How Austin Made DC’s Blue Beetle Fly
As the DC superhero hits the screen, director and Fantastic Fest regular Ángel Manuel Soto reveals his own secret origin
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., Aug. 18, 2023
It seems like every major turn of Ángel Manuel Soto's career has happened in Austin. "I love Austin," the filmmaker said. "I've said this many times and I say it without any shame that Austin is my favorite city in the U.S., and it gave me my first opportunity." It was where he shot his first commercials outside of his native Puerto Rico, and that landed him a job doing audiovisual work at Fantastic Fest 2010, "which changed my life." In 2015, he was attending the Cannes Film Festival, desperately trying to raise some interest in his debut feature, La Granja, "and it happens that [Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest founder] Tim League was celebrating his birthday there on a bar crawl. I was in the mix, and I gave him a Blu-ray." Six months later, La Granja received its world premiere at Fantastic Fest, "and that was the day I met Jairo Alvarado, who's now my manager." That meeting lead to his Sundance 2020 award-winning second feature, Charm City Kings, "and in the meantime I did [virtual reality horror short] 'Dinner Party,' which took me to South by Southwest."
So it's no surprise that Soto was so excited to bring his latest film, DC superhero adventure Blue Beetle, to Austin for a sneak screening and block party earlier this month, ahead of its release this weekend. "This whole full-circle journey for me is beautiful," he said.
Blue Beetle is in many ways a classic superhero origin story, as law school grad and first-generation immigrant Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) finds himself bonded with an alien artifact and becoming the protector of Palmera City. In the comics, he's actually the third Blue Beetle, and Soto grew up associating the mask with No. 2: billionaire philanthropist-turned-crime fighter Ted Kord. He only really became aware of Reyes "because of my friends who loved him in The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice. … When I started seeing that this movie was being made, that's when I really started sinking my teeth in." Yet that lineage under the cowl isn't ignored in the movie. "This is Jaime Reyes' story," Soto said, "but we love Ted Kord."
However, complicated comic book continuity isn't the only history in Blue Beetle. The script by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (writer of the 2019 English language remake of Miss Bala) deals explicitly with the long, dark narrative of the USA's intervention in Latin America. It's part of the Reyes family history, but also a complicating element in the backstory of vicious cyborg Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo). "A lot of the movies that we see out there, when they present Latino characters as villains or gangsters or narcos," Soto said, "they never explain why, what's the origin of all of it? It's always assumed that that's who they are, that's why they're bad, we don't like them. For me, we had to understand that there is a legacy of this kind of interventionism that has affected Latin America." For Soto, being able to explore those elements was essential. "It's something that weighs on our back forever," he added, "but in this climate it can't not be said."
Blue Beetle opens in theatres Aug. 18. Read our review here.
