Shazam Mild-Spoiler Review · 3:53pm Apr 7th, 2019
The movie does pull 90% of its overall feel from the New 52 Shazam, not exactly from the original Captain Marvel. So he's more of this guy
Than this guy
Now as a die hard Captain Marvel fanboy, I have had numerous personal issues with the way the New 52 Shazam was so intrinsically different, in many ways worse and almost a slap in the face, to the original Captain Marvel. The movie however bridges the gap in a lot of ways that honestly makes it work infinitely more than the initial New 52 arc, which this movie draws most of its plot from.
Billy Batson is portrayed as an antisocial punk, who honestly comes across as ungrateful like his New 52 self... The issue here being that it's not so much out of ungratefulness but the fact Billy is not an orphan in this universe, but a regular foster kid who was separated from his mother at a fair when he was 6 years old and has been in the foster care system ever since, leaving and running away from foster families as much as he can in order to find his mother. This simple change makes his stand offish behavior make more sense and one can even sympathize with it more, since he feels like he honestly doesn't belong in foster care since he HAS a living parent out there who he's yet to find.
This makes what in the New 52 was honestly just wildly out of character for Billy Batson, who was always a nice kid no matter what, into something that explains it and makes us empathize with Billy, who once he gets the Power of Shazam slowly through the course of the movie morphs from this guy
To this guy
The villain, Dr. Sivanna is a major threat in this and abundantly evil and seems to revel in it. While he's a far cry away from this Sivanna
The mad scientist cackling about his fiendish plans, the movie's Dr. Sivanna is exactly like his comic counterpart in the sense of he knows he's evil and doesn't care about that. This stems from the fact that as a child he was taken to the Rock of Eternity and tempted by the Seven Deadly Sins and when the Wizard Shazam saw this weakness of his spirit, he was told he was unworthy of being the Champion Shazam needed. Since he was told he wasn't good enough, he spent a lifetime trying to get back and take the Sins up on their offers of power, reasoning that if he's not good enough... Perhaps he can be evil enough. And while he does focus more on magic in this take, he does so in a very scientific method. Using science to try and crack the magical code as it were. And since he is a doctor, he earns the title of his comic counterpart in this movie as the "World's Wickedest Scientist"
All in all Shazam as a film fixes numerous issues I, and many others, had with the New 52 incarnation of the character and captures the original and downright fun spirit of Captain Marvel. To quote from Grant Morrison on what made Captain Marvel stand out
"Captain Marvel was the first superhero comic to just throw out the notion of realism. Captain Marvel can fight dragons and meet women from the moon. Anything you can think of, this guy can do, so of course that was an immense hit, because it was taking much more advantage of the form, I think."
I am more excited than ever to see this tomorrow now. Thank you for this interesting review! Cant wait!