justice league

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Crisis on Infinite Earths Pts. 1-3 (2024)

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

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 making COIE 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! 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League – Warworld (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Injustice (2021)

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

We don’t talk about video games around here very often. Although our bread and butter is film talk, obviously, we occasionally diverge and talk about books, music, and Star Trek. I enjoy video games, although I wouldn’t consider myself much of a gamer. When I enjoy something, I usually do nothing but play that game to completion (or close enough to completion that I’m satisfied) and then might not pick up a controller again for months, and even over a year at certain points in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever even brought it up over on the podcast, although if you go back through the archives and are curious as to why I didn’t write a single review in September of last year, the solution to that mystery is that I had just gotten Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m the kind of person who thinks that the newest system is always too expensive, and normally wait until the next generation is out before I even consider purchasing one. The XBox 360 released for Christmas 2004, but I didn’t buy one until I used my tax return to do so in February of 2008. I used nothing but that as my entire entertainment center for over a decade. The PS4 was released in 2013 and the PS5 in 2020, and I upgraded to the PS4 on Black Friday 2019, when the prices were already starting to drop and there was additional savings. But what really prompted me to upgrade was the release of two games that had me salivating: Spider-Man and Injustice 2. The latter of these was a sequel to a game that I had played on my 360, and although I had little interest in the narrative (such as it was; this is a one-to-two player 1v1 fighter of the Mortal Kombat mold after all), but I was intrigued about getting to play as Supergirl, my love for whom is well documented in these reviews. The narrative of the first game is simple; a furious Superman, enraged at having been tricked into killing a pregnant Lois by Joker, forgoes due process and just straight up kills the murderous clown. This ends up splitting various heroes down ethical lines as Superman slides further and further down the slippery moral slope, ending with him setting up a regime. When you play the storyline (rather than just the arena), you mostly play as members of the rebellion against this despot. 

It’s not the most original storyline. We’re up to our necks in “What if Superman, but evil?” at this point, and if you’re thinking that maybe this was before that was such a tired idea, then you’re sort of right. The game came out in 2013, while this film came out in 2021, at a point in time in which the world already had two seasons of The Boys. In 2013, this was fine — not just because it hadn’t been done to death yet, but also because it wasn’t supposed to be a movie, it was just supposed to be the bare skeleton upon which a fighting game was very thinly predicated. But piggies love slop (and I’m not excluding myself here) so of course the game got a prequel comic, and the prequel comic got an animated adaptation, and here we are. I never read that comic (and you can’t make me), but there were apparently enough changes that the film has a disputed reputation. For what its worth, this is one of the most fan-fictiony things that I have ever seen with a full animation budget, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. This movie is the equivalent of watching a child smash action figures into one another and weld together different half-remembered things that they know about characters into a messy narrative, except it’s also sadistic in a way that seems designed to appeal to someone who craves more adult media but can’t fathom going out of their DC comfort zone. 

The film opens on Clark (Justin Hartley) and Lois (Laura Bailey) in bed together, when Clark is awakened because he hears an extra heartbeat, revealing that Lois is pregnant. She goes off to work while Clark gets his Superman on and meets with Batman (Anson Mount), who deduces the good news even before his friend can reveal it. Unfortunately, the Joker (Kevin Pollak) is in Metropolis, where he murders Jimmy Olsen and kidnaps Lois. The whole league is brought in to try and find her before something bad can happen, and they work together to find that Joker and Harley Quinn (Gillian Jacobs) have stolen a submarine and that one of the nuclear warheads is missing. Superman brings the sub back to shore and boards it, and inhales some Scarecrow gas that has been laced with kryptonite, then attacks what he believes to be Doomsday and takes the monster into space, only to discover upon exiting the atmosphere that he’s dragged his lover and their child into space, where they both die. Worse still, a timer has been surgically grafted onto Lois’s heart, so that when it stops, the missing nuke detonates in Metropolis, atomizing the city. While Green Arrow (Reid Scott) takes Harley into what amounts to protective custody, Superman tracks down Batman and the Joker to Arkham, where he—over Batman’s protests—extrajudicially murders Joker. This sets the two heroes at odds with one another, as Superman starts down the slippery slope with Wonder Woman (Janet Varney), Cyborg (Brandon Michael Hall), Bruce’s own son Damian/Robin (Zach Callison), and others joining his regime, while Batman, Arrow, Catwoman, Dick/Nightwing, and others form a “rebellion” against Superman’s overreach. This starts small, with enforced peacekeeping in the Middle East through invasion and deconstruction of the power structures of fictional countries like Bialya and Qurac, but gets out of hand when he murders an entire warehouse full of young ravers because of their idolization of Joker as a figurehead against Superman’s fascism. From here, it’s hero versus hero, yawn, etc.

You know that thing that people love to mock about MCU movies where a character says, “Well, that just happened,” even though no one has ever uttered that line in any of those? In this movie, someone actually says it, and I couldn’t believe just how creatively bankrupt the film already was at that point, a mere fifteen minutes in. It doesn’t bode well for the film overall, and is oddly also a part of the only thing in the movie that gave me any joy, which was the interaction between Arrow and Harley. He’s a very self-serious man, and their playful antipathy (complete with periodic gassings of one another) is some of the only levity that this gritty film musters. I’ve loved Jacobs since Community and she’s an inspired choice for Harley here, and she’s clearly having a lot of fun with it. Their rapport is fun, especially when she manages to crack through Arrow’s resistance on certain things (notably, she criticizes him for naming his secret HQ the “Arrowcave,” noting that “Batcave” makes sense as bats live in caves, she recommends the “Quiver,” which he adopts fairly quickly as he realizes that she has a point). That’s about all that there is to enjoy here, however, as the rest of the film alternates between being utterly dour, repetitive in its action sequences, and occasionally just straight up fanservice of the kind a child playing with toys would enjoy. What if Damian killed Nightwing? But, but what if when that happened Dick became, like, a version of Deadman called Deadwing (no, really)? It’s best enjoyed if you have the mind of a child, but isn’t really appropriate for children, which means it’s best suited exactly for the kind of manchildren that, to its credit, it’s clearly made for. That’s not a recipe for a good movie, though, and it shows in the final product. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League Dark – Apokolips War (2020)

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

Ever since the beginning of the so-called “DC Animated Movie Universe” subfranchise, most of them have been serviceable, and there have been a few stinkers, but I’ve rarely been “wowed” with any of the films so far. Justice League vs. Teen Titans and its follow up Teen Titans: Judas Contract were noteworthy, and Justice League Dark and Wonder Woman: Bloodlines both had something special going for them, but none of them have reached the level of exceptional. Here, in the grand finale of the DCAMU, however, they managed to pull off something really special, and even though I have lukewarm feelings about the continuity overall, I really liked this one. 

As Justice League Dark: Apokolips War opens, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) has gathered several groups together to discuss a pre-emptive strike against Darkseid (Tony Todd), the ruler of the hellish planet Apokolips. After his most recent unsuccessful attempt to conquer Earth, the Justice League has observed new activity from Apokolips that are interpreted as a prelude to invasion. Leaving the Teen Titans behind to act as security while they’re away, the League sets off to stop Darkseid on his home turf. However, as exit the wormhole-like “boom tube” near Apokolips’s orbit, they are attacked by Darkseid’s newest forces, hybrids of his previously-encountered Parademons and Doomsday (who previously—if temporarily—killed Superman), and the League goes down as the titles roll. We then cut to two years later, where John Constantine (Matt Ryan) and his demon buddy Etrigan (Ray Chase) are drinking themselves through one of the few remaining pubs in London, alphabetically. Constantine, who was in the assault team on Apokolips two years earlier, is particularly ashamed of his cowardice, as he left his lover Zatanna behind on the planet to be ripped to shreds by “Paradooms” while he fled through a portal. Two hooded figures emerge from the darkness to interrupt their well-earned pity party: Raven (Taissa Farmiga) and Superman, upon whom Darkseid tattooed the man’s “S” crest with kryptonite ink, rendering him powerless and forcing him to watch his adopted planet fall under occupation and resource strip-mining. 

We get an update on the new status quo. Most of our heroes are dead, and I do mean dead. We see some of them taking major injuries in flashbacks and who are presumed dead for much of the run time; Shazam gets his leg ripped off, Wonder Woman loses an arm, and Cyborg gets torn to pieces. Some of them die utterly horribly during the time skip; many heroes (including Zatanna) are overwhelmed with Paradooms and we only see their blood spray from amidst the gathered horde, while Atlantean Mera gets half her face ripped off, and Martian Manhunter is burned alive. When Damian tells the others what it was like on Earth on the day that the war began, we see our girl Starfire in two separate pieces, her viscera lying on the ground. As the film continues in the present, still more people die; Green Lanterns get skewered by giant claws and burned to crisps down to their skeleton like the poor souls in Sarah Connor’s dreams, Cheetah gets shot to death by quisling mercenaries, and Batgirl gets eaten alive, or at least that’s what I think happened. Even those who are still alive are in bad shape; Nightwing died during the invasion and was resurrected via Lazarus Pit, but he came back soulless, while Batman has been completely assimilated and is now under Darkseid’s thrall, using his intellect to plot the despot’s next moves, and Raven’s ability to keep her extradimensional demon father, Trigon, trapped in the gem on her forehead is starting to slip. Things are bad. 

Superman’s plan is to try and find Damian Wayne (Stuart Allan) and see if Bruce’s love for his son can break through Darkseid’s conditioning, and to distract the Apokoliptan forces by diverting their attention to the sites of several giant “reaper” mining devices via attacking them, while taking a small group to Apokolips while Darkseid’s forces are away and destroy Apokolips itself. Snags get hit, of course. Forces aren’t initially diverted to the “reaper” machines because only two of three are under attack, prompting John Constantine to seek help from Swamp Thing (Roger Cross) to take down the third platform. The resultant action sequence, in which Swamp Thing wrecks shit, it one of the coolest things in all forty-ish of these movies so far. Although the League gets back-up from the remnants of the Titans and the Suicide Squad, they lose more people than expected in the siege on the portal tower, and when they get to Apokolips, they have to face off against the cybernetically reanimated corpses of some of their fallen friends. Worse still, the appeal to Batman’s humanity doesn’t go as planned, and their plan to destroy the planet’s energy core turn out to be for nothing when they discover that the whole planet is being powered by an enslaved Flash on a treadmill, so there’s no reactor to blow. As things fall apart, Trigon is unleashed, adding a further unstable element to the fray. 

I like big finales like this; they really rev the easily-pleased engine of my heart. And I also enjoy a grand conclusion that feels genuinely conclusive. This is essentially this continuity’s Endgame, a chance to establish real stakes with life hanging in the balance and demonstrate that even our favorites (alas, Starfire) aren’t guaranteed to make it out alive (R.I.P., Zatanna). It feels like there’s a lot on the line, and the tone is consistent while also still offering opportunities for levity and the franchise’s trademark humor; apparently, the scene in which there’s a bait-and-switch joke about Constantine’s ex turning out not to be Harley Quinn but the anthropomorphic King Shark was heavily memed upon release. Shark even winks! The crossover nature of the film also means that we get to see interactions between characters that we haven’t seen on screen together before, and those character moments are always what I enjoy most in these movies (Lois Lane gets Harley’s Suicide Squad to join the resistance by beating her in an MMA match, of all things). Apparently, the ending of this one causes some minor furor online. I won’t get into the specifics, but the ending caps this narrative while also setting the stage for a new continuity to begin. I don’t know what to say about that other than that this is superhero media, babes; I don’t know what you were expecting. That another continuity might happen now—in fact, given that these were/are still making a profit, that another continuity will begin is inevitable—doesn’t make my appreciation of the tone of finality and melancholy in this one less palpable or meaningful. 

Wrapping up my thoughts on this, I think that it’s funny how much of this subfranchise was taken up with Batman (and Batfamily) media, for virtually none of those associated characters and relationships to have an impact on this capstone, other than the obvious one between Bruce and Damian. One of the reaping platforms is attacked by the minor leaguer Batfolk we met once before, but those roles could have been filled by anyone. The two Teen Titans movies ended up having more of an impact on the final chapter, and I love that. Despite his oversaturation in these animated movies in general, all those Batflicks wound up mattering almost not at all here. In fact, this movie could almost be watched completely out of context, and you’d still be able to follow the plot of this one pretty well, and the exposition to get you there doesn’t slow anything down. I don’t know that it would be as meaningful, but it would still be a hell of a lot of fun.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League Dark (2017)

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

After a semi-successful attempt at horror with Justice League vs. Teen Titans, we return to the ongoing animated cinematic universe with another horror-adjacent picture as well as a revisitation of supernatural themes. Following an opening sequence in which the big three—Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman—each deal with acts of violence instigated by normal civilians seeing other people as monstrous demons, we find DC’s resident occultist, we get our first glimpse of John Constantine (voiced by Matt Ryan, who played the character in live action on his own short-lived live action series that premiered in the 2014 TV season, and was later imported into the CW’s “Arrowverse” proper). He and Jason Blood (Ray Chase), a functionally immortal former medieval knight permanently bonded to a noble demon named Etrigan, are playing poker against some of Hell’s bigwigs. When Constantine wins big, it turns into a magic fight, in which Constantine and Blood/Etrigan emerge victorious. Elsewhere, Batman, who has faced off against magical villains multiple times, remains skeptical about the supernatural elements of his current cases, until he begins to receive messages telling him to seek out Constantine. To do so, he must first reunite with an old flame, the stage magician Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), who supplements her prestidigitation with real sorcery. She reveals that the messages he has been receiving are from Boston “Deadman” Brand (Nicholas Turturro), a former acrobat who was killed mid-act and who is now a roaming spirit with the ability to possess the living in order to fight crime. Once this “Justice League Dark” is assembled, they learn that their fight has something to do with the long presumed-dead villain Destiny, and that reality hangs in the balance. 

Personal confession time: Zatanna is one of my favorite comic book characters. I’m revealing my age a little here, but back when I still had a Tumblr, my custom background was a repeating image of Zatanna’s face from Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers run, which was one of the first comics that I read and, although it’s not as fondly remembered now as it once was, it was formative for me. I wish that she was in her more traditional magician’s outfit in this instead of the goofy ass New 52 costume that they’ve stuck her in here (it may be purely to make the animation easier, but the fact that they’ve given her detached sleeves here instead of those fishnet gauntlets from the comic book improves this look a solid 10%), but at least we’ll always have Young Justice for that, at least until Max cycles it off to some internet backwater like they’ve done with so much other programming. I also really like Ryan’s take on Constantine, and he’s played the character across so many mediums now that I can’t help but feel like he’s stamped himself onto the character just as much as the late Kevin Conroy did with Batman. There’s something deliciously Kolchak-like about his portrayal; everywhere that Constantine goes, everybody knows him, and they all hate his guts. It’s fun. 

As far as the horror elements go, this one is more understated than JLvTT. How scary it is depends on how weirded out you are by the demons that we meet. It’s frontloaded a little bit in that regard, as when we see the points of view of the characters who are enspelled to see demons in the form of those around them, the monsters they are seeing are truly repulsive and nauseating. The ultimate villain of the piece isn’t as imposing or uncannily inhuman as Trigon was, and while the magical fight at the end is cool, it doesn’t have that opening-scene-of-Wishmaster viscerality that made JLvTT stand out. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive or interesting, however. In fact, as this one gets to do a big magic battle that doesn’t come down to a big punch-’em-up at the end. Those vary in quality, but I can say that having watched so many of these in quick succession, a lot of them have become an undifferentiated battle sequence in my memories, if I retain any of those parts at all. This could have easily degenerated into a blue-beam-versus-red-beam fight as well, but some real detail went into differentiating the kinds of magic that each character wields and creating a sequence in which they work together and in conflict with each other at certain points. Like I said, it’s just not scary. But it is cool. 

Speaking of cool, we have to talk about the omnipresence of Batman in this series. So far, this seventh film is the fourth “Justice League” title, while all three other films have been “Batman” movies, and of the ones that have “Justice League” in the title, he’s been one of the major players in those plots as well, with him being the only member of the League in this movie with more than five minutes of screentime. It’s clear that DC Animation knows that he’s the moneymaker, and they’re not afraid to milk his presence for all that it’s worth, or overutilize him the same way that Marvel did Wolverine in the nineties or Star Wars is still doing with Darth Vader. Those aren’t positive comparisons, but I don’t think that this is as detrimental to the product. I would probably feel differently if this wasn’t following right on the heels of The Killing Joke, so I’m willing to account for viewer saturation fatigue as I remind myself once again that these films were never meant to be watched so shortly after one another. I just felt it was worth noting that the Leaguer most closely associated with the “dark” Justice League of the comics was Wonder Woman, which makes sense as she is a demigoddess and therefore a magical being. It’s Batman here for purely marketing purposes, and although that hasn’t created a negative effect yet, any time that becomes the case, the art itself declines.

Narratively, this one felt a bit like a Clive Barker novel. There’s a sequence in the movie where Constantine and Zatanna have to go into an enspelled victim’s mind, and the villain takes advantage of them being out of play in the physical world to make a move on them there. In order to do so, it creates a monster out of shit by backing up all of the toilets in the hospital where the man lies comatose. I know for sure that there was a shitmonster in Everville, and although I wouldn’t bet money on it, I think that there’s one in Imajica as well (as with these movies, I read those two in too-close proximity to one another and there’s a few things that are blended together in my recollection). That lends this rendition of Constantine a little bit of Barker’s Harry D’Amour character, which mixes well with Constantine’s constant—no pun intended—escapes from the consequences of his actions at the expense of those around him. It really comes back to bite him in the ass in this one, and it’s well-conceived. This one also feels like it can be watched separately from the rest of this series, if you’re just a Constantine (or Zatanna) fan and can’t be arsed with consuming the others. It’s a little more cheaply made than some of the others, but the seams are still pretty intact. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Doom (2012)

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

A direct sequel to Crisis on Two Earths, Justice League: Doom does not follow up on the apparent membership drive that ended the previous film. It seems that only one new recruit has joined the team since that movie’s finale, but it’s still a continuation, if one knows that this is the case and what to look for. This was another one that I had seen a few times even before beginning this project, not so much out of any particular fondness for it, but because it was the last one that was released before I finished grad school and moved back to Baton Rouge, so it was an easy one to put on in the background and do some unpacking or chores. It’s not as strong a film as Crisis was, but it still has some of the same magic, and it’s pretty good, even if it’s a little thinner than its predecessor. 

The Royal Flush gang, a villainous group that is characterized by their costumes taking inspiration from the highest point cards for the suit of spades, has been engaging in a series of break-ins, and Batman is on the case. He discovers that they have been using a piece of technology that allows them to pass through walls in order to complete their crimes, and when he engages them, the rest of the Justice League gets involved. During this distraction, Flash villain Mirror Master is able to use his ability to hide in reflections to surreptitiously enter the Batcave via the Batmobile’s rear view mirror, where he downloads files from the main computer. Some time later, each member of the League is attacked while they are alone. The man behind the attacks is Vandal Savage, an immortal who has been alive since the dawn of mankind, and he offers each of the League’s individual nemeses the opportunity to finish off their archenemy once and for all. While in his civilian guise, Martian Manhunter is given a drink by an attractive woman who turns out to be his enemy Ma’alefa’ak (another shapeshifting Martian and, depending on the continuity, J’onn’s brother), and the drink turns out to contain a compound that will result in the Manhunter sweating out highly flammable magnesium. Wonder Woman faces off against Cheetah, who manages to land a cut on the Amazon, resulting in an infection that causes her to see everyone around her as Cheetah, so that she will fight until her heart gives out. Superman is lured to the top of the Daily Planet building because a downsized reporter is planning to jump off of the roof, but is in fact a disguised Metallo, who is armed with a gun with a kryptonite bullet. Flash ends up with a bomb drilled into his wrist which will explode if he goes under a certain speed, Green Lantern is lured to an apparent hostage situation that goes south in a way that leaves him feeling unworthy of his powers, and Batman is tricked out of his home by the apparent disterment of his parents’ graves, only to find himself taken off guard by Bane, who knocks him out and stuffs him in his father’s casket (with the late Thomas Wayne’s skeletal remains) and reburies them in Thomas’s grave. 

It’s the darkest hour for the Justice League, but Batman breaks free first by digging himself out of his father’s grave and then finding Green Lantern and showing him that the people who were presumably killed by his failure were animatronics designed to shake his confidence, and along with newest ally Cyborg, they are able to rescue the others from their various traps. Batman reveals that all of these plans were actually his, that they were his failsafes should any of the other members of the League go rogue (or fall under brainwashing or magic compulsion, or any other manner of things that can and do happen in these four color fantasies). The others are not pleased with this revelation, but they still have to work together to face off against Vandal Savage, whose current plan is nothing short of genocidal: induce a solar flare that will ravage half of the planet’s surface and rewind the clock on mankind’s technological level to that of the Industrial Revolution. 

As a movie, this one doesn’t really feel like a sequel to the film that preceded it. While that one began life as a part of the Justice animated series, it had an entirely new voice cast that relied on some of the stunt casting that this series was known for, while this one mostly brings back the voice cast of that show. Kevin Conroy is back as Batman (as it should ever be), Tim Daly returns to voice Superman, Susan Eisenberg again voices Wonder Woman, Carl Lumbly is once again Martian Manhunter, and Michael Rosenbaum also returns to play Flash (albeit a different Flash). The only major casting change is that this film has Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern, as it features the Hal Jordan version of the character rather than the John Stewart version (voiced by Phil LaMarr). This is Fillion’s second time playing the character following his appearance in Emerald Knights. The character designs are a little different, too, and I watched this one several times without ever realizing it was supposed to be connected to Crisis, despite that one being one of my favorites. This time around, the connections were a little more apparent, especially in the musical choices; the opening title theme for this one very clearly incorporates the distinctive notation from the first. You can hear the exact same motif when the title appears here in Crisis and here, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched them close enough together to notice that before. There’s also fun new voice talent in this one, and it falls to me as one of the carriers of the Farscape fandom flame to call special attention to Claudia Black’s performance as Cheetah, which is absolutely delightful. The scene where Wonder Woman sees everyone as Cheetah gives Black the chance to do some neat little work as different variations on the same voice, which I liked a lot. 

Speaking of villains, however, this one falls a little flat in that department. Whereas Crisis had two interesting villains in the form of the nihilistic Owlman and the unhinged Superwoman, this is one of the thinner portrayals of Vandal Savage. Phil Morris’s voice acting is strong, but the characterization is a bit light, especially when you compare him here to his presence as the overall big bad of Young Justice, which admittedly had a lot more time to flesh him out. While both Owlman’s plan to destroy all universes and Vandal’s here to rule by reducing the population to a manageable half are very much schlocky comic book evil plans, the former had a sense of reality to it based on character motivation, while the latter feels broad and out of proportion for the motivation, like taking a bulldozer to a hangnail. Doom hinges on two major axes: the emotional core of the League’s feelings of betrayal due to Batman’s distrust, and the narrative plot point of the doomsday plan. The climax of the first is much more interesting and comes fairly early on, while the evil plot itself—despite being smaller in scale than in the preceding film—feels very cackly, Saturday morning cartoony. 

It’s unfortunate that this one is a bit of a dull note to end our time with Lauren Montgomery, who directed this film and several previous, starting with Superman Doomsday, when she was only twenty-seven years old(!). She was also a storyboard artist for that one, before she directed Wonder Woman, First Flight, Crisis on Two Earths, Apocalypse, and Year One. She was a storyboard artist on virtually all of the others, and she would continue to do this up through Batman: Bad Blood, at which point she became very heavily involved with a series called Voltron: Legendary Defender. These days, it looks like she’s gearing up to direct an as-yet-untitled animated film that is being released by Avatar Studios (she had previously been a storyboard artist on eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and was a supervising producer on The Legend of Korra in addition to doing some storyboard work for that program), so she’s still working, but this will be her last feature for this franchise. I wish her well! If they ever do another follow-up in this sub-series, I would love to see her return. For now, though, we say goodbye, and choose to remember her work at its best.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — The New Frontier (2008)

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

Many years ago, I used to own the two trade paperback volumes that comprised Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier comic. The miniseries is an exercise in reimagining the transition between what is considered the comic book Golden Age (about 1938 to 1956, notable for the introductions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) and that same medium’s Silver Age (1956 to 1970, notable for the introduction of the modern versions of the Flash and Green Lantern as well as the formation of the Justice League in place of the Justice Society). Set over the course of fifteen years, the series begins with the disruption of the superheroic Justice Society in the face of McCarthyism and sees Superman and Wonder Woman go to work for the government while Batman retreats into the shadows. Later, the emergence of new heroes like Flash and Green Lantern, and the accidental transportation of Martian Manhunter from his home planet to earth, arise just in time for the combined forces of two generations of heroes to take on an extinction level threat in the form of a living island populated by sauropods. 

Those two volumes were, unfortunately, some of the many books that I sold before my interstate move eight years ago as I was paring down my belongings. I haven’t read it since, but I recall it fondly, and I remember being very pleased with the animated adaptation’s ability to tell the same story concisely without the omission of too many important details. I even used to own this one on DVD before it, too, was resold in one of my many moves. Although it mostly holds up as a movie, I must have grown a lot since the last time I saw it, as some of its flaws stand out rather clearly these days. 

In the closing days—in fact, the final day—of the Korean War, USAF pilot Hal Jordan is shot down by Korean pilots moments after learning that an armistice has been declared; he is able to parachute into relative safety, but finds himself facing an enemy soldier who is unaware that the war is over, and is forced to kill the man in self defense. His resulting PTSD from this incident causes him to be the subject of mockery from others after discharge, as they consider him cowardly and perhaps too sympathetic to communism. Elsewhere, Martian J’onn J’onzz is teleported to Gotham City by an astronomer running an experiment, who then dies of a heart attack upon seeing the extraterrestrial’s form. A shapeshifter, J’onzz adopts the persona of a trustworthy detective, all while remaining fearful of violence from humans should they see his true form. These three new heroes as well as the DC “trinity” are brought together, alongside a bevy of comic deep cut characters and some who have become more well-known in the interim because of their presence in the CW “Arrowverse” shows, to face off against the living island and the malevolent consciousness called “the Centre” which animates it. 

This is a gorgeously animated movie. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is a very strong entry into this canon, since the source material was so well loved that it won all three of comics’ major awards, the Eisner, the Harvey, and the Shuster. Darwyn Cooke’s distinctive art style for the comic translates well to fluid motion, and the imagery is evocative of an older era that works well for the narrative. I really appreciate a lot of the artistic choices made here, with the choice to draw Wonder Woman as half a head taller than Superman being a particular source of jot for me. Although the film updates the title to include the phrase “Justice League,” the majority of the story focuses on Hal “Green Lantern” Jordan, and it may simply be that I am a Buffy fan (now and forever), but the choice to cast David Boreanaz, most well known to many as the vampire cursed with a soul, is particularly inspired. Hal feels guilt and shame, but not for the things that his fellow combatants think he should, and is tortured by the blood on his hands, and that’s not only within Boreanaz’s wheelhouse, it’s his forte. Equally genius was the casting of Lucy Lawless to voice Wonder Woman, even if it’s a shame that there’s so little of her in the film; still, she shines in every scene that she is in, and there’s a particular standout sequence in which she liberates a camp of “comfort women,” teaches them to fight, and leaves their former enslavers at the mercy of the freed women. Superman is aghast at this as they are both working as agents of the U.S. at the time, but it’s a well-crafted reminder that this immortal woman has an ethics and morality that is defined by a sense of justice that predates his “American way.” 

Despite Diana’s rejection of it, there is a distinctly jingoistic flair to some of the proceedings, and there’s a strange sense of sincerity to it that was lost on me in previous viewings. It is important to bear in mind that post-9/11 American Exceptionalism was an ever-present shadow on the entire landscape of media produced in the west, and in 2008 we were still a few years out from the point where non-satire mainstream films would be able to be openly anti-authoritarian and question the state again (the dam-breaker being the success of The Hunger Games, or at least that’s where I normally pin the turning point). As a comic, New Frontier was able to be a little more subversive, with the narrative focus on McCarthyism serving as a parallel to the contemporary (2004) witch-hunting and scapegoating of members of government who opposed the Bush Administration’s warmongering in the Middle East. The film also cut (other than a mention in the news) a storyline about a Black vigilante who fought the KKK before being murdered at the hands of a white lynch mob, as another indictment of the idea that the past was a place where things were “simpler” and “better.” Most of what remains is shown through the eyes of our objectively good viewpoint characters: the xenophobia that Martian Manhunter knows exists and cloaks himself against in order to “pass,” the muttering of bar patrons that they suspect Flash of being a commit because of his red costume, and the aforementioned belittlement that Hal Jordan receives from those who mistake his pacifism for cowardice and his PTSD for weakness. All of that disappears in the back half of this movie, however, as the film goes full Uncle Sam at the end, with all of the assembled forces against The Centre being identified explicitly as Americans, and, upon their victory, an excerpt from the JFK speech is played over a montage of the new and senior heroes fighting alongside one another as they move forward with a new (American) destiny. It’s not that the film’s sudden, new, shallow patriotism is bad in and of itself (it arguably could be, but I don’t have that in me today), it’s that it comes out of nowhere. I think that the intent is to show a rejection of McCarthy-era fearmongering giving way to a new dawn, but it’s a little too quick of a turn in a film that runs less than eighty minutes. It’s still one of the best of this series, but something I couldn’t ignore on this rewatch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Neil Patrick Harris, Superhero Sidekick

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Neil Patrick Harris wears a daunting number of hats in the show business racket: Broadway entertainer, game show host, sitcom star, children’s book author, etc. He’s one of these well-rounded, over-employed entertainers where you’re never sure how they fit all their various projects in a tenable schedule. One of his regular gigs is voiceover work for various animated projects wildly varying in target demographic, but often hitting that one common denominator in all age-specific marketing: superhero media. NPH has had regular voice acting gigs in the superhero pantheon over the years, even voicing the title role in a long-running animated Spiderman series. He’s only voiced characters in two animated superhero movies, though, both of which fall under the DC Comics brand. That’s maybe not that surprising to most people, as the DC Universe Animated Original Movies brand has dozens of feature-length cartoons under its belt to date. What is surprising, though is that someone as talented & recognizable as Neil Patrick Harris has only played supporting characters in both instances of his movie-length collaborations with DC. Likely a reflection of his busy, no time to dally schedule, NPH’s animated superhero movie specialty seems to be punching up a side character’s dialogue with wry, cocky wit, making them appear more fully developed than they’re written to be. As with many of the projects NPH applies his time to, he’s good at his job.

In our current Movie of the Month, 2010’s Batman: Under the Red Hood, NPH’s sidekick role plays as entirely intentional. He’s cast as just one of two ex-Robins, raised under the Caped Crusader’s tutelage in a movie that’s all about Batman’s struggle with the other. NPH appears in the film as Nightwing, an early adopter of the Robin persona who has since branched out to fighting crime on his own, but still desperately needs fatherly approval from a standoffish Batman. Nightwing is an outsider to the central plot involving a second, younger Robin, but he’s also an essential parallel of it. This requires him to be present, but without enough time to develop his persona. It’s a paradox that’s easily fixed by having NPH on hand to instantly sell the character’s sarcastic, performatively confident personality. It’s the same role he fills as The Flash in the earlier DC animated feature The Justice League: The New Frontier, through for entirely different reasons. The Flash is a sidekick to no one and his storyline is one of the driving plot threads in New Frontier, yet NPH is afforded just about the same amount of screen time & character development there as he is in Under the Red Hood. This is because the film is overstuffed with the backstories & character introductions of a long line of superheroes in the film’s cast, who all divvy up the runtime until there’s barely any left to go around. It’s a frequent problem for anyone who’s familiar with the trajectory of modern live-action superhero franchises, especially the DCEU. It’s also a telling contrast to the intimate story told in Red Hood.

As busy & overcrowded as The New Frontier can feel, it does have an excellent central gimmick. Set in the Atomic Age 1950s, the film feels like a better world where Brad Bird made his animated superhero media in traditional 2D instead of with Pixar. Telling the story of an ancient disembodied force that vows to destroy humanity because of its dangerous nuclear proliferation, The New Frontier is decorated wall to wall with the visual kitsch of a 1950s diner with a sci-fi theme. By setting the clock back to that setting, though, it also requires the Justice League to be a uniformed group of disparate superheroes who spend the entire runtime coming together as a team (and joining efforts of an untrustworthy military) for the first time. Characters like The Flash, Superman, and Wonder Woman already have detailed backstories in place, while more character development is afforded the origin stories of lesser characters like The Green Lantern & Martian Manhunter. It’s likely no accident that more seasoned, well-established voice actors are afforded to the three more static characters (NPH, Kyle McLachlan, and Lucy Lawless, respectively), since their personalities need to be more immediately recognizable than the ones who’re developed through origin stories. The Flash is key to the film’s plot, especially in establishing superheroes as McCarthy Era Others (“What’s with that red costume? Red’s for Commies,”) but he’s afforded almost the same amount of screen time as Nightwing in Under the Red Hood: very little. He’s a well-established superhero reduced here to Superman & Wonder Woman’s de facto sidekick.

From a technical standpoint, the more intimate, self-contained story of Under the Red Hood is more effective as a piece of writing, while the overly busy, origins-obsessed plotting of The New Frontier is indicative of the worst impulses of superhero media storytelling. I enjoyed both films very much, though, believing New Frontier’s narrative shortcomings to be far outweighed by the beauty & charm of its Atomic Age aesthetic. Neil Patrick Harris is employed in self-contradictory roles in both pictures. He is both central to the themes & plots and reduced to glorified cameo roles as sidekick & afterthought. NPH does a great job of making both roles memorable, informing both characters with a punchy, wry sense of humor without fully tipping them into wiseass Deadpool territory. Like The New Frontier, the man’s career is spread into an impossible number of directions and it’s impressive the amount of quality work he produces despite that myriad of obligations.

For more on May’s Movie of the Month, the animated superhero thriller Batman: Under the Red Hood, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s profile of its Caped Crusader voice actor, Bruce Greenwood.

-Brandon Ledet

Justice League (2017)

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Look! Up on the screen! It’s big! It’s dumb! It’s loud! It’s Justice League!

And it mostly works. Mostly.

The very first scene of Justice League does some good work walking back the problems—and they are problems, not merely criticisms—of the first few non-Wonder Woman films in this universe. We see Superman as children see him, which is also the way that this franchise keeps trying to retroactively force its audience into reconceptualizing him: as a true-blue (literally, given the lightening of his costume) hero and symbol of hope. He’s kind, sympathetic, and, you know, Superman, as he’s supposed to be. And then, just as his life was, the video is cut short. This leads into a beautiful opening credits montage, a strength of Zack Snyder’s as a director (even those who hate his Watchmen adaptation, which I surprisingly don’t, are all but universally pleased with its Dylan-composed credits sequence).

This sequence is not without contentious issues, of course. First, there’s a headline seen in a newspaper box mourning the loss of David Bowie, Prince, and Superman, but not Leonard Cohen, which is pretty disrespectful given that the whole thing is set to a really, really terrible cover of “Everybody Knows.” There’s also the issue that we’re supposed to be seeing a world in mourning for the space god who showed them some truths about themselves, but if you’re going to enjoy anything about this movie, you’re just going to have to accept this retcon.

Consider the speech from Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in the first Richard Donner Superman film (and later repurposed for the trailer for Superman Returns): “They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you… my only son.” This same speech was actually echoed by Russell Crowe in his turn as Papa El in Man of Steel: “You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.” Unfortunately, this franchise has made zero effort to actually follow through on these lofty ideals of the Superman-is-Messiah beyond paying lip service and a couple of “subtle” images in Man of Steel. The problem is that this was never present in the actual text of the film, which presented us with a broody, angry, super-powered alien whose only affection for the beings of his adopted world were his love for his mother and an office romance. He was more Tyler Hoechlin’s Derek Hale in Teen Wolf than Tyler Hoechlin’s Clark Kent in Supergirl (he’s killing it, by the way), and that absence has been sorely lacking in this film series so far.

But. But. Justice League, for all the baggage that its carrying from three bad movies and one spectacular one, actually works if you ignore all that needless, pointless, and out-of-place GRIMDARK nonsense that preceded it in the earlier installments. And it’s not just with Superman either; the scene that immediately follows the opening montage shows Batman out and about being Batman, and even uses some passages from Danny Elfman’s previous work on Tim Burton’s 1989 film adaptation (but which will always be a keystone for me as the theme music for the Batman animated series).

This first Batman scene is both good and bad. Your standard Gotham City burglar is exiting onto a roof at night, sees Batman, attacks the Bat, gets his ass handed to him, and is dangled over the side of a building to attract a Parademon (the foot soldiers of the film’s villain), which can apparently smell fear. Bats traps the Parademon in a net, tests out a series of sonic disruptions on it, and it dies, leaving behind a clue about the three Mother Boxes. It’s so, so dumb, but the combination of the old Elfman theme and the absurdity of the whole thing makes it feel like the cold open of an episode of the animated Justice League, where Kevin Conroy’s Batman would do something just like this: lure, trap, find weird clue that matches something he’s already investigating, detective it up. It shouldn’t (and for most people won’t) work in a feature film with live actors that is supposedly trying to take itself seriously, but that narrative works for me on a certain level. On the other hand, there are other elements of this scene that are inarguably bad story choices, like Batman just kind of grappling away from the scene to do detective stuff, completely disregarding the theft he just interrupted and leaving the burglar to his own devices.

The overarching plot of the film concerns the arrival of Steppenwolf, one of the members of Jack Kirby’s cosmic DC creations The New Gods, on earth. Millennia ago, he attempted to invade the planet and turn it into a “primordial hellscape,” but he was repelled by an alliance of Amazons, Atlanteans, the tribes of Man, and a couple of others that we’ll explore in a minute. Steppenwolf carrier with him three Mother Boxes, pieces of advanced technology that, when combined, create the terraforming effect that will make the earth his new home (yes, this was the exact same desire of the villains of Man of Steel). Now, after several millennia, he has returned in the wake of Superman’s death because mankind’s mourning of that great symbol of hope has made it ripe pickings for the invader’s crusade, and Batman has to recruit five superheroes with attitude to repel his forces (yes, this is essentially the same plot as the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, and yes, I would love to see the trailer for JL recut with the opening narration of MMPR).

I’m not going to lie to you: this movie is clearly half-baked and it makes a lot of mistakes. Beyond the fact that Bats uses a street level criminal as bait and then ditching him without even notifying the police, there are other mistakes both big and small. For instance: the janitor working at Star Labs is seen bidding Dr. Stone good night, and it’s obvious (at least on the big screen) that the ID he’s wearing is for a different person, as he has dark hair and is clean-shaven, while the picture on the ID is of a man with a big bushy head of white hair and a glorious Mark Twain mustache. You can imagine sitting in the movie theater and thinking, like me: “Oh, he must be a spy who stole this ID, that’s a neat clue.” But no, it’s just a mistake; later, after said innocent janitor has been kidnapped by the villain, we see his belongings left behind in a pile, including an ID with an accurate photo. That’s this movie in a microcosm: when you think that it’s being clever, it’s actually just a goof.

When I was a kid, the DC comics characters were much dearer to me than Marvel’s. Although becoming an adult and becoming more socially aware has meant that I’m less inclined to love Batman uncritically (i.e., he’s kind of a fascist who spends most of his time attacking poor people out of his own sense of morality, rarely actually inspecting the causes of poverty and crime and trying to correct the problem at the root, although some of the best Batman writers have taken note of this and written him accordingly), he’s still the first character I think of when I think of superhero comics. The aforementioned Batman animated series was a defining piece of media for young Boomer, as were reruns of Superfriends, and I loved visiting the one aunt whose cable package included FX, as that meant I would get to see an episode of the Adam West Batman and, if I was very lucky, Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. It’s for this reason, and not because I am a “Marvel fanboy,” that I’ve been pained to see this franchise handled so, so poorly in the past few years. Wonder Woman was not just a step in the right direction, but a wholehearted plunge into how to to this whole thing right (Alli may have given it a mere 3.5 stars, but that was a 5 star movie for me personally).

Justice League is having a harder time straddling that fence, seeing as it has to undo the immense damage done to the franchise as a whole by Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. Sure, Suicide Squad was a terrible movie on the whole, but at its core it was a C-grade movie dressed up as a blockbuster, which is an aesthetic that I’m always a little bit on board for in spite of myself, especially when the actors really commit to the nonsense; additionally, the backstory and arc of Jay Hernandez’s Diablo contain far and away the most effective emotional beats of the first three films. It certainly didn’t fracture the fans in the same way as BvS, which some people are still defending for reasons that are unclear to me. Still, JL is trying hard to course correct, and the job that it’s doing is admirable, even if it stumbles every ten minutes or so. It works as a cartoon about the Justice League that just happens to be live action and have a tonally dissonant visual aesthetic from the text of the actions on screen.

The most important thing I can tell you if I’m trying to give you an idea as to whether or not you should see this film is this: Justice League works, if you accept it not as part of this franchise, but as an entry into the larger cultural understanding of Superman specifically and DC in general. What I mean by this is that the story it’s trying to tell, about a world without a Superman, does not work as a piece of the DCEU divorced from the context of the DC animated universes, or comic books, or even the earlier Donner and Burton films. But within that larger conversation, in which we do have a Superman who is a beacon of hope, truth, and justice, it does.

Additional notes:

  • I, too, saw all of the photos of Henry Cavill’s uncanny valley face online before I went to the theater, but I never noticed it when actually watching the movie. Maybe it says something about how my brain works that I completely overlooked it, but I’d wager it has more to do with the fact that if this were real life, Superman would have had to keep telling me “My weird face thing is up here.” You know what I’m talking about.
  • This has been addressed in other reviews that I’ve read and heard, but it is super weird that no one is at all concerned about maintaining their own or other’s secret identities in this movie. Aquaman calls Bruce Wayne “Batman” in front of a whole bunch of villagers, and Lois calls the newly awakened Superman “Clark” in front of several Metropolis police officers, which is only going to make it more obvious when he shows back up at work after having disappeared and reappeared at the exact same time as Supes did.
  • Ezra Miller’s Flash is charming, and I liked him a lot. A lot of his jokes fell flat, but I liked that they were overlooked in universe as well. I think that he’s probably the best addition to this universe since Wonder Woman.
  • Ray Fisher’s Cyborg is given almost nothing to do other than to be the machina that the deus exes.
  • All the stuff that you heard about Wonder Woman being more sexualized in this film is true, as I noticed the lingering shot of her rear, but she’s still Wonder Woman and still the best thing about this movie. I can’t wait for WW2.
  • The design for Steppenwolf is terrible. A stop-motion Starro would have been better, and would have made for a better villain overall anyway. Can you imagine a film where Starro the Conqueror appeared and tried to terraform the world into something more suitable to himself (i.e. covering the whole earth with the ocean)? There would be no need for the cliche sky beams, and instead there could have been the opportunity to discuss the rising oceans that are the result of climate change and Starro’s need to barely push humans into doing his will. The insistence on doing the New Gods stuff right out of the gate, especially after the imagery and ideas of Jack Kirby were so much better utilized in Guardians 2 and Thor: Ragnarok earlier this year, was a bad decision.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond