Warning: The following article on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and how the DCEU ends contains spoilers.
In 2013, I went to see Man of Steel with a good friend of mine, who was also the only other person who seemed as psyched for a new Superman movie as me.
Man of Steel opened on Krypton, with Jor-El fighting against military insurrectionist General Zod, in an attempt to save his species from destruction as the planet collapsed around him. Jor-El succeeded in sending his son, Kal-El, AKA Clark Kent, AKA (again) Superman, to Earth along with the genetic information of Krypton, though he lost his own life in the process.
Helmed by Zack Snyder, Man of Steel was the first movie in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) and felt like something new in the superhero genre. Snyder’s work didn’t have the optimism of the earlier Superman DC movies, and at the same time, it didn’t have the polish of Disney’s, at the time, fledgling Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, it had shaky cam and a sort of muddy, brown aesthetic that was definitely in vogue at the time. Superman even killed a dude to save some people, which felt like a massive subversion and questioning of how the hero’s ethics would play out in the real world. Overall, the director’s early DCEU felt like something dirty, violent, and lived in.
I walked out of Man of Steel having loved it, but within about a year, my feelings had reversed on it entirely, owing in large part to the cultural dissection of the film that found a way to make virtually every single scene bad or a problem in some way. By the time Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad rolled around the next year, I was thoroughly done with the DCEU, only to be sucked back in by Wonder Woman, bounce out again due to Justice League, in again for Shazam! and Birds of Prey, and then out again — you get the idea.
I don’t necessarily agree with Snyder’s maximalist, edgy vision for the DCEU, and I have some pretty massive problems with his work that make it, in general, not for me. At the same time, I can appreciate why people liked it. His DCEU remains something entirely different from normal superhero fare, even if it didn’t always work. It never, ever felt like Snyder wanted to make my father’s superhero universe, and I loved that about him.
All of that makes the ending of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom more depressing, though, as it seems likely to be the actual final film in the DCEU in a year in which we’ve had at least two other movies billed as the final film in the DCEU.
For those who haven’t seen Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom yet, the movie ends with Orm eating a cockroach, a callback to Arthur Curry convincing his brother at one point in the movie that people eat them on the surface world.
That’s it. That’s how the DCEU ends. Patrick Wilson eats a cockroach.
There’s something that feels so poignant about the whole thing, and while I want to avoid turning it into some sort of grand metaphor, it’s hard not to. Despite its faults, the DCEU started out with so much promise. Man of Steel was a high-stakes tale involving the fate of a species and the ethics of killing others. Sometimes, the film and Snyder’s take came off as sophomoric and more concerned with edginess than depth, but even when he failed, it was interesting, and it was clear he had a vision for what he wanted to do. Instead, the whole thing ended with Orm eating a cockroach.
At the end of the day, Hollywood exists to make money. One of the biggest critiques of the early DCEU was that it was clearly trying to play catch-up to the astonishingly successful MCU, resulting in it shoving characters together as fast as possible for a blockbuster Justice League movie rather than giving them a bit more time to develop in their own films. Once it became clear things weren’t working, Warner Bros. pivoted.
They’ve now pivoted again, with James Gunn and Peter Safran’s take on the DC film universe, which has undoubtedly contributed to some of the poor box office returns for recent films. Whether what they do will succeed or will, at this point, be washed away in the growing fatigue surrounding superhero movies and the confusion around what is and isn’t canon anymore remains to be seen. I love DC, and I wish them all the best.
Still, that same profit motive that’s driven Warner Bros. means that, like with the comics, these stories can’t end until they’re no longer profitable or valuable to the corporations behind them. This results in a lack of control as to just how things end. The cockroach scene would be a bad ending to the film regardless, but it’s genuinely depressing when it’s the end of a ten-year film franchise.
The problem of that profit motive, which makes it mandatory that every dead horse be beaten into dust, is that the story has to go on for as long as it can in order to keep making money. However, a good ending that caps things off is a beautiful thing. It lets work end with dignity and purpose, bringing everything full circle as best it can and giving us a distinct unit of art that we can examine and re-examine, like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy.
The DCEU deserved a better ending than it got. For all its ambition, it deserved the chance to put its message out into the world, rather than have endless, cynical business decisions undermine the whole thing in hopes of getting an extra few dollars. Maybe the lesson of the cockroach is that not setting an endpoint only ever results in a sputtering, flaccid ending, like cockroach guts leaking out of our mouths.
