WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Suicide Squad, now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.
Practically every character in The Suicide Squad is in some sense a villain, but going into James Gunn's movie about criminals teaming up to fight more dangerous threats, there was always the question of who the real villain of the story was going to be. It was known beforehand that Task Force X would be fighting Starro the Conqueror, and it was also predictable that at least one of the squad members would turn on the team, which happened to be Peacemaker. But Starro and Peacemaker's evil actions are just symptomatic of the ultimate villain of The Suicide Squad: the United States government.
Task Force X is sent by Amanda Waller to Corto Maltese on behalf of the American government to destroy Project Starfish, a top-secret military project at the Jotunheim prison. The story they're told going in is that Project Starfish is the doing of Corto Maltese's new dictator Silvio Luna. Luna is absolutely a scumbag, but even if everything they heard about him was true, the way Task Force X begins its mission by slaughtering the very freedom fighters they were supposed to be helping is already a heavy satire of American foreign policy.
Once the scientist The Thinker takes Peacemaker, Rick Flag and Ratcatcher II into Jotunheim to reveal to them exactly what Project Starfish is, The Suicide Squad gets even brutal in its political commentary. It turns out Project Starfish was an American project all along, torturing the alien Starro and killing tons of human test subjects as part of experiments the government couldn't get away with on US soil. The reason the squad was sent to destroy it wasn't out of safety concerns, but as a cover-up now that a hostile Corto Maltese government couldn't be trusted to keep it secret.
Project Starfish plays like a metaphor for the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, where the American military used its presence in other countries to get away with war crimes. As if Project Starfish itself wasn't bad enough, Waller wants the squad to let Starro loose for the sake of killing civilians and further political instability, a situation that evokes decades of violent US interference in Latin American countries. Peacemaker betrays the rest of the squad because, in his fanatical misguided patriotism, he is the only member who wouldn't betray Waller and the government's orders.
It's become a common refrain among critics of superhero movies, particularly the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that the genre serves as "military propaganda." While these arguments are often reductive, there is a grain of truth to them. Many films and TV shows from both Marvel and DC seek out US military approval and are therefore limited in their ability to criticize American militarism. Captain America: The Winter Soldier calls out legit issues with NSA surveillance, but attributes the problems to Hydra in order to shift the blame. Captain Marvel's sci-fi story has anti-imperialism themes, but Carol Danvers' backstory glorifies the Air Force. It's a constant back-and-forth to get away with any serious political critique in most superhero films.
Nobody could ever accuse The Suicide Squad of being military propaganda. Amanda Waller's evil isn't presented as some "bad apple" aberration or a Hydra-like outside infiltration but as representative of how the system works. The heroes in this movie are those who are willing to defy the orders given to them by the government. In the blunt directness of its harsh criticism of American foreign policy, The Suicide Squad might very well be the most politically audacious superhero film since V For Vendetta.
To see how James Gunn's film tackles American foreign policy, The Suicide Squad is now in theaters and on HBO Max.