Aimless Man Morphs into Giant Blue Beetle

It’s a story you’ve heard before: A man with a dead end job wakes one day to find himself a beetle. “Everything right now feels so out of reach,” Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) laments in the trailer for the upcoming DC Extended Universe film Blue Beetle. His life as a resigned pool boy in the fictional Palerma City is about to be abruptly upended when he’s asked to safeguard a mysterious box. Inside, he finds an ancient-looking electric-blue beetle that jumps inside his body and turns him into a part-insect, part-human cyborg. His skin morphs into an exoskeleton reminiscent of a standard-issue supersuit, he grows bug-like appendages on his back, and a threat-detecting computer capable of slicing a bus in half now lives in his brain. The beetle has a name and it’s Scarab. “It’s some kind of world-destroying weapon,” a more knowledgable voice says in the trailer. But the villain, Susan Sarandon’s Victoria Kord, wants it for, oh, no reason. “The Scarab chose you, but it belongs to me,” she intimidates. Adriana Barraza, Damían Alcázar, Elpidia Carrillo, Bruna Marquezine, Raoul Max Trujillo, and George Lopez star in the upcoming superhero tale. See if Jaime meets the same fate as Gregor Samsa — in theaters on August 18.