Suicide Squad: A Movie About The Movie Suicide Squad
As a child, I remember sitting in front of my television as the cable box scrambled due to an electrical outage or a service interruption. Black and white pixels showered across the screen and a blizzard of sound poured out of the speakers, as if my ear was pressed against a block of ice as it was shaved into a snowcone.
Staring at the screen was hypnotizing, in a way. As long as it wasn’t too loud, I would sometimes stare at the salt and pepper chaos for a few moments, feeling my existence being pulled slowly into the scattered abyss and washed away in a feeling neither good or bad. I simply existed in front of the screen in a moment of zen in which I neither created nor perceived. Nothing changed. Nothing came or went. I just was.
This is the experience of watching the new DC Comics Blockbuster Suicide Squad. To be certain, it is the worst movie ever made, if it could even be considered a movie. It is more like a side-scrolling 8-bit video game in which your characters fight from left to right across the screen until the music kicks up for a boss fight. You tame the boss, you move onto the next level, and you carry on. Each subsequent level gives you another opportunity to consider the fact that there is no rhyme or reason for your fight. A princess was captured? The mayor has gone missing? The city is out of control? Who cares. Just keep hitting A for punch and B for jump and it will all be over soon.
If it is a movie, Suicide Squad only fits the the bare minimum taxonomy for the category “movie.” It is more like a movie about the movie. We are brought along a series of steps that explain what would happen if this movie were to ever actually be made. We are shown who is bad and who is good, who is important and who is not, and who triumphs and who fails. These steps are explained to us, and we are implicitly instructed to take their word for it by…by the power of fiat, I suppose. It would be as though this essay I am writing right now looked like this:
- Suicide Squad is a bad movie.
- There are reasons that exist that will make you feel like it is bad.
- You will finish reading this and now know that it is a bad movie.
This film merely instructs us how to feel. This character has a kid, so they are good. We root for these characters because they are in love. This person is good because they are pretty. This person is bad because the other good characters say so.
In this way, the movie is not “bad” in the classical sense. It is not enragingly bad or even laughably bad. It is bad by omission. It is bad because it is not really even “there” at all.
Unlike previous movies I’ve walked out on for their agonizing predictability (Brothers Grimm) or their bizarre character choices (Harsh Times), this movie provoked no such visceral reaction at all. I bought my ticket. I sat. I watched the screen. Moving images passed before my eyes. I left. Other than a few sudden explosions or particularly cringe-worthy moments of bad writing, I left the theater completely and utterly unaffected.
I walked home through the streets of New York feeling teleported from before the movie to after, as if the last two hours were nothing more than a rip in the space-time continuum, sucking away my attention and $12 and transporting them to the other end of a wormhole in another galaxy.
This movie will make a MASSIVE amount of money. Zack Snyder continues to make movies for the same reason people still allow M. Night Shyamalan to take the helm: when it’s all said and done, these movies make a boatload of money in the US and abroad. And I am certain there are people who will love this movie. I do not look down on them for it. Perhaps they are DC Comic fans who are able to sense the gravitas and ethos of these characters of whom I was so scarcely acquainted. Or maybe they are kids who just want to see things blow up and see the good/bad guys win.
But what of the rest of us? What does this mean for us that a movie can be greenlit and put to reel having not even a semblance of a plot? Not even a single effort toward building toward “moments” in the film or helping us to understand the characters? Surely we are doomed.
There are many movies in the world to hate and even many bad movies to love. But this is not one of them. Even the emotions required to hate a movie could not be drummed up within me by this farce. It is a non-movie, or at best an explanation of the movie we were supposed to see.
We deserve better than white noise.
