On a whim, I decided to watch the recent superhero movie, Blue Beetle. I’ve been feeling a little burned out by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I figured I’d try something from DC. It also stars Xolo Maridueña (who I’ve enjoyed in Cobra Kai) as the main hero, Jaime Reyes.
The basic structure of the movie is standard hero-origin fare, but at the very least, it ends up being better than a lot of the recent Marvel stuff. I think where Blue Beetle succeeds (and where the MCU increasingly fails) is that it feels very human and doesn’t get lost in the weeds of a “superhero universe” or its tropes. In the case of Blue Beetle, the emphasis on Jaime’s Latin American background is what holds the entire film together.
Jaime’s family is Mexican, and they are shaped by both the struggles and triumphs they’ve had to face making a life in the US, ranging from some members being undocumented immigrants, to enduring years of backbreaking labor, to a rather surprising detail about his doting old grandma. Blue Beetle asks how a person like Jaime, the very first member of his family to graduate from college, gains a lot of his strength from his upbringing and the values of his culture. The generational and cultural gap felt by Jaime as a first-generation American feels very authentic. And all through this, the story of the Reyes family delivers a complex message about what it’s like to aim for the American dream in an America that doesn’t see you as equal.
Blue Beetle isn’t spectacular, but it’s still a pretty entertaining feature with some solid legs. It frames the superhero aspects of its story through an exploration of a multigenerational immigrant experience, and manages to cross a finish line that many of its peers have been unable to reach.
OGIUE MANIAX 
Hmm, this sounds pretty interesting. I only saw a couple trailers for this movie when it first came out in the theaters, and it just kind of looked like another run of the mill super hero movie, so I skipped it, but this sounds a little different. I’ll have to check it out. I tend to like stories about the immigrant experience in the US.
Lol, growing up I always thought I was very American, like more American than apple pie. Then in my twenties I got a job in a big city and I heard the term “third generation immigrant” for the first time in my life. My grandparents came over to the US when they were little kids, and I always thought that if you moved to the US before you started school, than you were totally an American! I was very surprised to find that my new coworkers didn’t have the same opinion. I was even more shocked when, after they found out that my parents were the first gen of my family born in the US, that they started treating me really differently. I grew up in a port city where basically only people that couldn’t speak any English at all were considered immigrants, so this different point of view of who were “American” and who weren’t really threw me for a loop. Ever since that experience, I’ve had a curiosity of what other experiences for immigrants are like.
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