Everyone probably has moments they’d like to take back. We say the wrong thing. We do the wrong thing. We hurt someone’s feelings or make things harder than they should.
But few of us, have destroyed a city in an unguarded moment.
The same cannot be said of Teth-Adam, would-be protector of the ancient civilization of Kahndaq.
About 5,000 years ago, he was granted (in a roundabout way) staggering powers by the Council of Wizards in an effort to check the megalomaniac Sabbac and his demon-powered crown. And while he did indeed check Sabbac—checked him right into whatever afterlife awaited him, in fact—he wasn’t exactly surgical in his strike. If Sabbac was a wildfire in serious need of quenching, Teth-Adam was a hurricane, exacting his own sort of disaster.
The wizards looked at the wreckage of Kahndaq, shook their heads sadly and decided to imprison Teth-Adam for eternity. After all, we can’t have a demigod with anger management issues running around, can we?
‘Course, if they were really serious about keeping Teth-Adam locked up, maybe they shouldn’t have carved the “get out of jail” spell on the door. But that’s just me.
Now, 5,000 years later, Kahndaq is still dealing with its share of problems. It’s controlled by an organization called the Intergang, and its leader is looking for the crown of Sabbac, which (as mentioned) grants its wearer with all sorts of demonic powers. Intrepid archaeologist Adrianna Tomaz and her small band of helpers aims to find the crown before he does, so she can hide it away again. (Perhaps under the sofa cushions.)
In an odd twist of fate (I’m beginning to think these wizards are extraordinarily bad planners), the crown was stored in the very same place where Teth-Adam was. So when the bad guys catch Adrianna with the crown, she releases Teth-Adam and … things get messy.
Moreover, Teth-Adam’s not one to kill scores of people and then just slink back to his prison. No sirree. He’s got a new epoch to explore! People to meet! Buildings to destroy! And given that the Intergang leader still wants the crown, perhaps it’s just as well. Can’t have that crown falling into the wrong hands.
But across the ocean, the Justice Society learns of Teth-Adam’s escape. They, like the wizards of old, know he’s not a nice guy. So they zip over to Kahndaq, hoping to drag the supercharged fella back to jail—before Teth-Adam really starts flexing his muscles.
Teth-Adam (whom Black Adam is called throughout most of the movie) is an antihero. And we’ll talk loads more about those “anti” tendencies in the sections that follow. But he has some heroic tendencies, too. Adrianna notes that even when she first released him, Teth-Adam’s first instinct was to protect her son, Amon. It’s not the last time Adam protects him, or his mother—and indeed all of Kahndaq celebrates him as their very own “champion.” After millennia of foreign rule, they feel like they need one.
But the Justice Society—especially its leader, Hawkman—reminds Teth-Adam that heroism requires more from us.
“Heroes don’t kill people!” Hawkman tells Teth-Adam.
“Well, I do,” Teth-Adam deadpans.
But Hawkman is ultimately right, of course. If we claim the higher ground, we must walk the higher path.
Adrianna is a loving mom—even if some of the decisions she makes out of that love can be a bit questionable. All the members of the Justice Society are willing to risk their lives for a greater good—and to save each other.
[Spoiler Warning] Teth-Adam was not the person the wizards originally chose as their champion. That’d be his son. And indeed, that son proved to be far more worthy of the powers granted to him—serving as protector, champion and all-around good guy. But when bad guys tried to kill Teth-Adam, his son sacrificed his powers to heal his pops—and the son was killed soon thereafter, leaving Teth-Adam in possession of some very nasty abilities and a very serious grudge. Teth-Adam acknowledges that his son was the real hero, not him. And that boy, through his sacrifice, might be the movie’s real hero, too.
When Hawkman suggest that Teth-Adam kneel before their authority (which, admittedly, was a poor choice of words), Teth-Adam says, “I was a slave before I died. Then I was reborn a god. I kneel before no one.”
It’s just one reference we hear to gods and the like in Black Adam. Teth-Adam is classified as a “demigod” once, for instance, and someone says he has “god-like powers” elsewhere. Someone belittles these lowercase “g” forces in the world. “They say the gods control us,” she says, “but we’re the ones who are always burying them.” We do hear someone casually reference an even higher power—saying “God willing.” But that’s the sole reference we get to a truly almighty being.
That’s a little odd, when you think about it, because the movie’s real villain is plucked straight out of the Christian Gehenna.
The crown of Sabbac is imbued with the power and attributes of six demons (the names of which we see very briefly flash on screen), and its wearer turns into a huge demonic entity. He sports horns, manipulates fire and even has a pentagram carved into his chest. The crown’s creator was “obsessed with black magic,” we learn, and his successor brings forth armies from literal hell (which look like skeletons with glowing innards).
One of the Justice Society’s heroes is a guy named Doctor Fate, who’s described as a wizard that wears a helmet several million years old. The helmet gives him the power (among other things) to see into the future, and he often references fate as if that force itself was a god—in control of all things. Doctor Fate acknowledges that the future can be changed. But he also suggests that the ability to see several futures has also made him something of a moral relativist. “You cease to believe in absolutes” he says.
We see a brief glimpse of an afterlife granted by (according to the one entering said afterlife) “the gods.” Teth-Adam says that he condemns people to “the eternal sleep of the damned.” We should note that a couple of the superheroes here have backstories that are explicitly spiritual (and pagan) in the comics that the movie doesn’t really get into.
Superhuman characters wear form-fitting garb, and a few men are seen shirtless.
Violence is Teth-Adam’s first and, in some ways, only response to any sort of stimuli. And he wastes little time before he starts killing people. He grabs someone by the neck, holds them Darth Vader style and watches as his victim essentially melts. Though that scene’s not bloody, we do see the victim essentially dissolve and skeletonize before the skeleton, too, turns to dust.
It’s the movie’s introduction to Teth-Adam’s violent excesses. Several other bad guys are killed before the antihero even leaves his prison chamber (most electrocuted, some thrown against rock walls). Outside, he obliterates a well-armed force—grabbing missiles in mid-air and sending them flying back to the trucks that sent them, ripping apart helicopters and even sticking a grenade in someone’s mouth. Explosions rip through the desert landscape. Corpses lie everywhere. Again, it’s not bloody, but the casualty count is significant.
Elsewhere, Teth-Adam drops people from dizzying heights or throws them across several zip codes. Some of these victims are saved—at least temporarily—by Hawkman. But clearly, Teth-Adam has little regard for the lives of those who oppose him. He talks about snapping someone’s neck 5,000 years ago, and in a flashback we see the cataclysmic blast that nearly wiped out the civilization that Teth-Adam was apart of. Hawkman bluntly tells him that he’s “murdering” people.
But, of course, when the Justice Society tries to take Teth-Adam into custody, they get swept into his mayhem anyway. Most of their battle takes place in the middle of a city. Cars are hurled and buildings are destroyed. And while we don’t see any casualties, we can guess that not everyone escaped injury.
Elsewhere, people are zapped into painful nothingness. Characters are sometimes skewered by various weapons (though the characters being mainly superheroes, some fare surprisingly well). We see several fights and beatdowns, and Adrianna’s son is nearly shot and killed. A boy is peppered with arrows and dies. Someone’s throat is apparently slit. A character is nearly beheaded before mysteriously vanishing. People dispatch hordes of skeleton-creatures rather handily. Teth-Adam is wounded by a bit of Eternium (a very powerful metal in the DC universe).
About five s-words and a clutch of other profanities, including “a–,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused once.
None.
Amon, Adrianna’s son, can sometimes feel disrespectful. Characters lie.
While not explicitly negative, Black Adam does seem to nod at some subtle socio-political commentary. Intergang runs checkpoints that (especially given the movie’s Middle Eastern setting) call to mind Israeli checkpoints of Palestinian communities. Kahndaq’s fervent desire for self-determination might call to mind Palestine, as well—but also might remind people of the Arab Spring of 2010 or 2011. Kahndaq’s less-than-cordial welcome of the Justice Society (DC’s full title, the Justice Society of America, is never given here) might also point to American and allied operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And certainly, Teth-Adam reveals himself to be a champion against foreign intervention of any kind. “Not your country, not your choice,” he tells Hawkman at one point. Again, not necessarily negative, but whether it is or not might be dependent on what you think of a whole range of real-world issues.
The central question of Black Adam (of which the titular character, in the DC comics, has been Shazam’s prime villain for decades) is a simple one: What, exactly, makes a hero?
For Amon, Adrianna’s teen son, the answer is simple enough: power and cultural/national affinity. That’s the case for much of Kahndaq, as well, a people who nearly worship Teth-Adam as a savior, in spite of his excesses.
“The world doesn’t always need a white knight,” someone tells us. “Sometimes it needs something darker.”
But does it? It seems like an argument that Boramir might offer in The Fellowship of the Ring—an argument to use Sauron’s One Ring, this corruptive thing of evil, rather than destroy it.
Compromise very often leads to corruption. But in the guise of the ever-likable Dwayne Johnson, Black Adam makes its charismatic case that the world sometimes does need something darker. When Hawkman tries to take some bad guys in alive for questioning, Kahndaq’s residents boo. When Teth-Adam summarily murders them, they cheer. Hawkman can sometimes come across as a pharisaical goody-goody, unequipped to deal with life’s messier moments. “It’s [Black Adam’s] darkness that lets him do what heroes like you cannot,” he’s told.
“I guess we’ll see,” Hawkman says—alluding to a bevy of future DC movies where Black Adam may be a villain, or a hero, or both.
The film technically condemns Teth-Adam’s excesses while encouraging the audience to, at least in part, excuse (and maybe even applaud) them. It’s just one friction point in a movie full of them, both aesthetically and ethically.
Black Adam also feels both rushed and shallow—another DC attempt to wow us with action and bombast without ever grappling with the characters wearing the capes, the men and women under the masks. The content falls well in line with what we’ve come to expect from superhero fare; but its spirituality is dark and its morals seem conflicted.
“I’m no hero,” Teth-Adam tells us. And while I’d wholeheartedly agree, the movie itself doesn’t seem so sure.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
