Notes on The Suicide Squad

aka no badder bad guy than the US government


I watched The Suicide Squad this week and I ejoyed it quite a bit. It’s silly, it’s brutal, it doesn’t pretend to be anything that it isn't and it has surprising heart. Better than the other one by far. 

In her review Youtuber Amanda the Jedi elaborates a bit more on that surprising heart than I will do here. Suffice to say, this movie makes you care about the characters more than the other one ever did. They feel like people and their relationships feel genuine. 

Another aspect I liked about this movie is that despite being shock-full of ‘bad guys’ the story makes it clear at every turn that the baddest bad guy is and remains the US government.

I called this post ‘notes’ because it will be quite short since the points I am making are more or less obvious and not much analysis will go into this. It’s more a rehashing of elements of the movie that prove my argument.

Spoilers from here on out!

Almost everyone in this movie is some type of ‘bad guy’. (The only exception being the freedom fighters they meet on the island nation where their mission takes place.) The squad itself are criminals (with a varying degree of severity), the targets of their mission are brutal military dictators, their contact is a cruel mad scientist, the monster they fight in the end kills humans by the hundreds. And yet the US government, represented in the movie by Amanda Waller, the leader of the taskforce, (played by the brilliant Viola Davis) and - to a lesser degree - Peacemaker (John Cena) comes away arguably the worst.

Let’s go through the movie mostly chronologically (and in a list):

• That Amanda Waller is ruthless and does not care about anything but the missions she is tasked with - least of all the lives of the squad members - was already obvious in the other movie. This one hammers it home on multiple occasions. She lets a team walk into an ambush as a distraction, threatens to have the 16-year-old daughter of a squad member killed should he not agree to the mission, and orders the indiscriminate killing of locals among other things.
  
• The US government’s involvement in regime changes in middle and South America is both alluded to and outright stated as well as supported by the fact that the squad’s involvement is at no point meant to help the people of the country but secure the US government’s self interest, because while the previous regime was also brutal, it was favorable to the US and, therefore, didn’t warrant intervention.
• Later they find out that the actual goal of the mission has been to destroy records of the US government’s involvement in human experiments conducted on the island with an alien starfish US astronauts had picked up decades ago. The experiments were conducted on the island on purpose, so the government could keep them quiet. The previous regime used the alien and the experiments to get rid of their enemies and the US government supported them.
• Squad leader Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) is appalled by this and wants to instead let the world know what happened. Since he is US military and not a bad guy, Amanda Waller cannot threaten to kill him instantly to ensure his cooperation and has instead made sure that Peacemaker would kill everyone necessary to keep the secret for her, which he does.
• Peacemaker as a character in general exemplifies some of the negative qualities of US foreign intervention. In a pointed line he says “I am committed to peace, no matter how many men, women, and children I have to kill for it”*. He is, nominally, following vague ideals of freedom and peace while at the same time committing atrocious acts in the name of these ideals.
• Through mishaps the starfish is released instead of killed and it has grown considerably in 30 years. The first thing it does is declare the city his and possess what is left of the military. Amanda Waller orders the squad to leave as she believes the records to be destroyed (they are not). When the squad decides it’s time to be good guys and save the city and its people, she threatens to blow them up and would have done so, had she not been stopped by her assistants.
• When Starro the giant starfish is defeated and dies, he says through one of the humans he possessed, "I was happy floating, staring at the stars”, underscoring the fact that Starro only became a monster threatening earth through the actions of the US government and making me feel sorry for him.
  

In the end, the protagonists might be villains (although, again, to differing degrees, Ratcatcher 2 just stole stuff) but the degree of their villainy and the amount of suffering they cause is always trumped by the US government.


Anyway. Movie was fun. Nanaue the shark person was my favorite. Loved the little rat. Sad about some deaths but what can you do.

Satori over and out

* Forgive me if that isn't the exact line, I watched the movie in German.