Spoilers ahead for Suicide Squad. If you haven't gotten to theaters to see it yet, you may want to check out one of our other awesome stories.
Now that Suicide Squad has been out for a week, the majority of audiences have made their way to movie theaters to see all of the villains and chaos that the marketing promised. And those moviegoers certainly noticed that some of the characters in the titular squad had far less screen time than others. Perhaps the worst victim of this circumstance was Slipknot, who was robbed of a character backstory scene, and then was promptly killed early on into the actual mission. While his death was effective in raising the stakes and making it clear that the villains could die at any moment, his lack of backstory made him a total wallflower compared to the loud characters presented on screen. So why didn't he get the same treatment as everyone else?
Suicide Squad director David Ayer recently sat down to participate in Empire's Film Podcast, where he was asked about Slipknot's lack of background in the film. When questioned about why he didn't get the cool credits and graphics that everyone else did, Ayer said the following:
Yeah we shot one, but after a point it became overloaded, ya know, so you have to cull and pick and choose your battles, and Slipknot gets his head blown off pretty quick, so ya know, I made a commitment early on not to try and create some kind of misdirect because when you have that many characters every frame of real estate is priceless, and I didn't want to invest in that real estate to create some misdirect because after opening night everyone knows he dies anyway.
While it felt a bit inorganic that Slipknot didn't receive the same treatment as the other squad members, David Ayer's reasoning does make a bit of sense. In regards to the pacing of Suicide Squad, we spent a pretty sizable amount of the runtime dedicated to Amanda Waller explaining the various villain's backstories. And while it was a fun introduction, and we got some primo Flash and Batman footage squeezed in there, it did run a bit long. Sure, Slipknot's introduction wouldn't have made a huge time difference, but it might have been just the cut needed in order to keep audiences engaged in the evolving story before them.
Then again, it might have been a disservice to exclude Slipknot in this way, because it made his death a bit insignificant. The audience didn't give a shit about this random dude who happened to be on the mission, so when Rick Flag blew his head off it didn't affect us as much as it did to the characters on screen.
What did you think of Slipknot in Suicide Squad? Sound off in the comments below.
