A Starro is about to be born.
When audiences sit down to watch “The Suicide Squad,” in theaters and on HBO Max Friday, they may leave with one burning question: Did I really just watch superheroes fight a giant alien starfish-y thing?
Indeed you did.
He (she? it?) may seem like a mild acid flashback, but the boss-level villain Starro is so very real and, against all odds, now appearing in a major summer blockbuster.
The movie is both a quasi-sequel to 2016’s poorly received “Suicide Squad” and a complete reboot. Government operative Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) assembles a ragtag group of convicts (including Idris Elba’s Bloodshot and Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn) to infiltrate a South American island nation and destroy a secret lab.
That’s when they have to contend with Starro.
And if you’re thinking that there have been so many superhero movies that we’re now down to using echinoderms as villains, know that Starro the Conquerer actually has an important place in comic history. He served as the bad guy in the very first print adventure of the Justice League of America back in 1960.
His name was a riff on one of the late DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz’s favorite stories, a 1925 novel called “Tarrano the Conquerer” by Ray Cummings.
As to why the starfish design with a big eye in the middle? It’s unclear. As author Michael Eury has pointed out, though, Starro creators Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky could have borrowed his look from a 1956 Japanese kaiju flick called “Warning From Space,” in which the alien invader looks virtually identical to Starro.
“The Suicide Squad” director James Gunn has said that Starro fits with the movie’s somewhat absurdist tone.
“As a kid, I found Starro completely terrifying,” Gunn said at a July press conference. “So, it was about taking something that was completely, mind you, ridiculous [and] putting him in a setting that is the gritty streets of Colón, Panama, and then allowing him to do his scary business, but he’s also completely outrageous. And so, that mix of things appealed to my aesthetic.”
Here’s hoping the movie does well enough to warrant a sequel, and audiences get a shot at seeing what C-list villain could possibly come next.
