Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

I completely forgot that Justice League: Warworld existed, despite the fact that, according to my viewing history on the app formerly known as HBO, I sat through it at some point in the year since its release (or, more likely, I put it on while I was doing housework and then took a nap). Don’t let that fool you, though, as it’s not my resentment about realizing that there was still yet another one of these movies before the coming “crisis” that led to the low score for this one; it’s one of the most forgettable, despite being one of the more original of these flicks. 

We open in the Old West, where a lady gunslinger arrives in a town that has barricaded its funds inside the town bank, to protect it from an outlaw Jonah Hex and his crew, who claim that they are owed their “protection interest” by the miners who reside within. The woman is more trusting of the townsfolks’ representative, Bartholomew “Bat” Lash. She ends up defending the town from the bandits, including derailing a train that was sent barreling toward the town’s fortifications. When Hex kills Lash, she almost beats the former to death, before riding off into the dawn, her name still unknown. From there, we find ourselves on the world of Skartaris, a very Edgar Rice Burroughs sword-and-sorcery jungle planet, where a man named Warlord captures a mercenary sent by his enemy, the dark wizard Deimos. The mercenary offers to reveal Deimos’s hideout to Warlord, but the latter man insists that the mercenary accompany them, and once Deimos is dead, he will reward the mercenary with his freedom and his weight in gold. Warlord’s little Masters of the Universe-style team gets picked off one by one until only he and the mercenary are the only ones to arrive in Deimos’s loot cave, where they also find a familiar woman chained to his throne. They ultimately manage to kill Deimos, and the mercenary and the now-freed warrior woman share a look of recognition as a portal opens, and they enter it. From here, we find ourselves in what is, for all intents and purposes, a pastiche of the Twilight Zone classic “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, where an “Agent Kent” meets his new partner, King Faraday, at a diner where a group of bus travelers have gathered after seeing a supposed UFO crash. They’re assisted by highway patrolman Bruce Wayne, and among the diner patrons is a woman who identifies herself as “Ms. Prince.” Of course, nothing is what it seems. 

Warworld really suffers from being viewed so closely after I marathoned all of the DC Showcase Shorts. Although they weren’t all perfect, most of them were very effective as exactly the kind of vignettes that this film is seeking to achieve (albeit while making them fictional “mindscapes” in which our heroes are trapped), and failing. The western segment fails to achieve the atmosphere of the Jonah Hex short, and is a fairly rote “protect the townspeople” narrative that offers no genuine excitement. The “savage land” section is a pale imitation of the Kamandi short, and there’s nothing all that interesting about “What if Batman was a mercenary on a strange world?,” since it’s just another retread of tropes you’ve seen done before, and better. The black & white alien paranoia bit is the most intriguing experiment that the film does, and it turns into a pretty rote retreading of all the tropes associated with that genre before speeding right past it into the realization on the part of Clark, Bruce, and Diana that they’ve been forced to play out scenarios by an alien known as Mongul, who has harnessed the psychic powers of Martian Manhunter to do so. The three manage to escape from their psychic prisons, get out into the large “war world” planet-killing ship, and blow it up, before being saved by an unknown woman who tells them that they will be needed “for the coming crisis,” and then it’s credits time. 

I spent most of the movie assuming that the Wonder Woman whom we were following was a version of the character that we had not yet seen, since the only Wonder Woman appearance prior to this in this new “Tomorrowverse” sub-franchise was the one from the alternate dimension in the Justice Society movie; as a result, I kept asking why I was supposed to care about this character when we had never seen her before. As it turns out, this is that Wonder Woman, which is revealed when she recognizes Superman as Clark, but as a younger version of him than the man she knows. It’s needlessly complicated, and the narrative decisions on display only make sense when looking at this not as a film unto itself, but as a placeholder and teaser for the upcoming Crisis film. It’s not interesting, it’s not exciting, it’s not fun, and exists solely for the least interesting reason for any piece of art to exist: filler sequel bait. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond