Here's What Those Confusing Shazam! Moments Meant

What are his powers? What's up with the bad guy? Do superheroes have a group chat or what? Riding on the high of the mischievous, hilarious, and sometimes touching film, we want to clear up a couple questions about Billy Batson and his bigger, better self.

Shazam! opens with the creation of the villain, Thaddeus Sivana. Bullied and belittled by his family, he is naturally tempted by the voices of the Seven Deadly Sins, who promise power and respect. He fails the wizard's test and is forever scarred. The wizard casts a spell to seek the pure of heart and find someone worthy of his name.

When Billy Batson takes the test, things go differently.

The Sins aren't there to tempt him, and the wizard chooses him as Champion. Sivana's research indicates that hundreds of people had been found before Billy, and each had in some way failed. Were they all sinners at their core? Why was the wizard so picky in the first place?

The wizard had been burned before, bequeathing his power to Teth-Adam, who became a tyrant and unleashed the Seven Deadly Sins. Originally, Black Adam, as portrayed by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson himself, was set to appear in the film. Perhaps we'll see exactly what happens when a wizard gives power to someone not so pure of heart in the Black Adam solo film.

There are rarely hard and fast rules for magic, which makes its implementation confusing. In Shazam!, Sivana, Billy, and countless other people are spirited away to a cave-like lair known as the Rock of Eternity. There, the wizard resides surrounded by empty thrones. The Seven Deadly Sins are imprisoned in stone. This place isn't on any map, much to the frustration of Sivana, who dedicates his life to finding it. It's in a kind of limbo that can only be accessed through magic.

According to the comics, the Rock of Eternity resides within multiple dimensions at once. This helps explain a thoroughly confusing sequence during which Billy and his new family run around the maze-like rock and discover a collection of doors straight out of Monsters Inc. Behind each one, there's some kind of strange other world. The movie's explanation of all this is basically just, "Because magic."

People typically don't fund mad scientists. They are forced to work in abandoned castles and basement labs, their only friend a typically inept and malformed crony, but not Dr. Sivana. He has a couple dozen scientists working under him in a busy lab. Only when you walk into his personal office does his lifetime obsession with the mystical Rock of Eternity and Seven Deadly Sins begin to show. Sivana has been especially smart to hide his desperate search into the realm of unknowable magic as a study of "mass hallucination." Here's what those confusing Shazam! moments meant - providing you keep watching the video!

#Shazam #DCEU

"Pure of heart" | 0:13
The Rock of Eternity | 1:11
Funding Sivana's weird research | 1:56
What are the Sins? | 2:48
Greek gods? | 3:31
Identifying Sins | 4:33
Does the world like superheroes? | 5:15
Infinite Shazam siblings? | 6:11
Bad guy mechanics | 6:56
Why was Envy left? | 7:35
The caterpillar | 8:03
Shazam and Superman | 8:51