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.
It would be very easy for this film’s setting, in which we see a “different” or “morally inverted/skewed” twist on the Justice League, to be very tired at this point. We’ve had good heroes framed as evil, seen a true hero face off against a team of morally questionable “heroes” who act as his foil(s), and visited both an alternate dimension with evil versions of our heroes and an alternate timeline with morally “unchained” versions of our heroes. I’ve seen part of the big Crisis on Infinite Earths animated film that DC is currently in the process of releasing at this very moment, and spoiler alert, we’re not out of the woods yet. Surprisingly, by going full “Elseworlds” with this one, it feels fresh and inventive, rather than like we’re trodding all-too-familiar ground.
In the world of Justice League: Gods and Monsters, the titular team is composed of only three people: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Except that this Wonder Woman isn’t Diana, Princess of Themyscira or Paradise Island, but a humanoid extraterrestrial warrior woman named Bekka who hails from the planet of New Genesis. Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, but is instead Dr. Kirk Langstrom, who appears in the comics and its adaptations as B-tier (if you’re feeling generous) Batman villain Man-Bat, a giant bat creature who was once a man. Here, Langstrom is reimagined as a kind of vampiric anti-hero in the vein of Morbius. Superman is still the last son of Krypton, but we eschew the traditional baby-in-the-space-bulrushes story, and instead Jor-El and Lara are just going to dump some DNA into a rocket and send off a theoretical child they neither know nor love, like in Man of Steel. At the last moment, however, General Zod storms into the laboratory and sticks his finger into the machine (not a euphemism), so that the child that arrives after space gestation is genetically his and Lara’s son. Upon reaching the earth, instead of being discovered by the Kents, who are able to adopt the space child and hide his spaceship on their farm, he is instead first discovered by migrant workers who must flee from government agents, causing this Superman to grow up with no knowledge of his heritage while the government has possession of his pod and access to its technology.
It’s an interesting set-up that allows us to actually examine who these characters are, how they maintain relationships with each other and people on the outside, and how we perceive them as icons through a new lens, darkly. Superman (Benjamin Bratt) here has a more complicated relationship with humanity at large, and at one point idly comments that it might be easier to enforce peace through conquest. Is this a matter of nature or nurture? If it’s the latter, is it possible that there is some genetic predisposition toward egomania that he inherited from his militaristic father? If it’s nurture, is this the result of his identity being deliberately kept from him, or perhaps the result of more direct interaction with the ineptitude (and danger) of the status quo, having seen the way that the American government and people treated his undocumented adopted parents? His relationship with Lois Lane (Paget Brewster) is more adversarial here, and that’s a lot of fun to watch. Like mainstream Wonder Woman, Bekka (Tamara Taylor) is royalty, but instead of coming to “man’s world” as an ambassador of peace, she’s a refugee with nowhere to go after entering into an arranged marriage that was secretly an assassination/coup plot by her father. She’s carrying around a greater burden than Wonder Woman normally does, but she’s nonetheless still paired with Steve Trevor (Tahmoh Penikett) who is now the liaison between President Amanda Waller (Penny Johnson Jerald!) and the League.
As with most things in DC animation, however, Batman is still the star of the show. Michael C. Hall brings a lot of gravitas and pathos to Kirk Langstrom, which is good news, since he’s in a “these super scientists all knew each other in college and there was a terrible accident” plot. The film has to have a pretty strong emotional center if you’re aiming for a demographic that, if they’re at all interested in your product, has probably already seen this exact thing lampooned on The Venture Brothers; I’ve never seen Dexter, so my primary Hall touchpoint is Six Feet Under, and there’s a lot of the vulnerability and introversion that Hall brought to David Fisher there that’s coming through in this performance, perhaps making it slightly better than it has a right to be. See, he was one of the hand-picked graduates of a select group of students overseen by this world’s benevolent(ish) Lex Luthor (Jason Isaacs), although he’s only really remained close to his former best bud and nanomachine specialist Will Magnus (C. Thomas Howell) and Will’s wife Tina (Grey Griffin). Flashbacks to their college days reveal that Tina was always more in love with Kirk than Will, but that the former’s aloofness meant that she found herself in the arms of the latter, although Kirk’s social awkwardness partially stems from his desperate need to find a cure for a wasting disease with which he is afflicted. He’s researching the use of bat plasma, naturally, and when he hits upon the idea of incorporating Will’s research into his own as a hybrid treatment, they put their heads together on it, resulting in the unfortunate Hero Dracula state in which Kirk now finds himself.
The backstory of all three characters takes up a good portion of this film’s runtime, but it never feels expositional. This also means that the main plot of the film is cut down to the bare essentials, which does wonders for the pacing. It’s essentially a mystery story, as we see several other members of the Luthor special program for geniuses killed off by dark, unrecognizable creatures. When the third of these murders occur, it becomes clear that someone is attempting to frame the Justice League for these killings by mimicking their powers and/or fighting techniques. What is “Project Fairplay,” and what does it have to do with the murders? And why take the extra step of making it seem like the Justice League has crossed the moral event horizon? It’s an effective little mystery, probably the first time that one of these movies has attempted a superwhodunit and managed to succeed, with multiple twists that lead up to the big reveal.
It’s also worth noting that Gods and Monsters is done in the artistic style of Bruce Timm, which is to say that it echoes the design aesthetics of Batman: The Animated Series and its associated properties, including Justice League and Justice League: Unlimited. What’s interesting about that is that one of the occasional complaints about those series was that the character designs were too static, specifically that it could be hard to tell the difference between characters when they were unmasked, and that all the female characters in particular were almost identical. I didn’t bring it up in Batman vs. Robin, but that inability to differentiate between characters is becoming an issue over in that ongoing franchise. The big reveal scene of Talon’s identity in that movie (and that he was sleeping with Bruce’s love interest) was completely undercut by the fact that, with the shadowing choices used in the scene to evoke the light of a city skyline at night meant that I initially thought we were finding out that Talon was Nightwing, since they had the exact same jawline, cheekbones, and haircut. Later scenes in normal lighting reveal that he’s a brunet, which helps us tell them apart from that point on in the film when they are out of costume, but that’s not the kind of character modeling you want in an animated film. Here, even though they have the same hair color and are in a lot of scenes together during their college flashbacks, even in the relatively simplified Bruce Timm style, Magnus and Langstrom have sufficiently different features that it’s never an issue, and that’s worth praising here. It’s a small thing, but it’s important.
I enjoyed this one as a nice, refreshing break, and as an interesting spin on the whole “through a lens, darkly” thing that shows us our characters in a different context. The animation style feels like coming home after a long time away, and the plot zips along at a great pace between legitimately interesting backstory reveals. This one gets an unequivocal recommendation.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 