The Suicide Squad trailer reveals the DCEU’s next great villain: Starro
Well, this looks like a whole lot of fun, doesn't it?
James Gunn is bringing his unique sensibilities to the DCEU with this year’s The Suicide Squad. The film is set to be a very loose sequel to 2016’s David Ayer-directed Suicide Squad, with only a handful of characters returning alongside several major new additions.
Now, fans have gotten their first real look at The Suicide Squad with the first official trailer, and unsurprisingly, it is so James Gunn.
The Suicide Square trailer arrives
Warner Bros. debuted the first red-band trailer for The Suicide Squad Friday morning. The trailer features plenty of R-rated humor and violence throughout (looking at you, King Shark), which just further sells it as the supervillain version of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films that fans have been hoping for.
The most interesting development of all though comes in the trailer’s final moments, which confirm what some fans had previously suspected about the film — namely, that it will feature the DCEU debut of Starro the Conqueror. Check out the trailer for yourself below.
Who is Starro in DC?
In DC Comics, Starro is the leader of a parasitic race of giant, starfish-shaped aliens known as Star Conquerors, which Starro uses to take over entire planets and pull both alien and human races under its mind control.
The villain — who was the first to face off against the Justice League in the comics — uses its psychic powers to populate planets with endless amounts of Star Conquerors. Starro then has the clones attach themselves to the faces of the planet’s sentient individuals, which allows the villain to mind control them and create a giant, planet-wide hive mind comprised of billions of people all under Starro’s control.
In other words, Starro is a legitimate world-conqueror, the kind of villain that seeks to simply spread its influence and control over as much of the universe as it possibly can. It also happens to look like a giant starfish, which just adds a layer of absurdity and comic goofiness to the villain that James Gunn is clearly already taking advantage of in The Suicide Squad.
See that giant starfish on the monitor? That’s Starro.
The Inverse Analysis — Based on the sheer quirkiness of the trailer, it’s not at all surprising that Starro is in The Suicide Squad. The supervillain fits in well with Gunn’s whole take on the comic book genre — especially his tendency to lean hard into the weirder corners of the Marvel and DC comics. Whether or not Starro is The Suicide Squad’s sole villain remains to be seen, but the entity certainly looks like it’ll be a challenge for the film’s titular team to take down.
As long as Harley and King Shark make it out alive, though, everything should be a-okay.
The Suicide Squad will be released in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6, 2021.
