The following story contains mild spoilers for David Ayer's Suicide Squad. Please stop reading if you do not want to know any specific details about the movie.
When you are building a movie centered around a team of supervillains -- from Deadshot (Will Smith) to then lethal Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) -- one huge challenge has to be "Who do THEY fight?" If you can't use a good guy -- because they are all pre-occupied building the Justice League -- then you have to find an even worse villain worthy of the attentions of a Suicide Squad. We knew that Enchantress was going to create problems for the Squad, but it turns out that she has a personal reason for causing problems, and director David Ayer found it in the roots of the DC Comics.
Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) walks a fine line in Suicide Squad between government ally -- when she's plain, old June Moone -- and lethal sorceress. There's an object she wants to get in the upcoming movie (I'll leave that for you to discover), and she gets help from a character we saw it the trailer, but was unidentified, up until now. Incubus is that monster who divides a subway car in half in the Suicide Squad trailers, and in DC Comics lore, he is Enchantress's brother. David Ayer recently told me:
Incubus. It's a little bit obscure, but it is right out of canon. It's one of the first Suicide Squad [comics] I read, where [Enchantress] and her brother end up transporting these people into different dimensions, and it was kind of like, 'Whoa, that's insane. I'm going to go for that.'
As we wrote about earlier, Suicide Squad differs from previous films in the still-early DCEU (like Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) because it introduces magic in the form of Enchantress and her brother, Incubus. These are extremely powerful beings who create all sorts of new obstacles for the largely human villains in the Squad. Deadshot isn't a metahuman. Harley isn't a metahuman. Boomerang (Jai Courtney) only fights with a boomerang. What's that going to do? Even Killer Croc has problems grappling with magic, which is part of what makes Incubus and Enchantress so scary.
Here's a shot of Incubus doing some damage from the Suicide Squad trailers.
You will find out for yourself if the Squad is able to rise to the challenge and contain both Incubus and Enchantress when the DC Cinematic Universe tackles magic and sorcery starting on Friday, August 5.
