything he could and he only failed because his mother didn’t want him to find her, moving states and changing her name.
Before this in the movie, he had some trouble with his superpowers. Most notably flight. He just couldn’t fly well.
The part with his mother ends with him finding out his foster family is in trouble.
He jumps off a roof, says the magic word and flies off at superspeed to help them.
No problem flying now that he knows the people he now calls his “real family”, not his blood relatives, are in trouble.
To me, this is what the movie is about. Not superpowers, big fights, special effects or anything else.
Maybe it is because I’ve had my parents call me at work, while I was chief engineer of a division, to tell me I was an embarrassment to them and the family.
Maybe it is because I drove halfway across the country and back to try and reconcile my father and sister to have him hang up on her at Christmas.
Maybe it was my mother’s letter to me when I was in engineering school about how my tuition meant that she only got to spend one week in Hawaii instead of two.
To me, turning away from his mother to go to the ones who really did care for him was a very powerful thing.
And, the movie makes it very clear that the turning away from the person he had such hopes for that turned out to be false is his decision. The call for help only comes after he has turned and walked away from it.
He did that without the superpowers. Without a call for help as motivation.
Only with a “I accept this person didn’t want me and will go to those who do” on his own.
The part of Indian Jones and the Last Crusade I like least is when everyone thinks Indy has gone over the cliff.
“I never told him anything,” his father laments. “It wouldn’t have taken long. Only a few minutes.”
This is one of the great myths I hate.
That there are some magic words that a parent can say to a child that makes the crap they were put through worth it. That it will all be good if you just get to say those magic words.
Shazam doesn’t play that game.
His mother was a shit that abandoned him when he was 4.
And, that doesn’t change.
The happiest ending in that is he is told it wasn’t his fault.
But, that’s it. No more than that.
Turning from the dream he’s held for 10 years to go to ones who really have demonstrated they care for him is why I accept him as a hero.
And, why I like the movie.