Black Adam is visibily ignoring one of the main criticisms that Man of Steel was hit with. Dwayne Johnson's powerful metahuman Teth-Adam, a.k.a. Black Adam is set to make his entry into the DCEU when Black Adam hits theaters on October 21. Freed from his 5,000 year-long imprisonment, the former slave in ancient Kahndaq turned ruthless anti-hero enters the modern world determined to dispense justice on his terms, with the Justice Society of America standing in his way.
As both an executive producer and leading man, Johnson has been very hands-on in Black Adam's marketing, heavily pushing the slogan "the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change". Numerous clips released for Black Adam along with its trailers are testimony to that with the level of power Black Adam exudes, but they also show a key similarity with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. Not only is the main character extremely powerful, a fight between him and other metahumans unleashes a massive amount of destruction - something Man of Steel was criticized for.
Black Adam's Fight Scenes Greatly Resemble Man Of Steel's
Johnson's biggest goal with the seemingly immortal Black Adam has long been to build up to a showdown with Henry Cavill's Superman, and the marketing for Black Adam shows he could match the hero in a battle. The fight scenes in Black Adam that have been teased also look very close to Superman's brawls with Kryptonian soldiers in Man of Steel. Like Superman, General Zod (Michael Shannon), and Faora (Antje Traue), Black Adam and other characters like Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) zoom to their opponents at super-speed, and deliver Earth-shattering punches in the most literal sense possible.
As in Man of Steel, the fight scene clips from Black Adam also show the toll the environment around them takes. In both films, buildings are destroyed and huge craters are left in city streets as the human populace flees in terror. Man of Steel took considerable criticism for this, with some finding such destruction excessive in a Superman movie. However, despite Black Adam's boast of changing the DCEU, there some aspects it looks to keep the same, as it also evidently shares Man of Steel's perspective on such destruction having a narrative purpose.
Black Adam's Battles Are Realistic – That's A Good Thing
Man of Steel is very frank about the level of damage Kryptonians could inflict on Earth with their levels of super-strength and invulnerability, and Black Adam is similarly honest to this end. Aside from raising the stakes of its superhero battles immensely, Black Adam understands the reality of metahumans fighting threats to Earth. The spontaneous nature of such fights prevent large-scale evacuations from being practical, and significant levels of destruction simply cannot be avoided in such situations.
As with Man of Steel, Black Adam seems to be upfront that superheroes like the Justice Society of America and even anti-heroes like Black Adam deal with human lives being at risk by the level of power they must deploy in order to fight off commensurate threats. While Black Adam himself resorts to tactics that Superman never would, Black Adam as a movie recognizes the war zone that any area where metahumans do battle would inevitably become. That puts Black Adam on a very similar plain as Man of Steel, while getting audiences primed for the showdown of the two movie's metahuman protagonists that Dwayne Johnson is determined to deliver on.
