For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two superhero movies currently in wide theatrical release: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) & Superman (2025).
Way back in the ancient pop culture landscape of 2018, there was some excitement & novelty to be found in a one-off experiment like Batman Ninja. Sure, every other major film in production was a superhero picture and, sure, the Caped Crusader was in roughly 30% of them, but it was still a welcome break in format to see the genre reimagined in a unique context – freed from the laborious narrative responsibilities of a “shared cinematic universe.” The first Batman Ninja film was an over-the-top indulgence in redesigning famous Batman villains within an alternate-universe anime aesthetic. Its newly released sequel does the same for members of The Justice League, but all the excitement & novelty has been dulled by a constant flood of multiversal storytelling over the years since. Every superhero picture is an alternate-dimension reimagining of familiar superhero archetypes now, and so Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League serves no real purpose beyond being an easy gateway into appreciating the visual delights of anime artistry for previously uninitiated 12-year-olds. Still, it’s cute.
Yakuza League‘s boldest creative gamble is in its assumption that its audience remembers any plot details or running jokes from the previous Batman Ninja outing. The story picks up at the exact moment when the last movie ended, with Batman & Robin returning to modern Gotham from their time-travel adventure in feudal Japan. It seems there are some lingering space-time anomalies resulting from that adventure, mainly that the island of Japan has disappeared from global maps and relocated to the sky above Gotham. The now sky-bound nation’s alternate history has been ruled by infinite yakuza gangs, leading to a “Yakuzageddon” event that threatens to tear Gotham down if the Bat Family cannot fix the corrupted “multiverse frequency” in time. The anomaly initially manifests in a “yakuza hurricane,” raining countless gangster intruders into Gotham like so many Agents Smith from Matrix sequels past. The situation escalates when Batman & Robin fly to the floating Japan in the sky to restore order in the now crime-ridden country, only to discover that the alternate-universe anime equivalents of fellow Justice League members are the biggest, cruelest gangsters of all. Many loud, silly fights ensue as they struggle to restore Justice League values into the Yakuza League variants, with only Wonder Woman working as their ally on the inside.
The major saving grace of Yakuza League is that DC has once again given Japanese animators free rein to reimagine their most iconic characters in an anime context (with Junpei Mizusaki & Shinji Takagi sharing directorial credit). They have as much fun with that freedom as possible, taking for-their-own-sake detours into 80s Saturday morning cartoon parody, Lady Snowblood-inspired karaoke video art, and pop-up book illustrations that help expand the artistic project beyond its most obvious boundaries. By the time Batman climbs into yet another mech suit to fight the Yakuza League equivalent of Superman, however, the “Batman, except it’s anime” aesthetic can’t help but feel a little rote. If you’ve already seen Batman Ninja, you’ve already seen everything Yakuza League has to offer – give or take scenes of The Flash sharing lightning powers & sartorial choices with Mortal Kombat‘s Raiden. If you’ve seen any superhero movie in the 2020s, you’ve also already seen the genre collapse in on itself with this style of “What if?” alternate-universe reimagining, which is starting to feel like an admission that there’s nothing exciting or novel left to mine from this material. It’s all just different flavor packets added to the same basic gruel.
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, Boomeris 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.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is a monstrosity. Like the antimatter wave that threatens the (multi)cosmos in its narrative, it sprawls – cancerous, devouring everything. It’s not badly made; if anything, it’s above average, but it’s working very hard to try and duplicate the successful interfilm structural scaffolding that characterized the MCU when it was at its most culturally relevant, and coming up short. Hell, it’s falling short of the (mixed) glories of the CW’s “Arrowverse” Crisis event, even when it attempts to duplicate elements of it that can’t be explained away as simply being from the original comic. Although it’s possible that the creative (for a certain value of creativity) concept behind this was to wrap up this franchise given that there’s yet another new DC refresh on the horizon, attempting to pull off the equivalent of a direct-to-video/streaming Endgame after a mere seven films (if we’re being generous and treating The Long Halloween as two separate entities, which I don’t). That’s not even getting into the fact that one of them was set in a different dimension, another was set in outer space, another was set in the future, and Warworld was, well, whatever the hell it was.
The narrative is broken up into three 90ish minute segments. In the first, it mostly revolves around the Flash (Matt Bomer) as he “time trips” through various points in his life: the night he met his wife, Iris; the formation of the Justice League; an excursion to a morally inverted parallel Earth ruled by evil versions of the standard DC hero roster; his and Iris’s wedding day an the interruption thereof by “Harbinger,” a messenger warning of an impending threat to all of existence; and finally, the lead-up to the plan to defeat this looming doom and the failure to complete it in time. It’s at this point that we learn that the reason Barry is skipping around in time is because he has accelerated himself (and Iris) so greatly that they are able to complete the building of a giant vibrational tuning fork that should allow the wave of destruction to pass through the planet harmlessly, living an entire lifetime in the minutes that remained before it arrived.
As we learn in the second segment, which splits its focus between Supergirl and a villain known as “Psycho Pirate,” this success is short-lived. There is not merely one wave of antimatter, but many more that follow, and the network of giant tuning towers requires maintenance, spreading our heroes thin. We also learn that Supergirl actually encountered the Monitor, the heretofore non-interventionist being that’s older than our galaxy and who has finally been stirred into action by the impending destruction of existence, prior to her landing on Earth, and that although they developed a familial bond, she resents him for his inaction regarding the destruction of Krypton. Psycho Pirate is able to manipulate this grievance into causing Supergirl to kill the Monitor, which exacerbates the already perilous situation (it also doesn’t help that the future in which her friends and lover reside has been erased). It is also revealed that the unhoused doomsayer who was rescued by Jon Stewart way back in Beware My Power is none other than our old friend John Constantine, who, following his exit from the end of House of Mystery, taking on the Crisis comics role of Pariah. Further, (in Part 3) we learn that it was an action that he took at the end of Apokolips War, namely sending the DCAMU Flash back to when Darkseid was a baby with the intent to kill the still-innocent child and infecting Barry with a spell that would still kill li’l Darkseid when Barry inevitably found himself morally unable to super-shake an infant to death. Apparently, Darkseid is so vital to the universe itself that his death fractured reality and created the multiverse that our characters inhabit, which set this whole bad situation into motion. Nice work as always, Constantine.
The third segment of this sprawl sees our heroes having used the release of energy from the Monitor’s death to somehow transport all of the remaining endangered Earths into The Bleed, an extradimensional “nowhere” that was featured in the Authority comics I mentioned back in Superman vs. The Elite. There’s a bunch of rigamarole involving an alternate Lex Luthor, but the (very) long and short of it is that each Earth in their brought with it their sun (sure) and that if a Superman absorbed the energy of all of the suns, it could be redirected to destroy the entity behind the (ahem) crisis, the Anti-Monitor, and everyone could go home. Wracked by guilt from having been manipulated into killing the Monitor, Supergirl chooses to sacrifice herself to this plan instead. This is all for naught, however, as it turns out that the Anti-Monitor is an “antibody” response from the larger whole of reality, as the aforementioned Darkseid infanticide fracture isn’t resolved simply by killing off one part of its immune response. The miracle machine that resolved the conflict of Legion of Superheroes is acquired, and it’s decided to merge all the different parallel realities back into one “monoverse” as the only possible solution, and everyone says their supposedly heartfelt goodbyes and jumps into the new universe, where all the alternate versions of each character merging into one single person on the new Earth. To its credit, this does manage to make that seem more hopeful than the CW adaptation did. Constantine, assuming he’s off for more of that eternal damnation that he’s always on about, also gets a new start, which—alongside the sweetness of Barry and Iris’s relationship and some of the scenes in that comment on the sadness and somberness of Wonder Woman’s immortality—is one of the few emotional touchpoints that actually work here.
If you look back at that third paragraph, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of “we learn” and “it’s revealed” going on. This is a text that is 50% “it’s revealed,” as it weaves together the apparently disparate threads of a pre-planned narrative from movies it’s been rapidly spitting out for the prior three years, rushing headlong into this project with no reason to make it other than, well, if you’re making DC stuff, you’ve just gotta do Crisis on Infinite Earths, right? You’ve just gotta. But the truth is that this is a terrible idea done for completely the wrong reason. The original comic came out in 1986 and was created specifically to simplify what had become a too-sprawling number of parallel Earths that DC’s continuity editors were supposed to keep consistent despite DC just buying out other comic book companies and sticking them in wherever. There was the “main Earth,” of course, and then there was “Earth-2,” where DC editorial had arbitrarily said all stories from the “Golden Age” had occurred. Then there was the Earth where all the Shazam (née Captain Marvel) characters lived, and the Earth where the Justice League was instead the dictatorial Crime Syndicate, Westworld Earths, Elseworld Earths, and so on and so forth. So 1986’s COIE was going to simplify everything, while DC Animated editorial decided to create and destroy a multiverse in about 15 hours. Making COIE purely for the sake of makingCOIE is a bonkers decision. There were, collectively, twenty-three seasons of television across six different television series before the CW committed to doing this as a concept, whereas this exists to tie different continuities together that didn’t need that at all, and it does it through exhaustive exposition.
The other 50% of this movie is nostalgia bait, but to be honest, it wouldn’t be Crisis without it. The original comic was published before I was born, and I learned about it when I started getting into comics in my adolescence; I got a copy of it from the library, and, despite having a mind that was a sponge for all of what I was reading, it was a dense and incomprehensible text to me as a nascent fan. Who the hell were all these people that I didn’t know from Justice League? Why were there two Supermen? Things like an alternate reality of evil Leaguers I could figure out from context, but what the hell was an Atomic Knight? But those appearances of characters that I would come to know better (and many I would not)—Blue Beetle, Negative Woman, Nightshade, truly too many to mention—weren’t for me, who wasn’t even a glimmer in my mother’s eye when it was published. It was for all the fans at the time, people who knew who Bartholomew Lash and Hourman when they were reading the thing forty years ago and got a little thrill out of seeing to-them familiar characters all in the pages of a single comic. I understand the thrill of that, but that’s most of all the media that is being produced lately, whether it’s Free Guy or Ready Player One or any of the hundreds of less-obvious pastiches of endless nostalgia-driven regurgitation. For most of the people who are going to watch this and enjoy it, that’s going to be the reason that they do—not because of the animation or the design or the character work, but because Terry McGinnis Batman is here. Some stilted, cliche interactions between “our” Batman and his adult daughter from an Earth that’s running a few decades ahead, including lots of “Well, my father” and “I’m not your father” repeated ad infinitum isn’t going to convince me that this needs to exist. You’re also not winning me over by erasing the parallel world where Batman: The Animated Series and its associated works takes place, then dedicating the movie to Kevin Conroy. I guess some people find this touching because it was the last thing Conroy recorded before he died, but it feels ghoulish to me.
There were moments when I never thought we would reach the end of this, but here we are. Please don’t expect more of these. This little comic newsstand, like most newsstands outside of metropolitan airports, is closing for business. I didn’t have a good time, and I have no one but myself to blame, but I will take pride in managing to get through all of these in a year with most of my sanity intact. I’d say “until next time,” but there’s not going to be a next time. Excelsior!
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, Boomeris 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.
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, Boomeris 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.
At long last, we have reached the final Batman film in this long saga. I don’t expect that this will be the last time we talk about him, as I have no doubt that he’ll play a part in the upcoming massive Crisis on Infinite Earths triple feature (pray for me), but this is the last time that it’s his name in the title, and that’s something to celebrate. This is another one of those Elseworlds style flicks—what if Batman, but H.P. Lovecraft? The answer is another adaptation of a comic by Mike Mignola, whose previous Gotham by Gaslight was adapted into a thoroughly mediocre animated feature that sanded off all of the grit from Mignola’s art. Will this one fare better?
This time, it’s the 1920s, and Gotham City’s most beloved orphan, Bruce Wayne (David Giuntoli), has spent the last two decades traveling hither and yon in the wake of his parents’ deaths. In Antarctica, he and his three assistants—Dick Grayson (Jason Marsden), Santay Tawde (Karan Brar), and Kai Li Cain (Tati Gabrielle)—are searching for the lost Cobblepot Expedition. They encounter undead members of the crew and manage to subdue one, named Grendon (David Dastmalchian), and return with him to Gotham City, not realizing that he was already infected by parasites from the otherworldly creature he was attempting to free from the ice when Wayne et al arrived. Thus begins the unraveling of a tangled web of interconnections between the founding families of Gotham and the Cult of Ghul that worships the elder, eldritch god Iog-Sotha, and need only the Testament of Ghul to allow him to cross the threshold into our world and do whatever it is that Cthulhu entities do.
In addition to the above-mentioned group of onetime Robins whom Bruce collected on his voyages, there are, of course, other members of the same old usual suspects here. The “Cult of Ghul” tells you pretty early on that Ra’s and Talia are going to pop up and cause trouble at some point. Kirk Langstrom, who is normally a tragic villain known as the “Man-Bat,” is referred to as “the bat man of Crime Alley” before our title character really becomes a known element in the city. Here, instead of being transformed into a giant batlike man, he’s a mad scientist whose research into bats has led him to believe that they are speaking to him, a trait we ultimately learn he shares in common with Bruce. Jason Blood is also here, sometimes in his demon form as Etrigan, and it is he who starts Bruce on his road to learning the true horrors which lie beneath the surface of the rational world. Oliver Queen (Christopher Gorham) is made a Gotham resident here and the Queens are established as one of the founding families of the city, with OIiver using his family’s wealth to fund a one-man war on supernatural evil, while playacting as a booze-smuggling lush to keep his activities under wraps. There’s no Joker or Catwoman, but Harvey Dent is here reimagined as a candidate for mayor who becomes infected on one side of his body with a horrible rash that eventually breaks out in bumps and tumors which then spread onto a nearby wall to create a portal to Iog-Sotha’s realm. It sounds gross, and it is, but it also doesn’t really hold a candle to how revolting and frightening the demons in Justice League Dark and JLvTT were.
This is one of the film’s bigger weaknesses: the inability for this animation to really convey the horror of the mythos that it’s adapting. It disgusts, but it never harrows. One could unironically call it the comic book-ification of Lovecraftian horror, except that actual comic book adaptations of that material often rise from actual artistic interest and which result in some truly glorious art, but not art that easily translates to the moving image, even if what we’re talking about is being “drawn” in both artforms. I’ll admit that it was an inspired choice to bring in Jeffrey Combs(!) to voice Kirk Langstrom via his apocalyptic log, but that desire to make connections to previous Lovecraft adaptations is the only real time that this feels like it’s trying. Everything that makes it special comes from the source material, which, like Gotham By Gaslight before it, means that this is just a diminished version of what it’s supposed to adapt, with no real improvements. It’s not a bad movie, but there’s something really lacking that would have pushed it into being something special. I’d rank it only slightly above average if for no other reason than that we get to see Bruce fully commit to turning into an eldritch bat monster in order to save the day. That’s got to be worth something, right?
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, Boomeris 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.
When I first started this project, I knew that I would eventually have to watch these shorts in addition to the features in order to hit that magic number, 52. At that time, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max still hosted just about every DC project ever made, as a result of Warner Bros. folding the DC Universe service into HBO. All of these shorts were available there, until they were slowly offboarded from the service —never forget what they, and by “they” I mean David Zaslav, took from you. Most of these were only released as special additions to the DVDs of the feature films, which meant that tracking them all down proved no small feat. Ironically, although I have no issue with the wider internet at large knowing that I will soon have watched all of these films, I’m not exactly hot to expose this side of myself to the ubercool clerks at my local video rental. Somehow, we got there.
And another perfect little Halloween watch! This one opens in 1969 with a clear invocation of Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a group of hippies and their newest friend, a young blonde woman named Marcie (Natalie Lander) travel west across a desert in a VW van. The quartet of groovy folks—Dee Dee, Violet, Harry, and Ted—praise her for seeing through the scam of “society” and having escaped suburbia and her controlling parents, and, as they cross the border into California, hype up the guru they are going to see. Upon arrival to a run-down mansion, Marcie takes a moment to smoke a cigarette and clear her head and finds the details of the decaying decadence creepy: a statue in the form of the goat god Pan stands atop a run-down fountain that’s full of gross algae and dead fish, that sort of thing. It’s here that she’s startled by the presence of a suited man with an out-of-date hat, who introduces himself as the Phantom Stranger (Peter Serafinowicz) and urges her to leave this place before it’s too late. She laughs him off and enters the house, where she meets the guru, Seth (Michael Rosenbaum). As they have a dance party, Seth anoints each of his disciples with wine and then kisses them, his ouroboros pendant glowing with each locking of lips. Before he can do the same to Marcie, the Stranger appears again, telling Seth that he’s come to bring the latter’s reign of death and terror to an end. Seth doesn’t seem very scared, as he warns that he, a soul-sucking vampire, can only be killed by a truly pure soul, and he knows the Stranger doesn’t qualify. The two engage in a brief fight before Marcie knocks the Stranger out with a piece of statuary. While Seth drains the Stranger’s life force, she notices the corpses of the hippies and turns the tables on Seth by offering to become his queen, before snatching his necklace and smashing it, killing the demon. After a few parting words of wisdom from The Stranger, she gets into the van that the hippies no longer need and seeks out her next adventure, and her ongoing pursuit of finding her own truth.
I think what I like most about these little shorts is that their condensed nature means that there’s no room to pad these stories out with endless fight scenes. I’ve brought up before that a lot of the feature length films don’t feel like they have sufficient story to justify their lengths. Looking back, I think a lot of them sacrificed the possibility of adding a second or third plotline because what most of the people watching these are interested in are those superhero fights: punch, punch, laser eyes, kick, punch, piledriver. Being much shorter, these have exactly the amount of narrative substance for their run time, without the need to include the fight scenes that I often found extraneous, tiresome, and repetitive in the movies. This is a nice little kernel of a story about an ingénue with ingenuity and the mysterious being that acts as her guardian angel at just the moment that she needs it most in order to avoid falling under the spell of an eldritch entity. The short it’s most reminiscent of is The Spectre, as that story was also a period piece about a supernatural antihero, although this one is lacking in some of the creative scares of that first short. What it has in its place is some of the most interesting animation out of any of these, with a psychedelic dance party that’s truly beautifully animated; in particular, a recreation of the kind of multi colored lights that would turn up in a happening party are extremely well done, as they play across both the background and the characters (imagine the club sequences from Godzilla vs. Hedorah). This was a great little bit of fun, and I’m consistently surprised at how much higher the good-to-not-so-good ratio of these is in comparison to the features.
Adam Strange eventually gets to some good places, but it takes too long to get there, especially for a short film. We open on an ironically named mining colony called “Eden,” where an unwashed drunken man gets into a scrap with some other miners outside of a dingy bar. As he goes down, he mutters “Take me, take me,” and we cut straight into his flashbacks. This is Adam Strange (Charlie Weber), formerly of planet Rann (in the comics he was a human teleported from Peru to Rann by an errant “zeta beam,” and while that tech appears here, no mention is made of Adam’s earthling origins, so it’s unclear if he’s supposed to be human or Rannian). On the day of the invasion of his planet by the hawkpeople of Thanagar, his wife was killed in a bombing, surviving only long enough to tell him that their daughter may have made it to safety. Before he can search for the girl, however, a “zeta beam” appears and teleports him to the Eden Corp colony. He immediately sets to work calculating when the beam may appear next, hoping it will take him home, but as the years pass he grows bitter and disagreeable. While sleeping off his drunken stupor, several of the miners at a nearby digging site go too deep, unwittingly allowing insectoid alien beasts the size of cars out, which slaughter most of the men, with only a few escaping to warn the colony. The colony foreman (Roger Cross), the closest thing that Strange has to a friend, asks him to join in the barricading of the town, but the older man is knocked out. He awakens when he hears the sound of the battle outside and dons his spaceman gizmos in order to go out and join the fight, where he manages to kill all of the attacking bugs, leading the colony folk to see him with new, awed respect. As the colonists are evacuated the following morning, he is invited to join them, but says he has to remain behind so that he can await the beam that will bring him home and help him find his daughter. As the evac ships depart, his rocket pack pings, alerting him that a zeta beam is inbound.
When writing about Beware My Power, I noted that it was odd that the series took so long to do a proper space story, given what a larger cosmic universe the comics are set in. That was more of a space opera, while this is a bite-sized space western. The narrative isn’t complex: a man who’s lost everything ends up in a frontier town as an outsider, he loses hope of ever seeing his missing daughter again, and he gains the respect of the townsfolk by managing to defend them against an external force. It’s a little bit Shane with a dash of Tremors; it’s The Magnificent Seven with Aliens on the side. And man, once the bug creatures show up, they do some real damage, slicing dudes in half and spraying one miner with an acid that melts his face clean off like he looked into the Ark of the Covenant. I wrote in the review just prior to this one that a lot of the fights in the longer movies are the least interesting things in them, but this one has a story that feels a little rote, and it’s greatly enlivened by the alien attack. And, if you’re a completist, this one is supposedly part of the “Tomorrowverse” continuity, with this film serving to set up the appearance of Adam Strange (albeit in a different art style and with a different voice actor), so have at it. If you’re going to put together that spooky season playlist that I keep harping on about, this one might work alongside the others, but it’s also the one during which your guests are most likely to take a quick bathroom break.
Batman: Death in the Family (2020), released solo with other shorts
It’s impossible for me to rate this one, since it’s not really a short film at all? It’s listed as one on the series’ Wikipedia page, and even noted as a sequel to Under the Red Hood, but this one is more of an interactive experience à la Bandersnatch, which came out a few years prior. There were nine different story paths with seven alternate endings, starting from the point at the beginning of Red Hood in which Joker beats Robin nearly to death with a crowbar. The viewer would then select either “Robin Dies” (in which case the events play out exactly as they did in Red Hood), “Robin Cheats Death” (in which Jason becomes a vigilante with his face wrapped in bandages like Hush), or “Batman Saves Robin” (in which Batman, um, saves Robin but dies in the process). From the last of these choices there are further branches: either Jason kills the Joker (and from there either turns is captured by or escapes from the police, depending on your choice) or catches the Joker (which ends in either a bombing that kills all participants or a relatively bittersweet ending). I felt pretty lucky to discover that it was on Tubi, the people’s streaming service, and then balked when I saw that its runtime was over ninety minutes. I assumed that this meant that this must be the digital version which, according to Death in the Family’s own wiki page, is 96 minutes long and contains all story paths. However, that’s not what’s online, and I didn’t get all of those different pathlines above from watching every version; they came from the internet.
See, the version of Death in the Family on Tubi doesn’t contain all possible endings like the broadcast version of Clue; in fact, it’s just the “Robin Dies” narrative, which, if you recall, is just the plot of Under the Red Hood, again. It’s like a Reader’s Digest condensed version of that movie, where everything “extraneous” is cut out and the film’s entire plot is recounted in new voiceover from Bruce Greenwood, which is to say, it’s just a shorter, worse version of the earlier movie. Worse, it’s not even consistent with UTRH, since Bruce repeatedly refers to Jason as “son,” which is something he never did in the original film, and I think that it’s narratively important that this is the case. The closest thing to a term of endearment that he’s able to spare in his grief is in his mournful six word line: “My partner. My soldier. My fault.” All that is added is a final scene where we learn that this recap has been provided from Bruce to Clark Kent, who praises him for facing his inner demons or some such fluff.
However! If you noticed that the above doesn’t account for the hour-and-a-half runtime that’s on Tubi; that’s because there are several other of these shorts right after it, and which are not mentioned in the description. And one of them is the previously nigh-unfindable Sgt. Rock! Rock is followed by Adam Strange, The Phantom Stranger, and finally Death, which means that your Halloween playlist is already kinda made for you! And that I didn’t have to rent Hush and expose my nerdiness to the rental clerks after all. Alas. This also prompted me to check out the other Tubi listings for the shorts, and found that the 25-minute Return of Black Adam has a listed runtime of 62 minutes – because it’s followed by The Spectre and Jonah Hex (although they stuck Green Arrow there in the middle). Go forth with this knowledge, and enjoy!
The titular Kamandi is, in fact, the last boy on this post-apocalyptic earth, which bears more than a passing similarity to the distant future earth of Planet of the Apes (uh, spoiler alert, I guess?). Kamandi (Cameron Monaghan) takes his name from the bunker in which he was raised, Command D, by his now-dead grandfather. Outside of the bunker, despite a maximum of two generations having passed, the animals of the earth have evolved both anthropomorphically and anthropologically, speaking English and living in hierarchical structures. One such animal, Kamandi’s friend Tuftan, is the prince of the Tiger Kingdom (presumably no relation), and the plot opens with Kamandi rescuing Tuftan from some rat guys. Unfortunately, in their escape from one captor, they are captured by ape men on horseback, along with some of those rat dudes. Turns out these apes are cultists, who are dedicated to finding the reincarnation of a god they call The Mighty One. To that end, they have created a series of challenges to test the mettle of potential messiahs: to leap across a giant chasm, to weather a hallway full of tripwired guns and an acidic gas, and to defeat a giant insect monster (lot of those lately). Kamandi and Krew—including a guy named Ben Boxer who assures us that he is not human despite his appearance as well as an ape who has trained for this moment (and who could forget, a few dear rat boys)—manage to make it the whole way. Tuftan breaks his foot on the first obstacle, and although he orders Kamandi to leave him, he refuses. The hallway of machine guns is only passable when Ben Boxer says that this test requires “a man of steel” and changes his body into metal so that the others are shielded by him. Boxer falters when the acidic gas is released, Kamandi reasons that there are some acids that are more effective against metal than flesh and rushes through the green cloud to reach the shut-off valve, at the expense of burning himself, although not terribly. In the final test, Kamandi manages to wrest the control collar off of the huge bug monster, which earns him the animal’s trust and allows him to emerge as the victor of the confrontation without having to cause harm, while also showing mercy to the ape man who has been antagonizing him. As it turns out, the “Mighty One” that the ape cult worship was actually Superman, and they have one of his outfits in their shrine, waiting to be given to the person who exemplified the characteristics of their god — not strength of invulnerability or tactical prowess, but mercy and wisdom.
This doesn’t hold up much if you think about it too hard. That machine gun hallway is just a death trap; although there is a cooperative element to surmounting that obstacle, that makes it more of a test of teamwork than anything else, and really only if you’ve already got a bulletproof teammate. Kamandi shows compassion by helping the others cross the chasm once he reaches the other side, but it’s still a test that requires at least one person who is capable of a superhuman feat. I suppose that could mean that this is left up to the potential interpretation that maybe Kamandi truly is destined to walk this path, but I assume that most viewers are like me and would immediately dismiss a religion that’s less than a century old and devised by uplifted apes as … probably not true. According to the DC Universe Wikipedia page, this one is supposed to be a part of the Tomorrowverse (I’m so close to never having to type that again that I can taste it), and it’s part of Justice Society that Kamandi somehow travels back to (a parallel earth’s) 1940s to deliver the superclothes to the Superman. Damned if I remember that happening, to be honest, but I guess that makes this whole story a predestination paradox: Kamandi has to give past Superman his suit, so that he can become Superman, so that an ape cult will worship him after the apocalypse, so that they can give Kamandi the suit, so he can go back to the past, etc. Gee, sounds kinda stupid when you put it that way, huh? Predestination paradoxes are just destiny with a few extra steps, so I suppose it’s internally consistent.
I’m being hard on this one for no real reason, though, as I actually found it fun. I liked the choice of art style here, which is very reminiscent of Kirby’s style for the original run of the comic in the 1970s. It’s also fun to do something completely different from the rest of the franchise at large. These shorts have erred mostly on the spooky side, which I have loved, and in so doing they’ve been able to focus on characters who aren’t the same old roster of mostly superheroes and the occasional wizard, and I’ve really enjoyed these smaller stories. This is the weirdest one yet, and it’s a lot of fun to see a tiger guy run an obstacle course with his equally weird pals. You’d never see a feature length animation about this weird post-apocalyptic world, and we’re all going to be dead before they get desperate enough for comic books material that James Gunn makes this part of whatever he’s got stewing over there, so I’m glad that this ride exists to be taken.
This was the first of these shorts that I watched, as it was one that I found online and worried it would be scrubbed before I got the chance to watch it. This short features characters from the comic team “The Losers,” which was a collection of previously unrelated WWII characters brought together into a single unit in 1969 in an issue of G.I. Combat, a DC war comics anthology that ran for over thirty years, from 1952 to 1987. There was Navajo pilot Johnny Cloud (here voiced by Martin Sensmeier), who always destroys his planes after a mission, Gunner and Sarge (both voiced by Dave B. Mitchell), two “mud-marines,” accompanied by their white German Shepherd in the Pacific Theater, and Captain William Storm, a one-legged PT Boat captain who had previously helmed his own self-titled series from 1964 to 1967. There was also a single issue character named Henry “Mile-a-Minute” Jones, who appears here in this film, voiced by Eugene Byrd. Following their initial “team-up,” The Losers went on to become the main feature of Our Fighting Forces, yet another DC war anthology that ran from 1954 to 1978.
There’s not much to this one. The short, which runs about 13 minutes, features the above-mentioned characters being tasked with infiltrating an island that has seen the sudden appearance of several dinosaurs, aided by Chinese intelligence agent Fan Long (Ming-Na Wen). After a couple of close calls, including Storm being grabbed by the leg and appearing to be in imminent mortal danger in the mouth of a T. Rex, the group comes upon a research camp next to an anomaly that Fan identifies as a “laceration,” a rift in time through which the dinosaurs have made their way. After a few actions that demonstrate that Fan is willing to risk the lives of her companions in order to complete her mission, it’s discovered that she already killed the research team, and she confirms that she was sent by her government to find a way to harness the power of the laceration, which could yield power even greater than that of the in-development atomic bomb. In what I suppose would be a twist for the viewer familiar with The Losers, Cloud plans to fly a plane into the rift to destroy it, only to be relieved by Storm, who sacrifices himself instead, so Cloud doesn’t lose this particular plane. It’s thin on just about everything, and there’s not much to write home about here.
The last of the independent shorts to be released to date, Blue Beetle is a cute throwback to the Hanna Barbera animation of the 70s, and could easily be slotted into a block of Superfriends without being noticeably different from the cartoon segments that surround it, other than its humor being too self-aware to truly blend in. Blue Beetle is not Jaime Reyes here but Ted Kord (Matt Lanter), who teams with conspiracy theorist The Question (David Kaye) while investigating a diamond theft at the hands of the Squid Gang, so named because of their suits that feature suckers which allow them to climb the outside of buildings for their heists. The two do some goofy detective work, as they find a chemical at the crime scene that is only found in a now-defunct soda that was discontinued because it contained too much caffeine. Using the penny from the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray at one of the last places still selling old soda stock, they trace it to the lair of the villain who has hired the Squids, a “Doctor Spectro” (Tom Kenny) who plans to use the diamond for his mind control ray. In the meantime, he’s been able to get some traction in the brainwashing sphere through the use of the soda, which includes bringing heroes Captain Atom and Nightshade under his sway. The Question is able to get through to Captain Atom long enough for him to use his powers to turn the soda into its own antidote, releasing him and Nightshade from Spectro’s thrall, although he manages to escape to sow villainy another day. And hey, Blue Beetle made a friend!
There’s a moment in this one where the entire fourth wall is demolished, as Blue Beetle and The Question face off against Atom and Nightshade, to which he replies that they shouldn’t be enemies as “[they]’re all Charlton Comics characters,” pulling out a comic book and showing it to the others. Charlton was one of many smaller comics publishers that DC bought out before folding that imprint’s characters into their larger comics canon. Long ago, Alan Moore was tasked with penning a miniseries that would incorporate the Charlton characters into DC proper and ended up creating Watchmen, one of the most important and groundbreaking comics ever published, although by the time it hit print the characters had changed. Blue Beetle became Owlman, The Question became Rorschach, Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, and Nightshade become Silk Spectre. As a result, this one plays out a bit like the Watchmen Babies bit from The Simpsons, albeit as more of a Saturday morning cartoon that you might catch between Partridge Family 2200 A.D. and Jabberjaw (although, come to think of it, we kind of have an 80s version of that as well). It’s a loving parody of that which it mocks, right down to the repeated animation (Nightshade kicks Beetle in the same animation cycle at three different points in their scuffle), and its jokes mostly land, with Beetle trying and failing to pretend that he’s not Ted Kord when The Question sees right through him being a great repeating gag. A strong finish for this series of shorts, and one worth seeking out.
Constantine: The House of Mystery, released 2022 as the feature presentation on a Showcases Round-Up DVD
Technically, this is the last thing that was released as part of the DCAMU (I am so tired of typing that acronym). Taking place immediately after Constantine sends Flash back in time to reset the timeline, Constantine finds himself once again in the “House of Mystery,” where he opens a door to find his lover Zatanna and several of his old friends enjoying a meal, which is then interrupted by the appearance of two little moppets, a boy and a girl, who greet him as their father. This idyllic moment quickly turns to horror, however, as they begin to cough up blood, before the other adults in the room turn into demonic horrors who rip him apart, only for him to once again wake up in the same hallway in the House of Mystery, enter another room, and have another situation in which he is loved and appreciated turn into a bloodbath. He’s stuck in a Groundhog Day loop of horror, for centuries according to his monologue, and while he learns from each iteration how to more quickly escape his fate and avoid pitfalls, it always ends in his death. He only manages to finally break free when he allows a demon to whom he has sold his soul to find out where he is, so that when said demon, Nergal, comes to claim him, he must face off against two other demons with whom Constantine has made the same bargain. Escaping in the ensuing chaos, Constantine comes face to face with The Spectre, who reveals to John that his meddling with the universe by trying to create another Flashpoint has made the universe itself angry at him, and that Spectre had put him in the House of Mystery not as imprisonment for his meddling but to hide Constantine from the universe’s wrath. The irony is that Constantine was supposed to be able to spend eternity in the House with his loved ones in heaven-like bliss, but John’s self-hatred was so powerful that his mind refused to accept paradise and turned it into an endless hell. As John is dragged away by forces unknown, Spectre sadly intones: “Woe to you, John Constantine.”
Writing that description out, I almost gave this one an extra half star after deciding on three after my initial viewing. The problem is that this one is a fascinating story with a pretty thin premise, and even at a mere twenty-six minutes, runs a little too long. This one could easily have been another ten minute miracle like The Spectre or Phantom Stranger, but instead, the looping deaths drag on a bit. I understand the idea that, for us to believe that John would allow for his soul debtors to come looking for him as his last ditch attempt to get out of his personal hell, we have to see him make a few failed attempts at escape. I also understand that the length of time that we spend watching him is part of the point, but its runtime works against it. Like the mediocre Return of Black Adam that was pushed out to 20+ minutes when it would have functioned better by keeping the leanness of the other Showcase shorts, this one ends up being less bang for more buck. The need to make this the cornerstone and selling point of a DVD release with other shorts is probably the reason for this, which is just another example of DC shooting itself in the foot via its need to market these. Alas.
I’ve actually really loved the version of John Constantine that this little film subseries has pulled off, and with City of Demons as one of the highlights. The need to revisit the end of Justice League Dark robs that previous film of some of the strength in its ending, and the continuation lessens both the dour finality and optimistic possibility of a new world. On the other hand, that matters a lot less to me than the chance at one more character study of John Constantine. Just as I liked the tragic ending of City of Demons, one more look into the life and mind of this character, and the revelation that his self-hatred is so deep and powerful that it robbed him of the chance of eternal happiness but also happiness for eternity is heady and wonderful. It’s just too bad that it takes too long to get there.
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, Boomeris 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.
When I first started this project, I knew that I would eventually have to watch these shorts in addition to the features in order to hit that magic number, 52. At that time, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max still hosted just about every DC project ever made, as a result of Warner Bros. folding the DC Universe service into HBO. All of these shorts were available there, until they were slowly offboarded from the service. Never forget what they, and by “they” I mean David Zaslav, took from you. Most of these were only released as special additions to the DVDs of the feature films, which meant that tracking them all down proved no small feat. Ironically, although I have no issue with the wider internet at large knowing that I will soon have watched all of these films, I’m not exactly hot to expose this side of myself to the ubercool clerks at my local video rental. Somehow, we got there.
This short film, clocking in at just twelve minutes, is a strong start for this project. The Spectre features the voice of Gary Cole in the role of Jim Corrigan, an LAPD detective who inserts himself into the investigation into the death of a film producer. It’s not his case, as the assigned detectives and his chief remind him, but he has a vested interest in the case as the producer’s daughter Aimee (Alyssa Milano) is an old flame of his. His boss tells him to instead investigate the strange deaths of the suspects in the case of the producer’s death. The list of enemies is fairly long, but the potential motive of a few of them relates to not being hired for the guy’s most recent production. The first of these is a special effects man whose own macabre creations are animated by a spectral (naturally) being called The Spectre, an avenging spirit. The second suspect is killed while trying to flee to Mexico, as The Spectre forces him to flip his vehicle and, when he miraculously lives, repairs the vehicle supernaturally and has it run down its owner, Christine style. Finally, Corrigan confronts Aimee directly and accuses her of involvement in her father’s death, and when she manages to distract him long enough to pull out a gun, her shots pass through him without effect. Corrigan reveals that he is The Spectre, before avenging Aimee’s father by surrounding her with a cyclone composed of the money she was paid by the two dead men in order to give them the security code so that they could slip in and kill her father, killing her with a thousand cuts before the police arrive on the scene as Corrigan departs, unnoticed by the living people whom he passes by (and through) before driving away.
This is a neat one! A sly little horror story/renegade cop pastiche that features seventies style funk music and some genuinely creepy sequences. The Spectre himself is effectively scary, and his sense of punishment-by-irony is fun. The sequence set in the special effects warehouse allows the animators to go wild, as the SFX guy gets attacked by Dracula, the Wolfman, and even a (similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from) possessed Reagan animatronic, which dutifully vomits on him. The sequence in the desert in which the second suspect meets his fate is also a lot of fun, calling to mind the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” as The Spectre’s sudden appearance in the car in the guilty man’s rearview mirror, and he proves an unshakeable avenging force. Even the death of Aimee is brutal, even if it’s mostly offscreen, as she screams to her dying breath before the windows of her father’s sleek Beverly Hills MCM mansion are coated in her blood. This short form really allows the animation team to go all in on something that would be unsustainable for a feature length film (even one that only clocks in at around only 80 minutes like most of these do) and focus on a character who would be a hard sell for a solo outing. Of these movies, over a third of them are Batman flicks, and it’s not because there were simply so many of these stories that demanded to be told; it’s purely a matter of marketing, because the Batbrand sells. The Spectre … not so much. This is the perfect bite-size story for the character and to give the team the chance to work on something different and weird. You can probably trace a clear line from this one to the darker, more horror-oriented flavor of later outings like Justice League Dark and City of Demons. Worth a watch.
Another strong early showing for these shorts. There’s not a huge demand for a full-length Jonah Hex animated film (hell, there wasn’t a market for the live action feature, which came out the same year), so one of these shorts was the right call to tell a little western story. In the animation, an outlaw named Red Doc shows up to a saloon, drunken and boisterous, and claims that he can outdraw any man in the place. The saloon’s proprietor, Madame Lorraine (Linda Hamilton) invites him up to her bedroom, and once he’s comfortable, she kills him, robs his corpse, and has two henchmen dispose of the body. The next day, bounty hunter Jonah Hex arrives in town on the trail of Red Doc, but the bartender at the saloon claims to have never seen the man when presented with his “wanted” poster. A bar girl (Michelle Trachtenberg) tells him that Madame Lorraine sometimes takes men up to her parlor, men who are never seen again; Hex allows Lorraine to see his billfold so that she invites him to her boudoir as well, but he knocks her out and takes care of her henchmen. When she awakes, Hex forces her to take him to the abandoned mine that she and her flunkies have turned into a mass grave pit, and Hex retrieves Red’s body to collect his bounty and leaves Lorraine in the hole with the evidence of her crime.
Jane is doing great voice work here with Hex. He’s such a passionate fan of the character that he petitioned to play the lead in the ill-fated live action adaptation by getting a make-up artist to give him Hex’s trademark scarred face to audition for the role, losing out to Josh Brolin, so he’s bringing his A-game here to make up for it, and it shows. Hamilton’s aged rasp lends a lot of gravitas to her frontier serial killer character, and our innate association as an audience of her voice with Sarah Connor means that her world-weariness comes naturally to mind. Although this one lacks the overt horror elements of The Spectre, there’s a creep factor to it that makes this more of a “weird west” than a standard saddle-and-spurs bounty hunter story. The final images that we see of Lorraine, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her victims as her lamp slowly dies, is chilling, and it’s interesting to note that the animation team behind this studio was willing to put in such good work on something that was destined to be seen by very few people (I’ve had Under the Red Hood on DVD for years and never even considered watching this short, which was bundled with it, until this project). I might be giving too much away about when I’m writing about this, but alongside The Spectre, this one would make a great addition to a playlist of spooky season shorts.
It’s very strange to hear Green Arrow voiced by Neal McDonough. The first piece of his work that comes to mind (after this role in Star Trek: First Contact, of course) is his longtime role as DC villain Damien Darhk in the CW TV series universe, where he first appeared as the primary antagonist on Arrow in that show’s fourth season before becoming an antagonist on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s also interesting that this one, which is a little lackluster in comparison to the previous two, is directed by the same person, Joaquim Dos Santos. After this, he mostly spent time focused on TV projects (notably working on every episode of Legend of Korra in some capacity) before he went on to become one of the co-directors of Across the Spider-Verse last year.
This short features Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen trying to get to the airport to pick up his girlfriend, Dinah “Black Canary” Lance, fiddling with an engagement ring in his pocket. He faces some difficulty in getting there on time as he’s fighting traffic that’s the result of a visit from royalty, the child princess of Vlatava, Perdita (Ariel Winter). It’s fortunate for her that he’s there, as he assists in the foiling of an assassination attempt, but the sheer number of snipers and goons forces him to protect her as they try to escape from them. As it turns out, Perdita’s father died the night before, making her the heir apparent to the throne and the only thing preventing her uncle, Count Vertigo, from ascending instead. Vertigo has hired the villainous archer Merlyn (Malcolm McDowell) to take out Perdita, and although Arrow has faced him before and been bested by him every time, he’s been practicing.
This one is serviceable, but nothing to get too excited about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dos Santos was simply spread too thin, having to get all three of these first few shorts out, all for release in one calendar year. This one was penned by Greg Weisman, who I wrote about more extensively in my review of Catwoman: Hunted, and if you’re a Young Justice fan, Weisman has stated that this short is (essentially) in the same canon, so that may make it worth your while.
Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam (2010), released only in the DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection
This one is pretty rote. Orphan boy Billy Batson (Zach Callison, of Steven Universe fame) is living in a rundown slum after being kicked out of his foster home by his abusive parents, and he’s the runtiest of the street kids so he’s a target for bullies. The closest thing he has to a friend is Clark Kent (George Newbern), who is writing a series of articles about the boy’s struggles. When Billy is attacked by the supervillain Black Adam (Arnold Vosloo), Superman is thus close at hand to rescue him. From there, he gets an infodump from a mysterious wizard who tells him that Black Adam was once the wizard’s champion and had then been corrupted, forcing the wizard to banish him to a distant place, so far that he has spent the last 5000 years returning for his revenge. The wizard bestows his powers on Billy and tells him to speak the name “Shazam,” and you know how this goes from here. Billy turns into the adult superhero Shazam, he and Superman team up and defeat Black Adam, and he chooses to turn back into his human form and age into dust instantly rather than be banished again. And, of course, Billy gets to turn the tables on his bullies as Shazam, much in the vein of Bastian at the end of The NeverEnding Story.
There’s nothing special about this one, I’m afraid. It’s serviceable, but not special. The only thing interesting about it is, perhaps, that this features both a previous Superman voice actor reprising the role (Newbern had previously voiced the role on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and would later reprise the role further in Superman vs. The Elite and Justice League vs. The Fatal Five) and one who would play the character in the future (Jerry O’Connell, who voices Batson’s superheroic alter ego Shazam, would portray him in all of the so-called DCAMU movies). The animation is up to par, and the narrative is sufficient. Not exactly high praise, but this one may set the tone of the exact median of quality of this whole franchise overall. Perfectly balanced, not that interesting.
This one is unusual in that, unlike the others on this list, it was intended to be a tie-in to the film with which it was released. Eliza Dushku reprises her role as Selina “Catwoman” Kyle from Year One, this time on the trail of a Gotham heavy with diamond teeth called Rough Cut (John DiMaggio). After his thugs, trying to kill a cat, chase the poor thing over the edge of a bridge, it’s revealed that the cat was rescued by Selena, who recognizes the ornate collar the cat is wearing. She tracks Rough Cut down to a strip club, where a dancer named Buttermilk Skye (Tara Strong), who gets a diamond from Rough Cut as a tip, is warned by fellow stripper Lily (Cree Summer) that another girl got the same tip the week before, and no one has seen her recently. Catwoman appears through the back door and convinces the ladies to take a break, whereupon she takes the stage in her latex get-up, to much enthusiasm. Even her whip-cracking is appreciated, at least until she starts taking out Rough Cut’s lackeys. He escapes her, leading to a prolonged chase sequence that ultimately ends with the gangster driving off of Gotham pier in a hook truck, taking out the ship that was arriving to take on his latest shipment: trafficked women. One of them is a friend of Selena’s who returns her bracelet to her as the rescued women are tended by paramedics.
Catwoman is … weird. It’s not bad, per se, but much of it feels more like late night 90s softcore than anything else. Lauren Montgomery was the director on this one, having previously directed First Flight and Crisis on Two Earths, and having been a storyboard artist on Under the Red Hood and All Star-Superman, so she’d worked on pretty much all of these projects that I enjoyed until she left this franchise in 2016. It’s an unusually cheesecake-y product for her, although given that she’s spent so much of her career working on these superhero franchises, maybe she just wanted to direct a short film that’s twenty-five percent stripping. The work is impressive; Buttermilk and Selena both move with lithe, athletic grace, which I assume is pretty difficult to capture in a short that was budgeted as the add-on to a DVD that was already destined to haunt CVSes all over the country for the next fifteen years. But it’s also intended to capture sexiness for an audience that I am not a part of, so I mostly spent that time waiting for the scene to move on. At least when Tony Soprano and the boys are at the Bada Bing, there’s some narrative happening. I recently put on a David DeCoteau film in the background for some housework (it was Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks, if you must know, because of Sean Faris), and there were so many lingering scenes of swimming pools, locker rooms, and shirtless football tossing in that one. Those sequences exist solely because those movies are just material that you can fap to but also have on the shelf in your mid-aughts dorm room without having to come out to your roommate. Maybe the problem is just that I’ve never understood erotic animation, which this very much is, but I’ve honestly dwelt on it for so long that it’s starting to feel strange, so I’ll just say: to each their own. The chase sequence that follows is pretty good, and the dock setpiece works, but overall, this one didn’t leave much of an impression.
This was the hardest one of these to find. Most of them were available online to stream or download on the grey market, but for Sgt. Rock I had to go out and find a physical copy of Hush to watch this on. Luckily, there was a blockwide pop-up shopping experience going on outside of my local rental shop this weekend, so I was able to get in and get out with the movie without anyone paying too much mind to my renting of something so embarrassing. And, since I was only able to rent a BluRay copy, that also meant fighting with my extremely finicky machine just to get it to play (tweezers were involved).
This short stars Karl Urban as the titular army sergeant, who awakens in a hospital after his squad is killed in the line of duty in WWII. A superior officer tasks him with taking leadership over a small group of “unusual” soldiers to take out a Nazi base that intelligence reports indicate houses a facility that is in the middle of creating a doomsday device. Said group turns out to be the “Creature Commandos,” a trio of monster dudes: a wolfman, a Nosferatu-esque vampire named Velcoro, and a reanimated Frankenstein(’s monster). On the mission, they manage to enter the facility and discover a full Frankensteinian reanimation set-up, which the re-alived private sets out to destroy. As it turns out, this is the final weapon: undead, reanimated troops made up of the fallen enemy, with the first successes having been Rock’s previous squad, who attack their former leader and his current crew. Rock’s current forces emerge victorious, and when the Nazi major on-site teases Rock that he knows that they must be taken as captives as Rock must have been ordered to bring them in alive so that the U.S. could incorporate this research into their own war effort, Rock allows Velcoro to drain the Nazi scientists dry: “Bottoms up.”
Again, I might be giving away too much about how far in advance I am working on this project, but this strikes me as a perfect little Halloween short, and would work great in a mini-screening with The Spectre and Jonah Hex, although it beats the hell out of me how you’re going to get ahold of this short and somehow get it onto a playlist for you and your friends. I had no idea what I was going into with this one, and when it started, I was immediately bored by yet another scene of soldiers engaged in infantry fighting, but this is really only the prologue until we get to the good stuff, like a wolfman devouring Nazi soldiers and a vampire turning into a bat so that he can fly over a wall and open the reinforced door from the other side. This is the first of these shorts that I think would have really benefited from being extended to a feature length, as this was a pretty fun little ride.
Another little spooky short, this one both sweet and near and dear to my heart. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is my favorite comic book series of all time, and my favorite character within it (after Delirium) is Death, a personification of the concept and a member of “The Endless.” The Endless are not gods; they existed before mankind dreamt of gods, and are as old as the universe itself. First came Destiny, who was born alongside existence, as existence required Destiny to, well, exist. With the first living things came Destiny’s sister Death, as life does not exist without Death; she was followed by Sandman’s title character Dream, whose existence was necessitated when the first living thing to dream did so. (And so on and so forth.) Death was presented in Sandman as a perky goth lady, which has become a huge influence on the idea in pop culture and in real life, and some of my favorite stories from that series revolve around her (notably issues #43, “Brief Lives pt. 3,” and #20, “Façade,” which is my favorite Sandman story of all). It’s weird to see her being written by someone other than Gaiman, but this one was penned by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written the screenplays for Justice League Dark and City of Demons at this point, so his spooky DC credentials were already demonstrated.
Death follows a man named Vincent Omata (Leonardo Nam), a painter who never made it. Despite his love for making art from his youth, he was discouraged by his father as well as his art school professors —one of whom told him that he had no real talent for art and should consider transferring to the university’s dental school program. As an adult, he now finds himself unable to keep a job painting gates, as in, covering the entrance gate to Arkham Asylum in a new coat of paint rather than painting landscapes with such fixtures within them. His various personal demons appear to him in the guise of fiery specters that take the shape of people who have discouraged him, speaking the harsh words to him once again. After a chance encounter with a cute goth girl who gives him her top hat, she reappears later when he sparks up a cigarette to warn him that “Those things will kill [him],” and he offers to show her his artwork. He asks if he can paint her portrait, and he does; however, even realizing that he must have worked all through the night and it should be morning, he notices that the sun has not yet risen. In reality, Vincent has died, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette, and that the woman he has painted, Death, has shown him a kind of tenderness by stopping the night from passing until he could complete one last work of art, one that he can be proud of. He begs her not to let the painting burn, and as she takes his hand to lead him to the door that opens into whatever comes after life, she does ensure that the portrait he painted of her survives, leaving it behind in the charred ruins of his apartment like that viral Stanley cup that survived the Kia Sorento fire.
This is another entry in the horror-adjacent shorts that form this sub-franchise, but one that focuses less on fright than on the only thing that all humans share: the inevitability of death. Like Sandman before it, the short chooses to imagine Death not as an end, but a transition, and not as something to fear, but as something to accept. It’s a lovely little story, and, if you’re only ever going to see one of these, this is the one to catch.
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, Boomeris 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’ve seen the first fifteen minutes of this movie a few times now. It’s not boring, really, but it was something that I just kept trying to watch in the late hours when I didn’t feel like expending the effort to think about what to watch, so I would often put it on and then fall asleep. Now that I’ve managed to make it all the way through, it’s another solid but unexceptional entry in this franchise. And man, this period of films sure does have a hard-on for Solomon Grundy, don’t they?
After a pre-credits opening in which teenaged Kara Zor-El (Meg Donnelly) learns from her mother that she has been accepted to the “military guild” on the same day that Krypton is destroyed, she escapes in the only working pod, only to be knocked off course. When we catch up to the present day, Kara—still a teenager even though her infant cousin has now grown up and become Superman because of her pod having taken longer to reach Earth—is having trouble adjusting to life on our planet. Everything is technologically inferior in a way that isolates her. When she attempts to stop Solomon Grundy from going on a rampage, she’s confronted by a man who is upset that her activity has resulted in wanton property damage. Batman (Jensen Ackles) pulls Superman (Darren Criss) aside and says that Kara’s impulsivity makes her dangerous, and that something has to be done about this. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the same as the beginning of Apocalypse. As in that film, the solution is to send Kara off to train elsewhere with people who are more like her; in this case, that means heading off to the 31st Century, to train at the academy of the Legion of Superheroes, a kind of interplanetary Justice League of the future. There, she’s initially smitten with Mon-El, a flying invincible hero of the Superman mold, and has an instant altercation with a man she recognizes as Brainiac, but whom she later learns is fellow legionnaire in training Brainiac 5 (Harry Shum, Jr.). A quick tour of the grounds sets the groundwork for action later in the film, including foreshadowing the presence of a vault of confiscated weapons, which is subject to a heist later in the film.
Here’s a bit of a meta-spoiler; the animation studio is going to do a massive reset of this continuity after just one more of these, a film titled Warworld. That means that this is, for all intents and purposes, the second to last in this sub-franchise. After one Superman film, a sort-of Flash movie that mostly took place in an alternate past, a king-sized Batman flick, and a Green Lantern buddy space opera, we’re on our fifth film, and we’re already leaving a lot of story potential out there on the court to be swept under the rug as having happened between movies while racing toward a reset button. That begs the question of why they would even make these as interconnected movies in the first place if that interconnection is purely a matter of branding (oops, maybe I just answered my own question there). For all its flaws and variances between the films that made it up, the DCAMU at least felt like there was a reason for it to exist, and there was some reward for following them in the form of longer character arcs. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Here, we get a few brief minutes of Superman and Batman in the present before Supergirl’s gallivanting off to the future, and a quick check-in right in the middle of Kara’s adventures in superschooling to let us know that there’s a terrorist organization that almost managed to acquire Brainiac 1’s head from the lab in which it is being studied. Other than that, there’s no reason for this to not simply be a solo Supergirl outing, or it could keep the title it has now if there’s some concern about the movie selling fewer DVDs if it’s more obviously about a woman (the poor sales of Catwoman: Hunted probably contributed to this). The target demographic of this movie is very, very concerned about cooties.
What we do have is pretty rote. The rest of the student body at Legionnaire Academy is pretty lackluster. The most impressive is a woman who can split into three (and only three) versions of herself; the rest include your normal assortment of ragtag underdogs whose uncool powers are completely useless, until they’re all working in tandem at the end and everyone gets a moment to shine. There’s a guy who can turn himself invisible (but not anything else, like his clothing), a shy “phantom girl,” a man who can inflate himself and bounce around, and everybody’s favorite actually-a-comic-book-character Arms-Fall-Off-Boy, whose arms fall off. None of them have any hope of becoming Legionnaires when they complete their training, as it’s widely agreed that superChad Mon-El has the single open position on the team locked down. For half a second I got excited that they might be teasing a Mon-El/Brainiac 5 romantic pairing, but instead we have a pretty rote story about Kara having a crush on Mon-El before her friction with Brainiac 5 turns into begrudging respect, which is itself replaced by romantic interest. Brainiac 5 is a total Spock, though, since he won’t shut up about how he’s the smartest, most logical guy in the universe; I get the appeal. There is a traitor in the ranks, though, and given that this is little more than a futuristic variation on the stock “nerds vs. jocks” plot, you can probably guess who turns out to be the mole. Turns out they’re a member of the same terrorist organization that Bats and Superman dealt with in the 21st Century, which has existed for over a thousand years now and which serves one goal: help Brainiac (1) conquer the universe. Of course the man behind everything is Brainiac; it’s always, always Brainiac. I’m so tired.
As it turns out, one of the things in the superweapon vault has the potential to rewrite existence and Brainiac wants it but even he wasn’t smart enough to bypass the security system, so he let successive generations of himself become smarter until Brainiac 5 came along, whose sense of heroism could be manipulated into opening the vault. For what it’s worth, I am giving the film an extra half star purely because Brainiac 1 shows up at the end with Brainiacs 2-4 sticking out of his lumpy flesh and crying out in pain like Monstro Elisasue, so that was fun (he’s even defeated because all of his constituent parts decide they want ultimate power for themselves, and he’s torn apart by his own absorbed clones). Some amount of world shattering wigglies do expand, which I wouldn’t normally mention, but it might be important later since we’re speedrunning toward a crisis-style reset. In the end, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 make out and get together, and the Legionnaires who were conveniently kept away from HQ while all of this was going on return home and say that they’re going to let in all of the wacky misfits, even Arms-Fall-Off Boy! The end. Is this the last we’ve seen of Brainiac? I sure hope so. Y’all can keep Sinestro, too.
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, Boomeris 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.
Of all of the films on this list, this was the one I was least looking forward to. The few clips that I saw prior to my screening did not endear me to its 3D animation style, and it seemed squarely aimed at a child audience based on the premise alone. What this ended up being was much better than I expected, even if its PG-13 rating is a little baffling.
Jonathan Kent (Jack Dylan Grazer) is about to turn twelve, and is old enough to start to resent the frequent absences of his journalist father, Clark (Travis Willingham), despite frequent lectures from his mother Lois (Laura Bailey) about the importance of the fourth estate. When dear old dad misses Jonathan’s baseball game on his birthday, the boy broods in his room and runs from his father when he does come home, taking off into a cornfield before his emotional stress gets the better of him and he manifests heat vision. Hiding in the barn afterward, his father reveals to him for the first time that he’s not always off chasing stories, but averting tsunamis and stopping falling space debris, because pops is Superman. Jonathan is delighted at this news (despite, like many children, having a preference for the “cooler” Batman). After a touching father-and-son flight around the world in the vein of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” musical sequence, the two go to Gotham, where Superman introduces his son to Batman (Troy Baker) and the latter’s own son, Damian/Robin (Jack Griffo). There’s immediate friction between the elitist Damian and “farm boy” Jonathan, and their conflict belies Damian’s own insecurities, specifically that the Teen Titans don’t want him because of his tendencies toward both violence and lone-wolfism, rejecting him from the team. When an interstellar invading force assimilates huge swathes of the earth’s population, including the Justice League and the Titans, it’s up to the boys to put aside their differences and save both their dads and the world.
Strangely, I had an easier time adjusting to the animation style here than I have in the “Tomorrowverse” movies, perhaps because these character models don’t constantly call to mind Adult Swim shows of a bygone era. It’s certainly not up to something like Pixar’s output, but it’s pretty decent, if occasionally wonky. I don’t think we ever see anyone close the front door of the Kent farmhouse, as characters often walk in and leave the door wide open while they have a conversation until the scene ends, so it really does seem like everyone here was raised in the proverbial barn. There are even scenes that were rather impressive, most notably the scene in which Green Arrow, bow cocked, searches the JL’s “Watchtower” satellite for a potential invader, as there’s a lot of fun rotation around the character and the movement of both model and lighting was effectively moody. There are also several scenes of characters walking out of dark shadows to reveal that they’ve been taken over by Starro spores that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comfort Halloween watches, The Faculty, and that always gets points with me.
Characterwise, I appreciated that this film had one of the most infuriatingly unlikeable versions of Damian Wayne to date, and that his character arc over the course of this one moves him to a more sympathetic place, which was impressive. When we first meet him, he’s snide and condescending while Bruce stands by embarrassed, apologizing for the fact that his spawn is a bratty little edgelord. He even kicks Jonathan over the edge of one of the many non-OSHA-compliant platforms in the Batcave as a “test” to see if he can get the other boy’s flight power to activate in a traumatic situation (it does not work, and Jonathan is almost smashed to death on stalacmites). His decision to head straight to Jonathan’s school and recruit him to his “save the dads” mission is pragmatic, but also speaks to his desire to prove that he can be a team player. For his part, Jonathan himself is in a meeting with the principal following an altercation with a bully named Melvin; the school administrator tells Jonathan that Melvin is troubled and that if Jonathan can extend the other boy a little grace and look past his harsh exterior, people like Melvin can be the most loyal friend one can ask for. This doesn’t really seem to be true in the case of Melvin (that kid’s a little asshole), but it does echo through his scenes with Damian, as Jonathan is able to win him over through his own clever thinking and spirit of determination. It’s not the most nuanced or original storytelling, but it’s not talking down to its audience.
Speaking of which, I’m not really sure who this film is supposed to be for. I mentioned that PG-13 rating above, and for most of the runtime, I was hard-pressed to think of why that might be the case. Not every movie that’s about children is for children, obviously. No child should see Come and See or Graveyard of the Fireflies before they’re old enough to process what they’re seeing. This, however, definitely has the air of being made for a younger audience than these movies are normally suited for. In fact, the moment that a character said “damn,” I was a little shocked, as Super Sons had theretofore been so … family-friendly? The plot point about young Jonathan feeling ignored by his father because he missed the kid’s baseball game is a cliche lifted straight out of Hook, and both Damian and Jonathan’s playground insults are feeble in a way that couldn’t possibly interest an adult audience but might, perhaps, pass muster with a child. I found myself surprisingly touched by all the time that Clark and Jonathan spend together in Act I, but it’s not sophisticated, adult stuff; it’s for kids. After the midpoint, however, things start to get a little more violent, as if the film was lulling you into a false sense of security before moving on to Starro’s little seastar-with-an-eye things horribly emerging from characters’ mouths and, in the finale, all of those eyes bursting bloodily when the hive mind is defeated. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly, since it takes what is clearly a PG family movie into something that’s more in line with what the standard audience of these movies would expect, but I find it hard to imagine them not being bored with the film’s more squeaky-clean daycare-safe first half. Ultimately, it’s pretty decent, if tonally uneven, and for someone who normally rolls his eyes at stories about fathers and sons, I found this story inoffensive and occasionally tender.
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, Boomeris 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.
Green Lantern: Beware My Power falls squarely in the “solid, but unexceptional” tier of these movies for me. The story is interesting, and it goes out of its way to deliver something different from the films that came before it, making overtures toward space opera as a genre, while also falling back on some old standby narrative elements, like framing the narrative around a central mystery (this time, it’s “What re-ignited the conflict between two worlds brokering an uneasy peace?”) and having a Green Lantern with PTSD serve as the main character. But it also errs on the side of being a bit messy, its moral quandary is muddled, and there’s something amiss in the editing.
John Stewart (Aldis Hodge and therefore automatically an extra half star) is a veteran of the Iraqi Quagmire struggling to deal with his PTSD now that he’s back in civilian life when a UFO crashes into the junkyard next door. He rescues a small blue alien dude from the wreckage, who speaks to him cryptically before his body self-destructs at the moment he dies, leaving behind a green ring that slips itself onto his finger and starts talking to him. Unable to remove it, he asks the ring if someone could help him understand what’s happening to him, and the ring surrounds him in a protective shield and take him to the JLA’s satellite “Watchtower,” where after a round of extremely typical “misunderstanding means fight” stuff, Green Arrow (Jimmi Simpson) and the newest Green Lantern are off to the GL HQ planet of Oa in the self-repaired crashed ship. Upon arrival, they find the headquarters in ruins and meet Shayera Hol (Jamie Gray Hyder), a warrior of the planet Thanagar, which is populated by winged humanoids. She tells them that the Green Lanterns had helped to create a truce between the Thanagarians and the basically human people of Rann, who were at war with one another. An attempt to build a bridge between their two planets, metaphorically and (using teleportation tech known as “zeta beams”) literally, went awry, putting the two planets right next to each other and wreaking untold havoc on both. Each side blames the other, with good evidence on both fronts, although this turns out to be due to an external party that’s performing false flag efforts on both Rann and Thanagar. Along the way, they pick up Adam Strange (Brian Bloom), a hero of Rann whom even the Thanagarians respect, and who has been presumed dead for years.
Of course, the villain behind everything is Sinestro. It’s always Sinestro. I got tricked into thinking for a while that this story might go somewhere different, but nope: Sinestro. There does turn out to be another party behind him pulling things from the shadows, but the moment that it was revealed that the Rann/Thanagar beam-bridge thing was sabotaged by Sinestro, I rolled my eyes. (Worse still, upon looking up the movie on Wikipedia to review the cast list, it looks like the film’s poster/DVD cover straight up shows Sinestro; so much for making it a “mystery” at all.) Up to this point, I was willing to forgive a lot of the film’s flaws. A lot of the animation seems a little choppy around the edges, and there’s a distinct feeling that I get that certain frames were extended by fractions of a second, as if they needed just an extra minute and change of runtime in order to meet a contractual obligation and they were going to get those 87 seconds with what was already completed, even if it meant making the time between each character’s lines feel juuuuuuust a teensy bit too long.
Further, there’s a real “Not all cops” vibe early in the film that I wasn’t a big fan of, and seems particularly tone deaf given the time of release and the film’s main character. After manhandling a guy because he was being an obnoxious jerk while John was having a PTSD flashback, John then comes across two men planning to burn an unhoused guy alive in an alley simply for being there, and he fights them off. The police arrive just as he puts on a few finishing moves and tase him, only letting him go once they run a background check and learn that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The whole thing feels weird, out of place, regressive, and apathetic about police brutality. Given that one of the film’s theses revolves around moral justifications for taking a life, it feels weird to include this run-in with the police one of the film’s first scenes. I’m not exaggerating either; the first time that GL and GA meet Shayera, John almost kills her in their fight, as he has her pinned under a mental construct and is in the process of crushing her to death as his ring repeats “Lethal force is not authorized,” over and over again. It’s because of John’s PTSD, of course, as he keeps flashing back to the moment that one of his fellow soldiers was killed next to him, followed by an attack by an enemy combatant who stabs John through his hand in the altercation before John is able to get the upper hand. This gets called back a couple of times, including a scene near the end when the film’s big bad does the same. When the gang manages to rescue the imprisoned Hal Jordan, his old buddy Green Arrow is shocked when the newly freed man kills one of the enemy facility’s guards without hesitation, as Hal says that his experience in Sinestro’s prison has hardened him. Still later, the final villain is defeated when Arrow is forced to kill them, as there’s no other choice.
Justification for homicide seems like a strange place for these movies to go. I suppose it could be construed as necessary given that our newest Lantern here is a combat veteran, and the fact that John is haunted by the things he saw (and did) in the war makes for a much more complex character than the ones we’ve seen so far in this series. I don’t want to complain about the creative team on this one giving more depth to any of the characters, but it’s definitely a weird choice. A lot of the other choices I really liked, though. Although Unbound spent some time in space aboard Brainiac’s ship and the failed assault on the planet Apokolips obviously launched from space, it’s surprising that it’s taken over forty of these movies to make a proper, space-set sci-fi story (it also took them more than forty of these before they made one with a Black lead, it should be mentioned). The influences from Star Wars are all over. The Green Lanterns’ powers are given elements of The Force here (during a long interstellar trip, John even practices his use of his new powers with the ring like Luke does aboard the Millennium Falcon). There’s a dark, corrupting influence that causes the moral fall of the greatest and most respected member of an intergalactic peace-keeping order, and the fall of that order leaves only one last Jedi Green Lantern, one free of the influence of previous generations. Hal Jordan’s prison beard even makes him look almost exactly like prequel Obi-Wan. If you’re going to borrow (or steal), do it from the best, I suppose.
From a production perspective, this one is a little sloppy, but I’ve finally gotten used to the animation style, so it’s not intolerable. Narratively, it’s a refreshing change of pace to get out and do some space stuff, since the last time we did anything close to this scale was in Emerald Knights, which was over thirty movies ago. Characterwise, the choices they made about John Stewart’s past are an interesting wrinkle that delivers more pathos than normal, and his interactions with Green Arrow are a lot of fun. I love Aldis Hodge, so that’s a plus. Still, this one gets a “Solid, But Unexceptional.”
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