Kalypso (Lucy Liu) is the main antagonist of the 2023 DC Extended Universe superhero film Shazam! Fury of the Gods. She was the middle child of the Hesperides, who wishes to take back the powers Atlas, her father, gave to the Wizard Shazam.
By the 21st century, Kalypso comes across Billy Batson and his foster siblings, who fight crime as the Shazam Family, leading her to unleash a dragon over the city until they give up their powers. However, she betrayed her sisters and therefore subvert Atlas' legacy, planning to conquer Earth, kill Shazam and his allies, and even be willing to remorselessly destroy her sisters for interference until she was killed by Billy Batson.
Personality[]
Kalypso is a deceiving goddess who could be compared to Hades' evilness. She enjoys using dark powers against her enemies and intends to conquer Earth as an act of vengeance. Despite at first seeming to care for her sisters and for her father's legacy, she had her own ways of completing this task and eventually subverted these two traits by throwing everything away, betraying both Anthea and Hespera and being more than willing to kill them for interference. She is heavily ambitious, power-hungry, sadistic, delusional, and sociopathic. In other words, she is the mother of all monsters.
She misanthropically views humans as pests, intending to provoke them until they are all extinct, and turn their world into a black hole, or in other words, hell. She cares nothing about anything but her own ways of life.
History[]
Kalypso is the vengeful and treacherous daughter of Atlas, and sister of both Anthea and Hespera, having a more vengeful plan than theirs and manipulating both of her siblings for her own needs. Kalypso at first appears stealing a part of a broken staff, along with Hespera. She hypnotizes one of the security guards, turning him into a savage animal. Later, she was fighting Shazam alongside her sisters, forcing Anthea to betray Freddy and misleading Hespera, the rightful commander of the trio.
She hypnotizes Freddy's school teacher Mr. Geckle and causes him to fall off the rooftop. She then acts out of ambition, but Hespera chokes her and reminds her of the importance of human life and morals towards one another.
Kalypso then kidnaps Freddy alongside her sisters, and when he is interrogated by Hespera, who shows remorse and concern towards the humans, planning to steal from them but not to destroy them completely, Kalypso then tortures Freddy with her mental powers, before ordering the guards to throw him into a pit in which her pet dragon Ladon sleeps. She then betrays Hespera who obtained the seed of life to restore her realm completely in a peaceful way, and uses the seed of life to turn Earth into a black hole, much to Hespera's disappointment. She then plants it on Earth to create monsters and complete her spell. Hespera and Anthea try to stop her from being an irredeemable destroyer of worlds who would be compared to Hades according to Hespera's claims. Kalypso makes her dragon jill Hespera, and she turns Anthea into a normal human, before intending to kill her with the others of her current species.
She then proceeds to the final battle against Shazam, revealing she acted all this time out of pure ambition and not out of vengeance. She rides Landon (her dragon) towards Shazam, attempting to kill him. Shazam flies very fast into the sky, and under her instruction, a dark unicorn like horse is created, readying to kill the heroes. However, it redeems itself when Darla feeds it with skittles. More horses come and redeem themselves, as the heroes ride on them and defeat all monsters. She then tries to kill Freddy and Anthea, but Shazam stops her by luring her and Ladon to the top of a building, where Hespera, in her last moments of life, encapsulates them in a dome and traps them both. While they are still attempting to kill Shazam, he soon launches himself towards her and finally manages to push her and Ladon into the edge of the dome, before Shazam unleashes a powerful force of electricity that kills both her and Ladon by overloading the Wizard's staff, permanently ending her reign of terror.
Trivia[]
- Like Hespera and Anthea, Kalypso is a completely original character from the DC Extended Universe. She has no comic book counterpart.
- In the Greek mythology, Kalypso isn't biologically related to the daughters of Atlas. However, the film points out that they are related, making it a little different than the original myth.
- Infact, considering their different personalities and agendas, she is a dark reflection of what both of her sisters could become. Anthea and Hespera want to solve their problem in a peaceful way, but if they would let their hatred and their inner darkness make them ambitious, they would've followed Kalypso's path. Anthea is basically a selfless heroine, but if she wouldn't have courage to stand up to Kalypso, she would've probably been darker than she is.
- Lucy Liu appeared as Pearl in the 1999 film "Payback" and also O-Ren Ishii in the "Kill Bill" duology films.