WARNING: This article contains potential SPOILERS for Justice League
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The Justice League fans knew that the movie's Parademons have a secret - and the new trailer has confirmed just how Darkseid's soldiers are actually 'born.' It won't come as a shock to die-hard fans of DC Comics, or even our readers, since we proposed the theory of Parademon creation after taking a closer look at the enemy soldiers. They're strong, they're glowing, they fly, and they're nasty... and they used to be humans, before the power of Apokolips transformed them.
To this point it was assumed by most that Steppenwolf, the villain of Justice League, would be leading an army of Apokolips in an invasion of Earth - just as he had once tried to do thousands of years in the past. But as Bruce Wayne reveals in trailer, he can't help but sense something "darker" in Steppenwolf's plan. What if Darkseid isn't sending his lieutenant to invade Earth - but harvest it instead?
Again, we've based our prediction that Justice League will see humans turned into Parademons on a few factors. They seem to all be confirmed by the shot in the new trailer of a human soldier - fighting alongside the rest of Earth's united armies in the opening battle of Justice League, set thousands of years in the past - screaming out in pain and he appears to be burned by an unseen force.
Well, not so much 'burned' as 'reborn' into a nightmarish monster. Take a look:
What's left is the charred, wrinkled, greying skin of the Parademons in Darkseid's army. Accompanied by transformed teeth, grown more pointed and vicious. Also, the glowing red eyes are a good sign that the soldier has been transformed, if the rest isn't convincing. While the exact cause of the transformation isn't show, it's easy to make some predictions. And no matter what those may be, it's likely that the process will be less intense of involved than when the Parademon creation process was revealed in the comics. In fact, those glowing red rifts in the Earth's surface could be the answer.
As is usually the case with adaptations of comic books to film, it's safe to assume the most complicated aspects of the mythology will be streamlined for the sake of casual audiences. And in truth, simply saying that the 'power of Apokolips' can infect a person through simple exposure would pass believability for fans (the New Gods who live there are basically beyond understanding anyway). And if that red, glowing energy is enough to transform those coming into contact with it... well, let's just say Steppenwolf's mission to create a version of it powerful enough to stain the skies red later in the trailer spells disaster for humans everywhere.
For those unaware of the introduction of this new method of Parademon construction, it was introduced relatively recently - or at least explicitly clarified. Since the beginning, the winged Parademons of Apokolips were accepted as the shock troopers of Darkseid's army. How, or what they even were wasn't all that important - some even resembling normal humans with massive armor and weaponry. But in the New 52's version of Earth-2, which just so happened to be launched by writer Geoff Johns, current supervisor of the DC Movie Universe, the true origin of at least some of the Parademons was explained.
As we said before, they were constructed out of human beings through a fittingly comic book-y dose of mad science. But the key here, as we pointed out in our earlier theory, is that humans may not turn into regular Parademons. In the comics, the result of transforming a person was a Parademon Berserker: a stronger, more formidable foe in Darkseid's ranks. Given the inherent distinction based on what species is being transformed, the fact that some Parademons seen in the modern section of Justice League's story glow yellow instead of red seems important.
It's worth pointing out that the human seen being turned into a Parademon in the ancient prologue still has red eyes, so if the distinction in color really means anything, the truth of it is still kept under wraps. Perhaps the yellow glow is the result of a different Earth race being Parademon-ized - Atlantean, or even Amazonian? Most of the effects-heavy sequences involving the Parademons have undergone changes in post-production, but still, the decision to make them glow yellow seems like a deliberate choice.
These answers were likely to be a focal point of Justice League even before the human-to-Parademon transformation was shown to be a highlighted feature of the prologue. After all, it's presumably the same Apokoliptian technology that gives Cyborg almost an identical body to the Parademons... minus the subservience to Darkseid. We're already worried about the innocent bystanders being abducted ahead of Steppenwolf's arrival, and the ones apparently living next to the nuclear facility used for the climactic set piece. Can a process like this ever be reversed?
Let us know your own theories, or whether or not you think we've nailed the real mystery in the comments.
