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"They're corpses below those stars!"
While more vibrant and high-spirited than before, the upgrade to an R-rating, coupled with a new director with no strings attached, ensure that Task Force X's second cinematic outing isn't one for the faint of heart.Previews
- Joel Kinnaman was not lying when he said the movie would be "heavily R-rated"
; the Red Band trailer alone features such lovely sights as King Shark ripping a soldier in two, and prior to that taking another poor guy by surprise and devouring him head-first.- In the film version of the moment when King Shark rips that soldier in half, you can literally see his ribcage and his organs falling out.
- Weasel's appearance is... grotesque, to say the least. His bulgy Fish Eyes and feral demeanor certainly make him a far cry from the likes of Rocket, not helped by the fact that, per Flagg's word, he's been known to have killed twenty-seven children.
- Starro, having before been relegated to appearances in television shows and video games when it came to adaptations, makes his big-screen debut with this movie, and he's as every bit the Eldritch Abomination that you'd envision him as. A released clip depicts the Squad looking on in awe and fear as he bursts out from some sort of entrapment before fleeing for their lives. Harley in particular manages to get a close and personal glimpse at him, and all that she can say is nothing more than a "woah".
Movie
- The various experiments in Doctor Grieves's lab on Starro's infectees, including one of them cut in half and still moving, or another with half their face torn away with the starfish still attached to it. The fact that these victims are also political prisoners and their families also makes the scene more unsettling. And to make matters worse, Starro also suffered at the hands of the Thinker and dies expressing how it was happy in space.
- On top of that, the one with the starfish being removed from their face shows they don't have any of the normal bodily organs that would be on a human head, and it's full of holes. This suggests the Starro drones, once latched onto a human, drills into their heads and morphs the internal components into something not human.
- Or they just eat the parts which their puppet-body doesn't need anyway. Starfish are carnivores, after all.
- Although Amanda Waller is no stranger to taking drastic measures to get what she wants, it isn't any less unsettling nor sickening to see what lines she's willing to cross. The earliest example we see is how coldly she threatens to put Tyla in Belle Reve to DuBois. The kicker was her taunting DuBois that his daughter will likely die as the jail has the highest mortality rate in the American prison system.
- Even her team is disturbed by her ruthlessness. Her interaction with John Economos exclaims her character entirely.Economos: Hey, all that stuff about his kid... you wouldn't really do that, right?
Waller: You don't know half of what I would do, John.
- Even her team is disturbed by her ruthlessness. Her interaction with John Economos exclaims her character entirely.
- The Herrera family's execution by hanging is shown through video footage. What makes it more sickening is seeing that three of the victims were children, which Ratcatcher and Polka Dot-Man are clearly horrified by.
- The entire opening massacre (save for Rick and Harley) of Team A! Even going in knowing that not everyone is going to make it out alive won't prepare you for the parade of grisly demises.
- Before they even engage in combat, the team already lose a member during the mission drop-off when Weasel, whom nobody knew couldn't swim, promptly drowns in the ocean. Despite Savant's attempts to save and bring him to shore, Weasel's apparently already dead. Although his fate isn't as horrific compared to what the rest of the team will face, drowning is still far from a nice experience. However, The Stinger does reveal that he's alive… though that in itself is its own brand of horror (scroll down to the bottom for more details).
- Blackguard, while in the middle of revealing himself to have sold the team out, has his entire face blown off in an abrupt fashion by an unseen Corto Maltese soldier. It may remind a viewer of the equally as bloody death of the radioman at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. Even if he deserved it, seeing the vacant, gory crater where his face once was goes to show just how much more this film can get away with compared to past DCEU installments —Birds of Prey (2020) and Zack Snyder's Justice League, which were also R-rated, included.
- When Mongal attempts to bring down a helicopter, it almost immediately proves to be the worst possible thing she could've done; while she succeeds in bringing it down, she's caught in the wreckage and we get to see her crawling out of it... burning alive while howling in agony. We also get a special look at the blackened husk of her corpse during the title sequence with her eyes opened and white.
- It isn't just Mongal who perishes for her incompetency. Captain Boomerang is impaled with palm tree wood from the helicopter (with several of the splinters going through his face) and gets completely shredded by the blades of it afterwards. We also see his charred and dismembered arm in the title sequence, just to add to the pain of those who liked the character.
- Not even Javelin and TDK, who arguably had the least horrible fates, are exempt; the two of them get shot repeatedly with the former bleeding to death and the latter's arms being shot while they're still detached from him, screaming in pain. A Freeze-Frame Bonus reveals TDK to at least still be alive, though that's probably little comfort given he's last seen writhing in immense agony.
- As a horrified Savant tries to flee from the carnage, Waller warns him repeatedly to turn back and face the soldiers despite their larger numbers. When her last warning fails to make him return, we get to see just how those skull implants work... and it isn't pretty.
- Additionally, a canary resembling the one he killed earlier eats a chunk of his remains in the title sequences. While Played for Laughs, it can be unnerving to some people.
- The reason Bloodsport is afraid of rats: When he failed a training exercise to become an assassin, his father decided to punish him by locking him inside a small cage with a bunch of hungry rats for 24 hours. He was a child when this happened.
- While the jokes about Polka-Dot Man imagining everyone as his mother are Played for Laughs, the first scene of it, wherein he imagines her as the squad and freedom fighters, can catch someone off guard, ESPECIALLY King Shark, who is still CGI.
- Abner's backstory is not played for humor, however. Not least, because his was the best outcome among his brothers and sisters, whom their mother also experimented on.
- Suarez torching Luna's aviary and killing every bird inside. While we don't see the massacre onscreen, we are treated to the horrifying sound of the poor animals' dying screams.
- The US government in this universe collaborated with the dictatorial regime of Corto Maltese to perform the aforementioned human experiments, and in the present day, Waller states that the White House considers Starro's rampage in Corto Maltese to be a useful means of sowing chaos in an enemy nation—which, beyond being cruel, ignores the possibility of Starro's parasites controlling people outside of Corto Maltese and potentially causing a global catastrophe...not to mention that all of these brutal experiments on Starro have seemingly created nothing of value, with the White House happy to destroy everything related to Project Starfish. With these revelations about the government's amoral (and incompetent) nature, it suddenly seems unsurprising that the USA of the DC Universe is full of super-criminals and that cities like Gotham are lawless hellholes.
- King Shark may be the Dumb Muscle comic relief, but he's still very much a violent human-eating beast. He at one point tears someone apart so fast that their head is visibly still alive as he's chewing on them.
- Project Starfish, in which the government experimented on thousands of people, including innocent civilians and children.
- The mind controlled prisoners yelling and screaming in the cages. Especially when you remember that they're all extensions of Starro itself, giving an early insight into how broken and tortured it is.
- One of the mind controlled prisoners says "he had his way with me" implying The Thinker raped some patients (it doesn't help he's shown to have a high libido in the movie), and thus Starro by extension. It gets even worse when Ratcatcher 2, who's basically a young adult, looks at The Thinker upon hearing this and the latter shrugs it off as nothing with a sick, bashful grin.
- The various test subjects that have been subjected to brutal mutilation. This includes one whose entire torso is cut open with lots of exposed entrails, another whose entire chest and abdomen have been skinned and another one who has had the mini Starro ripped from his face, taking the skin off with it. And they’re all still alive. One can only imagine the horrible pain Starro felt.
- Essentially, the nature of Project Starfish is so horrifying that it shatters Rick Flag's faith in the US Government, driving him to expose the involvement of the US Government by any means necessary.
- After Peacemaker kills Flag, he slumps to the ground with his eyes wide open as if he is paralyzed. To say that it looks creepy would be an understatement.
- Polka-Dot Man unleashes his Polka-Dots on two armed Mooks in the office. Although the disintegration was quick, it left nothing but their legs with a pile of red mush on the floor.
- Which elevates the creepiness of Abner's previous admission that, if he doesn't periodically release his polka-dots, they'll eat him alive. He was being literal when he said that.
- While he undoubtedly deserved it for spending decades torturing and experimenting on Starro and the Corto Malteseans, the Thinker’s death is painful to watch. He gets his right arm and right leg ripped off and is then swung into a window with enough force to splatter him on in it like a bug.
- The extended scene isn't any better, if not worse. This time, it takes not one, but three swings to kill the Thinker and every time, we can see his mangled face before he finally explodes. As Gunn mentions in an interview that he had to take out a scene because it proved to be too gory for the movie, no wonder why this is cut out from the final cut.
- Waller ends up not only being perfectly fine with Starro destroying the city and murdering thousands of innocent people, but also willing to kill her own team when they decide to stop Starro.
- King Shark's 'dumb fish friends.' Once they are freed from the aquarium thanks to Polka Dot Man accidentally setting off the bombs, they reveal themselves to be far less adorable than they looked, showing off lamprey mouths and latching onto King Shark to try and eat him. Just what were those things, anyway?
- The fact that the fish are actually capable of drawing blood from King Shark. This is the same character who was established earlier to be bulletproof and later survives falling over 40 feet to the ground.
- In the comics, when Starro attaches one of its spawn to your face there was the hope that once the Justice League or other heroes defeated Starro those spawns would harmlessly fall off. In this movie, getting a Starro attached to your face means you're already dead. As the Thinker mentions in the lab, every poor soul is a brainless husk the second Starro has them. When the Squad kills Starro, every one of those puppets dies with it.
- For anyone that shares Bloodsport's fear of rats, the end of the battle with Starro can be downright horrific, if not nauseating. Millions of rats swarming from the rubble, pulling the Starro zombies under and swarming over the prone Dubois to reach Starro. then, following Harley spearing her way into the alien's gargantuan eyeball, scores of rats follow her lead into the wound, swimming through its ocular fluid and gnawing through nerves and blood vessels until Starro drops dead. Ratcatcher II may be The Heart of the film, but she has perhaps the gnarliest and most cruel kill in the entire runtime.
- The fact that Weasel comes back to life after the end title and is now roaming about Corto Maltese freely. Remember, it killed 27 children.note
- Squad Team B's raid on the resistance while mostly Black Comedy can be really disturbing, especially Peacemaker nonchalantly chopping a man sleeping in a hammock and a woman washing clothes. Even worse when a later scene reveals that they were actually innocent revolutionaries who just wanted to stop their corrupt leaders. Shows that as quirky and lovable as they are, they had the label of supervillains for a good reason.note
- A whole squad of soldiers open fire on King Shark achieving absolutely nothing other than making the super-strong, man-eating Shark demigod very, very angry. Their expressions show they realize exactly how screwed they are. Nanaue goes from lovable doofus to terrifying predator extremely quickly.
