Loved Blue Beetle

I'm glad I took a couple hours this afternoon to see Blue Beetle, the first character I've seen in a DC movie with zero connection to my childhood comic collection. Also, the only one I know who speaks Spanish. NPR liked it, so I gave it a try.

The young actor Xolo Maridueña who plays the central character Jaime Reyes is so sincere that any scene focused on his face is a pleasure. The camera focuses on his face; he's often focused on a member of his family with love, amusement, exuberant pleasure, pain -- he's a giving actor.

Jaime gets possessed by a piece of wearable technology from outer space that flies, protects him, shapes forcefields into any shape at will, etc. etc. -- just what we've come to expect from supersuits. It's also good for a laugh, as during a battle when the generic assistant voice tells Jaime that it must run a system check and reboot. But I enjoyed how Jaime's sweet personality teaches its AI something about love and family; in a fight to the death, the suit teaches him empathy for his opponent.

I enjoyed Jaime's family. They're played for laughs in a kind of Latino family sitcom kind of way. But they're part of the action from the get-go and they come to the rescue. When the grandmother says, "Now is not the time to cry," we know that there will be a time to cry later -- and it touches. (I think back on the original Star Wars trilogy, how the feeling of family that grew around Luke Skywalker was what drew me back to see it so many times.)

The primary villain Susan Sarandan's Victoria Kord is a kind of Martha Stewart of arms manufacturing, energetic and poised. She's almost adolescent in her pleasure when she directs minions to "target the family" so she can watch what the Blue Beetle suit is capable of doing in such an emergency.

As Kord's niece Jennifer, Jaime's love interest, Bruna Marquezine is just as appealing as Xolo. She brings intelligence and determination and beauty to every scene -- and the two of them are a joy together.

A word about Bobby Krlik's music: During the first bars of Krlik's score, Sensemaya came to mind, a 1939 composition by Mexico's prominent classical composer Silvestre Revueltas. Krlik is British with no Mexican connection; I theorize that he took his cue from images of Mayan pyramids in the title sequence and turned to Revueltas' colorful piece. Sensemaya tells in music a Mayan legend about hunting a giant snake, using low brass and dry crackling percussion and massive drumbeats to evoke music of the ancient Mayans. With synthesized sounds and some hip-hop style sampling, that's what I hear in Blue Beetle. If you're reading this, Mr. Krlik, I'd love confirmation. Thanks.

The Reyes family tempts Jaime to open the box that Jenny Kord told him he must not open.