Set to the bombastic operatic tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the first full length trailer for DC’s Suicide Squad film adaptation has hit and caused quite a stir.
Suicide Squad is, in a way, the pin upon which the DC Extended Universe of films lives and dies.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (infuriatingly, still the film’s actual title) is perhaps the biggest team-up comic book film in recent memory, purely in terms of legacy power, but it is a known quantity. We know movie Batman better than any other cinematic superhero, Superman has already had a film of his own, and director Zack Snyder is a person who rarely ventures outside of his specific narrative/artistic wheelhouse. We know what we’re getting. We don’t with Suicide Squad – a film that isn’t about superheroes, from a director in David Ayer who couldn’t be more fundamentally different from Zack Snyder or Patty Jenkins if he tried, with a cast of characters that is completely and totally the opposite of what we’ve seen from the DCEU so far.
In other words, its DC’s Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s the one where they have to prove they can do anything. And, with this full-length trailer, we now know that DC is just as aware of that connection to Guardians as we are – why else would Bohemian Rhapsody be playing over it?
The tale of the Suicide Squad, scored by Queen’s legendarily incomprehensible epic, follows a team of supervillains sprung from prison by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to, presumably, halt some mad plot by The Joker (Jared Leto). It’s a premise as old as anti-heroes – “The Dirty Dozen” but in Hollywood’s heroic age. Included in the team (downplayed in weirdness in DC’s fashion by Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag) are Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, who appears to have her full, Joker-laden origin story in play), and Boomerang (Jai Courtney), among other lunatics.
The trailer still refuses to grant a sense of Suicide Squad’s actual plot, but it is one hell of a tone setter. It remains to be seen if that is the tone Suicide Squad actually has or can live up to, however – one does not invoke Bohemian Rhapsody lightly.
Suicide Squad hits theatres on August 5, 2016.
