'Shazam!' May Be The The Most Positive Superhero Movie Ever Made – But It Has One Serious Failing

If you're reading this far, you know the drill. 15-year old foster kid Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is granted magical powers by an ancient wizard and when he says "Shazam," he transforms into an adult superhero (a hilarious and totally game Zachary Levi) with powers of flight, super-strength, and more. After an hour of Big-esque shenanigans and amusing abuses of power, Billy learns the Spider-Man lesson: with great power comes great responsibility and so on, and he must use his new abilities to defeat Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), a dangerous man with a heavy chip on his shoulder empowered by the demonic "Seven Deadly Sins."

That leads up to the climax: Billy and his foster siblings face off against Sivana and his monstrous allies at a Philadelphia fairground. Realizing that his greatest power is not his power but the ability to share the power granted to him by the wizard, Billy grants his newfound family his magical abilities. Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), Mary (Grace Fulton), Darla (Faithe Herman), Eugene (Ian Chen) and Pedro (Jovan Armand) transform into superheroes, complete with brightly colored costumes, capes, and glowing lightning bolts on their chests. Cue a final smackdown between the new Shazam family and Sivana's army, complete with adorable quips and adult actors perfectly capturing the joy of their child counterparts.

This sequence is undeniably fun. It's lovely, even. It completes Billy's arc: he has embraced his family and found his team and he has realized that choosing to be alone when others want to love you is an act of self-destruction. This affirming realization is shared with his foster siblings and they too are given the opportunity to become their best selves, to transform into superheroes that reflect their idealized form, to find the caped crusader, the man of steel, the, uh, Aquaman, that lies in the heart of every good person. It's a thematic cousin to Rian Johnson's beautiful Star Wars: The Last Jedi: anyone can be a hero, even a bunch of foster kids from the streets of Philadelphia.

Have I been positive enough yet? I think so. Because now I want to talk about what's sticking in my craw. And that's Pedro.

We're introduced to Billy's foster family with shorthand introductions. Darla is the precocious talker. Mary is the hard worker. Eugene is the gamer. Freddy is the dorky superhero fan. And Pedro is the big kid, the heavyset guy with antisocial tendencies who doesn't make eye contact, who avoids conversation when possible. Even with these simple set-ups, it's possible that everyone in the audience can see themselves in at least one member of this household.

Well, I saw myself in Pedro. As a heavyset guy who grew up being too shy, too anxious, and too embroiled in my own self-loathing over the shape of my body to make many friends, I immediately related to this kid. I would've killed to have Billy's powers, to be able to say a magic word and transform into a muscular superhero with a square jaw. I dreamed of it. In the climax, when Pedro gains the physique of a classical superhero torn straight from a comic book, I recognized the wish fulfillment being brought to life. I knew it in my bones.

But now, years later and perhaps slightly wiser, I realize how dangerous, and misguided, this particular dream was. By presenting a fat kid's idealized self as a classically athletic man, Shazam! is teaching the wrong lesson.

Here's the thing: there have been plenty of fat characters in superhero stories before and truth be told, most of them only add to the stigma. Think of The Blob from X-Men, a character whose obese body is treated as its own super-power. Larger comic book characters are generally defined by their weight and their weight usually defines their power-set. The coolest heroes, the ones who get the be on the cover, are the lean guys or the guys with bulging muscles. The problems discussed above have run rampant in superhero comics for decades, but what else can you expect from a medium that is, at its core, a power fantasy for readers?

So when I watched chubby Pedro become a superhero in Shazam!, I thought about Valiant Comics' Faith, a heavyset superhero who is not defined by her weight. In fact, her weight does not define her powers. Revitalized by a new creative team in recent years, Faith has the power of flight and she's agile and light on her feet – all the while being presented as a plus-size woman. The recent stories featuring the character have been critical and commercial successes for a good reason: they're damn fine superhero stories, told with heart, but they're also brave and bold enough to showcase a happy, healthy plus-size woman who achieves her best self without having to unrealistically transform into a supermodel.

Just look at the image of modern Shazam family below, the current comic book incarnations from which the new movie borrows many of its core ideas. Look at Pedro, standing center in the green costume. Look how he's clearly powerful and fit...but look how he's still a big dude, shaped more like a power-lifter than a sports model. Hell, just look to any "world's strongest man" competitions and you'll see a variety of body types, including men with large bellies, who are pulling off astonishing feats of strength.

This may still be an idealized superhero body, but it's one that feels attainable, one that feels at least somewhat realistic, and most importantly, one that tells readers "Hey, people are different shapes and not everyone is going to look like Superman and that's okay." Early in the film, there's a brief reference to Pedro leaving one of his weights lying on the kitchen table, suggesting that he's actually working out and keeping himself in shape despite being a heavy guy. The film could've leaned into this, especially with the casting of his superhero self. It does not. And that's a shame.

When the credits rolled on Shazam! and the theater emptied into the lobby, I noted a half dozen younger kids zooming around the lobby, arms outstretched, recreating action scenes from the movie. They loved the film. Of course they did. It's a joy. But I was also tinged with a familiar melancholy. Here was a superhero movie that had a chance to tell the heavy kids in the audience that they, too, could be heroes, even if they would never look like Jason Momoa or Zachary Levi. Here was a superhero movie that had the chance for a heavy character to achieve his ideal form and find it to be, well, himself and not a total fantasy built around typical expectations.

Shazam! is a very good movie, one that I can imagine digging itself deep into young minds with its messages of hope, family, and self-confidence. And yet, it still leaves the fat kid in me sad to know that I will only ever be a superhero if I look like that.