superheroes

The Not-So-New 52: Wonder Woman (2009)

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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. 

It’s a testament to just how starved we were for Wonder Woman content in the aughts that this animated movie, which came out in 2009, was so well received. It’s not bad per se—in fact, in many places, it’s quite good—but this movie’s version of Steve Trevor is gross in a way that was probably apparent even at the time, but which has become even more apparent in contrast to the way that the character was portrayed by least problematic Christopher in Hollywood, Chris Pine, in the live-action 2017 film that was released just a scant eight years later. 

The 2009 Wonder Woman film starts in the distant past: Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Virginia Madsen) is locked in battle with god of war Ares (Alfred Molina), her former lover. As her warriors die on the battlefield, locked in combat with an army of mythical monsters led by her and Ares’s son Thrax, she turns the tides by beheading her own offspring. Preparing to do the same to Ares, she is stopped by Zeus and Hera (Marg Helgenberger), who tell her that they cannot permit her to kill a god, but they will bind his powers and allow her to hold him as her prisoner in perpetuity, granting her and her people a new home on the paradise-like island of Themyscira, safe from the dangers of “man’s world.” After she and her people build their new home, Hippolyta is granted another boon as she crafts a child for herself from the island’s clay, which the Olympians bring to life: a daughter, Diana (Keri Russell). Decades later, Ares remains under lock and key under the guardianship of Persephone (Vicki Lewis), a warrior who lost an eye when she jumped into the line of fire and took a blow that was meant for bookworm Alexa (Tara Strong) in the war against Ares in the prologue; this lack of interest in battle on the part of Alexa makes her the target of mockery for supposed cowardice by her older sister Artemis (Rosario Dawson), Hippolyta’s right hand general. When modern USAF pilot Steve Trevor (Nathan Fillion) lands on Themyscira after an aerial dogfight, a contest is held to determine which of the Amazons should travel beyond their peaceful oasis to return him to his nation. Diana wins this competition, but her excitement is short lived, as Ares’s escape while the island’s inhabitants were distracted by the contest means that she will not need to seek him out and return him to his cell. 

There’s a tonal issue at play here that drags this one down a bit. It’s got a PG-13 rating, and at the time of release, there was some outcry about the level of violence in this one. I think that’s reflective of a systemic issue, as this film is no more violent than Superman: Doomsday, which didn’t receive the same kind of criticism, and I think it’s owed solely to the fact that the combatants here are women. There is a decapitation (in shadow), but in the earlier film, Doomsday murdered an actual child (although the “camera” cut away), but because Amazonians (read: women) are doing the violence, this one received more criticism. It makes sense that this would get the MPAA rating that it did because of this, but the dialogue remains very PG. There’s a recurring bit that starts because Trevor says “crap” in front of the Amazons, then has to explain that it means excrement; each time after this that he uses the word, the Amazons take this as further evidence of the crassness and baseness of mankind, until Diana finally uses it herself at the end as a demonstration of her becoming more acclimatized to man’s world. That’s all well and good (if a bit pat and trite), but its failure to push the boundaries of the film’s rating demonstrates that the franchise is still trying to bridge a gap between appealing to (and being acceptable for) children while aiming to attract an older audience through a novel, more mature approach to storytelling. 

Once upon a time, I owned this movie on DVD, having obtained it for a mere $5 from the CVS on Leon C. Simon, when I was a student at UNO. I have a very clear memory of watching the special features, which included several talking heads from the film’s voice cast, and Rosario Dawson using the word “warriess” several times, which I always found endearing. Dawson is giving a great performance here in general, with a couple of quite badass lines—my favorite of which is when someone teases her about her giant sword, and she replies that it “is but [her] dagger.” Very little in the film stuck out in my mind, however, other than the speedrun through the stations of the Diana of Themyscira canon: born of clay, paradise island, crashed air pilot, championship to determine the ambassador to man’s world, crusader for truth and justice. Once Diana comes to the modern world, there’s a distinct lack of charm in her fish out of water story that acts as a demonstration of why this narrative works better as a period piece; the Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie sets its events during WWI while the Lynda Carter TV classic was set in WWII (at least initially), as the earliest comics had been. This allows for there to be some natural chemistry between this isolated demigod princess and a man who can be a little regressive but still likable in that he was more aware than average for this time. Here, Steve Trevor is a total hound dog, in a way that would have been obnoxious even for a contemporary guy at the time of the film’s release. 

All of the stuff with Wonder Woman herself is great (minus a comment that she makes about Etta Candy that is supposed to shame her for being a stereotype), but I’d really rather not have heard Steve Trevor tell Queen Hippolyta that “[her] daughter’s got a nice rack,” even if it’s supposed to be a moment played for comedy (he’s bound with the Lasso of Truth). Later still, he tries to get Diana drunk with the implication that he expects to have the opportunity to take advantage of her! It’s vile, frankly. The rest of the film, as wonderful as so much of it is—the fight between the Amazons and the reanimated dead is a particular standout, especially as it exists both as set piece and as vehicle for closure on the Alexa/Artemis relationship—doesn’t make up for the fact that its male lead is an attempted sexual assailant by any other name. Edit all of that out and you have a 4-star animated flick, but it is in this film, and that leaves us where we are.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman — Gotham Knight (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. 

Batman: Gotham Knight was the third direct-to-DVD release that DC submitted for the approval of general society. Releasing in 2008, it was intended to be consistent with the then-ongoing Christopher Nolan Batman films, specifically taking place between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I was really looking forward to this one at the time, and I remember being less than excited about the final product at the time. Serving as a series of six interconnected vignettes, the film was imagined as DC’s answer to The Animatrix, and although I didn’t much care for it when I first saw it (in fact, I distinctly remember buying the DVD, watching it once, and then trading it in for credit at Wherehouse Music almost immediately), my estimation of it has gone up in the intervening years. Maybe I’ve just grown more accustomed to non-Western art styles or more accepting of changing styles within a single narrative, but this one is pretty fun. 

In the first segment, “Have I Got a Story for You,” penned by A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson, several teenage friends gather to tell one another about having seen the urban legend figure of Batman battling it out on the streets with a supervillain: one describes him as a cyborg, another as some kind of vampire, and a third as a monstrous human/bat hybrid with giant wings. If that sounds familiar, you may have read the 1975 story on which it was based, or (more likely) you’re thinking of the 1998 episode “Legends of the Dark Knight” from The New Batman Adventures. This one isn’t a new story, but it does take advantage of the different art styles available from Studio 4°C, the art house that directed this one. Some of the art here could be considered ugly, but it works both as an intro to this particular omnibus-style film and in its own right. 

The second segment, “Crossfire,” is written by prolific comic book writer and author Greg Rucka and animated by Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell). It introduces one of the throughlines of the overarching narrative, the background element of a looming gang war between the forces of Sal Maroni and a mobster known only as “The Russian.” This one serves as a character study of two Gotham City detectives for the Major Crimes Unit. They work directly for Jim Gordon and have conflicting feelings about their leader’s association with Batman – Crispus Allen, who is planning on resigning as he feels that he and his partner are stuck running errands for a vigilante (including the return of the captured felon from the first segment to his cell in Arkham Asylum), and Anna Ramirez, who believes that Batman has changed Gotham for the better. The two end up in a crossfire between the Russians and Maroni’s forces and are rescued by Batman, who tells them that Gordon is a good judge of character, and that he recognizes them and trusts them based on Gordon’s belief in them. 

The third (and in my opinion best) segment is “Field Test,” animated by Bee Train (.hack//Sign) and written by Jeff Goldberg, who was perhaps the closest to Nolan’s work of anyone involved with the production (other than David S. Goyer, who we’ll come back to), as he was associate producer on The Prestige and The Dark Knight before becoming co-producer on Inception and The Dark Knight Rises and executive producing Interstellar. This is the segment with the most pathos, as a mechanical malfunction in a WayneTech satellite is shown to have the side effect of creating an electromagnetic field, which resident tech genius Lucius Fox is able to reverse engineer into a device in the Batsuit that can deflect bullets. Bruce first uses it to frustrate a businessman whom he suspects of having had a local aid worker killed and uses a PDA that he steals from the man to force Maroni and the Russian into a confrontation that he can mediate to force a truce (to keep them from expanding their war into the civilian population while he collects enough evidence to put them away). However, when one of the henchmen is gravely injured by a bullet deflected by the new device, Batman becomes distressed by the violence that is so like the kind that took his parents from him. He gets the man to a hospital and forgoes the use of the deflector belt for the time being. 

Although this one is my favorite, it is worth pointing out since I haven’t so far that no one from the Nolan films is reprising their roles here, but having Kevin Conroy, who is the definitive Batman as far as I’m concerned, more than makes up for it. The only drawback to that is that his voice doesn’t always match with the animation style that the film has. It’s most noticeable here, where Bruce is drawn in a very pretty, bishōnen style, but which I mean that he’s always looking at the camera like this: 

Or this: 

And there’s something about it that just doesn’t set the right mood, even if this is the strongest link in this chain. 

Segment four, “In Darkness Dwells,” was written by David S. Goyer (who contributed to all three Nolan films) and animated by Madhouse (Beyblade, Vampire Hunter D). This segment follows Batman as he pursues the kidnapper of a local church cardinal into the sewers and learns that his opponent, the so-called Killer Croc, is acting under the influence of fear toxin that is continuing to be created by the on-the-loose Scarecrow. It’s the most action-focused of the segments and is more interested in creating interesting visuals than pushing the narrative forward, and it works for what it is, with several fairly tense sequences that really had me on the edge of my seat, credit where credit is due. The segment that follows, “Working Through Pain,” sees the return of Studio 4°C as the animator, with Brian Azzarello taking on writing duties. This one picks up immediately where the previous chapter left off, with Batman being shot by a hallucinating man. He cauterizes the wound and spends the larger part of the segment trying to find his way out of the sewers while flashing back to learning pain management techniques from a woman named Cassandra, who took him in when he was rejected by a monastic order which promised to teach him to work through physical pain. This one is probably second best, as its shift in focus to Cassandra and her own story; the same monks previously took her in when she was posing as a boy in order to learn their ways, only to eventually expose and shame her when they are unable to break her spirit as she excels in their order. In the sixth and final segment, Madhouse returns to provide animation for the story “Deadshot,” penned by longtime animation writer Alan Burnett. It’s straightforward enough: the shady businessman from earlier in the film hires the titular assassin to kill Batman after he lures the Dark Knight into the light by staging an assassination attempt on Jim Gordon. It’s a fine end, if not necessarily a climactic one. 

There’s less to talk about here than in the previous two films. The segments range from acceptable to quite good, but they never reach the point of being truly amazing. At a brief 76 minutes, it’s worth checking out, even if you don’t care all that much about Nolan’s films. 

-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

The Not-So-New 52: Superman — Doomsday (2007)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, a new Swampflix feature for 2024. For background, I was a twenty-year-old college student in 2007 when there was a brand-new surge of comic book adaptations into films. Iron Man premiered in theaters the following year and, although it didn’t seem like it at the time, foretold a society-moving shift in the cinema landscape that would echo through today; elsewhere, someone at DC Comics was like, “What if we just started making animated direct-to-DVD features?” We were still four years out from the controversial 2011 DC comics reboot “New 52” (from which this feature takes its name), which most non-comic fans in the general public ether know nothing about. If they do, they might half-remember seeing a morning or midday show fluff piece about Superman’s new outfit (it was the one with the blue t-shirt and jeans, to make him seem more down to earth), or the noteworthy controversy surrounding the fact that DC’s creative staff dropped from 12% women to 1% during the editorial shake-up, or the fact that the new continuity portrayed Barbara “Batgirl/Oracle” Gordon’s previously permanent paraplegia as a temporary condition from which she recovered, essentially getting rid of one of the very few notable wheelchair users in comics. Or they might know of it from the fact that it was the new continuity introduced in the wake of Flashpoint, a Flash-centric timeline changing event that the general public is more aware of since it’s been adapted several times — first as an animated film in 2013 (which we’ll be getting to), then again as a plot point on the CW’s long-running (no pun intended) Flash TV series, and most recently last year as one of the inspirations for the narrative for last year’s Flash film. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Since that year, Marvel has produced thirty-three features (and over a dozen TV shows), while DC’s animation wing has produced about fifty-two of their animated movies without, to my knowledge, a single one of them ever hitting cinemas. I say “about fifty-two” because there are some that are split into two parts, the placement of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm within this list is debatable, at least one that is a repackaging of episodes of a webseries, and because anyone familiar with DC comics knows how much they love the number 52. With that in mind, I thought I might torture myself for as long as I could take and watch every single one of them, a new review coming each week to your virtual comic book stand here on Swampflix. I might go insane. Come along with me?

Superman: Doomsday was the first (give or take your feelings about the above-mentioned Mask of the Phantasm) of these films to hit the shelves of your local Best Buy, and I remember very clearly watching it on a Netflix DVD shortly after release. I also recall being impressed by it, with one particular scene standing out; it’s the intro scene for Lex Luthor (James “Spike” Marsters), in which his assistance Mercy Graves (Cree Summer) enters a room and he motions for her silence before finishing some kind of calculation in his head and entering it on his device and handing it off to her. When she asks if it’s the cure for cancer, he tells her it’s actually the cure for muscular dystrophy and directs her to have one of Lexcorp’s internal biomedical scientists work on turning the cure into a treatment—that is, to water it down and turn a one-time windfall into an ongoing source of income. I remember being utterly shocked at the sheer banality of his evil, truly the epitome of corporate emperors. 

This is immediately contrasted with Superman (Adam Baldwin), whom we see in his arctic Fortress of Solitude, spending his down time between rescuing cats from trees and fighting mechanical spiders trying to protect human life in a more mundane way. Lois (Anne Heche) is there with him, trying to get him to admit his secret identity—which she has already figured out on her own—as Clark Kent to her, which he skirts around with the excuse that confirming would somehow put her in danger, which she chalks up to simple fear of commitment. Elsewhere, an illegal drilling operation under the Lexcorp banner uncovers a buried spaceship, which turns out to contain an alien called “Doomsday” which was genetically engineered by an extraterrestrial race as the perfect, unstoppable soldier, which they then threw into space when they were unable to control him. Doomsday carves a swathe of murder and destruction all the way to Metropolis, where he engages in a lengthy battle with the other title character that ends with both of their deaths. 

In some ways, this is a condensation of the infamous “Death of Superman” comic book arc of the ’90s, with Kal-El’s death at the hands of Doomsday leading to the rise of several potential replacements, the most notable of whom were Conner “Superboy” Kent and Steel. In some ways, that’s what initially led me to be interested in starting this project, as 2018 saw the release of a more direct adaptation with the DC animated release of Death of Superman. Having long lost touch with this animated feature endeavor, my mind boggled at the fact that within ten years, they had already circled back around and were remaking their own work. I’m sure it won’t be exactly that when (if) I ever get to that one, but a quick look at the cast list and their associated characters tells me that it is a story that’s more extensively involved with a larger comic book character community. In Doomsday, the “Reign of the Supermen” super-mantle succession crisis of the comics is replaced with a singular clone of Superman, created by Lex from blood shed in Kal-El’s battle with Doomsday, one who starts out with the same ethos as the character that we have seen die but who gradually becomes more fascistic, going so far as to execute a recaptured super-felon rather than risk the possibility that he escape again. 

That’s an awful lot of discussion of Clark and Lex, but in my eyes, the real main character of this story is Lois. In a cast full of great performers (Martha Kent is voiced by Swoosie Kurtz!), the late Heche is doing absolutely phenomenal work selling Lois’s frustration, grief, cautious hope, and fierce determination. Having seen some of the later releases from this animation house, I can tell you that it would be easy to sleepwalk through the recording sessions and that some actors definitely do later on, but not Heche. I mourned her more watching this movie than one would expect from a purely commercial enterprise, but she carries this movie, with no apparent strain at all. A lot of the scenes are clearly condensed, but there’s still a surprising amount of pathos there. Particular standout scenes include her first meeting with Martha Kent, where both women are necessarily cagey—Martha because she’s unaware that Lois knows Superman was Clark and is thus concerned that the younger woman may simply be looking for a scoop, and Lois because she’s hesitant to admit how much she knows, and the scene in which the apparently newly resurrected Superman flies Lois home and responds with confused indifference when Lois kisses him—because, as a clone, he knows only what Luthor knows about Superman, and so isn’t privy to the real Superman’s private life. Heche and Lois are great here. 

Where the movie is less enjoyable is in the visuals. Although there is a lot of really great, dynamic animated action (the Doomsday vs. Superman battle takes up a solid chunk of screen time but never quite reaches the point where the audience is bored), the character designs are inconsistent. Some of this can be blamed on the designs being imported from the DC Animated Universe of TV shows that had recently come to a close with the ending of Justice League Unlimited in 2006, very shortly before this film went into production. That canon began with Batman: The Animated Series all the way back in 1992, where the eyes under Batman’s cowl were simply featureless white space, which allowed for the animators of that series to allow the character to express emotion through the shape and change of the “eye holes.” When Bruce was out of costume, he and the other characters had a fully drawn eye, with an upper and lower line representing the outline of the eye, sclera, and a single dot for both the iris and the pupil. When Superman: The Animated Series started airing in 1996, both Clark and Superman were drawn with a simpler eye design of a single line to indicate the upper edge of the eye, and again with a single dot to represent the pupil and the iris, but no identifiable sclera; I can only assume that this was to keep Clark’s face from looking too “busy” or being too detailed with the addition of his glasses. When you look at all of the Justice League together in their respective shows, they all have different eye designs, but they don’t look odd next to each other because there are so many different designs: Supes has his single line and dot, Martian Manhunter has his red eyes, Wonder Woman has very detailed eyes (full upper lid line, partial or full lower lid line, visible sclera, distinct blue iris and black pupil), Green Lantern has his distinctive fully outlined eye shape with a singular green iris with no pupillary dot, and the characters with masks like Flash either follow the Batman design of white spaces under their cowls or, in the case of Hawkgirl, have solely pupils under the mask but pupils and an iris when unmasked. 

Here, however, three of our main characters are so disparate in their design that they look janky together in a way that distracts the eye. Superman once again has the single upper lid line and the single (almost beady) pupil dot, while Lois has the fully detailed eyes like the Wonder Woman example above, except that her eye color is darker, so that she appears to have a distinct pupil and iris in some close ups but in most wider shots appears to have a single, gigantic pupil. Jimmy Olsen, in turn, has all the details, including a blue iris that also appears to be too large when compared to the other characters. I understand that importing these character designs from the TV animation probably saved a lot of time and work, but I can’t pretend that I didn’t notice it, and even if you’ve seen this before and didn’t consciously recognize that had happened, your unconscious probably did. Once you add in Mercy Graves’s lack of any nose (she just has two nostril slits), it’s messy. 

That having been said, this is a fun movie. In a pre-MCU and pre-Big Bang Theory world, it was pretty daring to have an animated feature—and therefore to many people’s minds, a movie for kids—that is so unflinching in its depiction of violence and grief. It was moderately controversial at that time for precisely that reason, although I feel it’s probably faded into relative obscurity now that the self-appointed so-called moral guardians have moved on to harassing accepting parents and inciting violence against librarians. Looking at it now, fifteen years later, when the market has been completely oversaturated not just with superheroes but various conceptual deconstructions and reconstructions of them with the mainstream adaptations of things like The Boys and Invincible, this one looks rather tame in comparison. Still, it’s not to be scoffed at, and there are much worse ways to spend seventy-seven minutes. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blue Beetle (2023)

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I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadful Ant-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them. 

Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it. 

Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting. 

With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cutie Honey (2004)

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I’ve been talking a lot of shit this year about the exhausting routine of superhero media.  It’s just been non-stop whining, to the point where I couldn’t even praise the ecstatic animation style of the universally beloved Across the Spider-Verse without also citing its narrative contributions to our growing, culture-wide superhero fatigue.  I should probably take time to note, then, that I am a total hypocrite on this exact subject.  While I’ve been mostly avoiding the ongoing deluge of major-studio superhero sequels (the new Guardians, the new Shazam, the new Justice League spinoff, etc.), two of my favorite trips to the theater so far this year were specialty screenings of two Japanese superhero films: Shin Ultraman & Shin Kamen Rider.  Hideaki Anno’s post-Evangelion career pivot to lovingly remaking the vintage tokusatsu media of his youth has been hugely rewarding lately, with the wholesome humanism of his Ultraman film and the earnest inner-turmoil of his take on Kamen Rider reviving the otherwise artistically dead medium of live-action superhero filmmaking.  It turns out there’s still plenty novelty & enthusiasm to be found in the tokusatsu end of superhero media, at least for Western audiences whose only major exposure to the subgenre was decades-old broadcasts of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  So, even though I’m supposedly fatigued by the Hollywood assembly line of live-action comic book adaptations, I recently found myself looking back to the first time Anno dipped his toe in the genre two decades ago with his take on the bubbly kawaii superhero Cutie Honey.

Reviving source material originally published as manga and animated series in the 1970s, Anno’s live-action Cutie Honey film is the clear bridge between his early anime career and his recent swerve into retro live-action tokusatsu reboots.  All of the absurd, anime-style shot compositions of his recent “Shin” films were already part of his established visual style in 2004, complete with his needlessly stylistic depictions of bureaucratic desk work.  He even incorporates hand-drawn animated sequences into Cutie Honey‘s opening credits & action set pieces, both as a nod to the character’s comic book origins and as a shrewd cost-saving tactic.  For all of its stylistic connections to Anno’s other work, it’s the first time I’ve seen him participate in the “magical girl” anime trope, which helps separate the film’s familiar Anno-isms from the macho, Batman-style brooding of Shin Kamen Rider and the gee-willickers Space Age awe of Shin Ultraman.  Cutie Honey approximates what it might be like if Anno produced a Shin Sailor Moon movie next; or at least that’s what came to mind for an anime-newb like me who’s only been exposed to the medium’s most iconic “magical girl” titles. He does update the vintage anime’s visual sensibilities with a little ironic kitsch and mid-aughts fashion choices (including an amusing amount of attention to flip phone bling), but for the most part the highlights of his Cutie Honey film are in the same register as his recent Ultraman & Kamen Rider films.  He approaches this kind of material with the goofy exuberance of a Looney Tunes short or an episode of Adam West’s 1960s Batman series, except amped up with the psychedelic visuals & self-hating sleaze he made a name for himself with in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The titular Cutie Honey is a cute, sweet-as-honey office worker who loves taking bubble baths and playing dress-up.  She’s also a cyborg superhero who can “transform” into any conceivable disguise by pressing the heart-shaped pendant on her magical choker and shouting “Honey flash!” into the cosmic void. Her disguises mostly amount to her playing Gene Parmesan style dress-up games to fool her enemies, but when the situation at hand calls for violence she does change into hot pink body armor, going full kawaii superhero.  Anno takes a lot of obvious delight in filming the Sailor Moon-style magical girl transformation sequences in those battle scenes, as well as staging her fights with legions of faceless goons that she kicks into the air like limp mannequins.  The details of Cutie Honey’s global espionage sidekicks or her gender-ambiguous arch-enemies—known collectively as Panther Claw—don’t matter as much as the sugary joy of her cutesy quips & superheroic costume changes.  The film is simultaneously goofier and sleazier than Anno’s recent “Shin” movies, constantly ogling its bouncy superhero in her underwear between costumes and trapping her in damsel-in-distress lesbian kink scenarios.  Despite all that old-man leering, it’s aggressively girly for a superhero film, which pushes it even further into a campy, gay sensibility than the Batman ’66 vibes of Anno’s recent works.  It’s especially amusing that Cutie Honey fuels up for her superhero transformations by eating ungodly piles of junk food, which makes her the perfect hero for little girls and overgrown gay stoners everywhere.

Although Cutie Honey is an early rough-draft sketch of what he would later achieve in his “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” projects, I don’t know that I would as readily recommend it to Hideaki Anno die-hards as I would to fans of Girl Power superhero media like Tank Girl, Birds of Prey, Josie and the Pussycats, and Spice World.  It neatly belongs in that hyperactive, hyperfemme superhero canon, even with the thick male-gaze lens strapped to Anno’s camera.  In either case, it’s refreshing in the context of our modern MCU/DCEU sponsored hellscape, which 2008’s Iron Man kicked off just a few years after this seemingly ancient early-aughts novelty.  I highly recommend checking it out while Anno’s perspective on the superhero genre still feels fresh & exciting, even though the legal means of doing so is a little shaky.  YouTube has it dubbed; Internet Archive has it subbed.  Neither transfer is in especially great shape but, hey, at least you won’t be watching Uncle Ben’s corpse or Mrs. Batman’s pearls hit the pavement for the thousandth time.

-Brandon Ledet

The Flash (2023)

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Hello there, reader! Because of the nature of this movie, the seemingly endless stream of (alleged) criminal acts that the lead star continues to perform, and the fact that a nearly-completed movie starring and helmed by creators of color was shelved for back asswards financial reasons while this one was still released to the general public despite starring an (alleged) criminal, I have chosen to forego a star rating for this film to prevent even the appearance of advocating for you to contribute to its box office or rental take. I myself had no intention of seeing this movie and contributing to it monetarily, but for reasons I cannot disclose, I was able to see it on opening weekend, and Warner Bros. footed the bill. For reasons of legal disavowment, I must reiterate that Swampflix and its affiliates do not endorse piracy, and the fact that I am bringing this up here is not a playful endorsement for pirating this film⸮ Wait, shit, what does that punctuation mark mean? I’ve never seen it before! Anyway, on with The Flash!

When I recently had the good fortune to visit with our fearless leader Brandon in real life recently, he recited a piece of wisdom that I’ve heard him voice before: CGI ages like milk. I don’t disagree, but in the case of today’s film, the CGI arrived rancid upon delivery, and the fact that it did so means that this film has no right to exist in the form that it does. I’m going to reference two pieces of media that, based on box office, Nielsen numbers, and anecdotal evidence in the form of responses to my general questions, you’ve probably never seen: 2013’s regrettable Sam Raimi Baum adaptation Oz the Great and Powerful Movie and the 2019 sexy Spanish drama series Toy Boy. In regards to the latter, the opening sequence of the show contains scenes from within the narrative, but with the characters and all surfaces rendered as if they are made of glazed ceramics (see it here, although it’s possible NSFW for sexy reasons); in the former, there is a character named the China Girl, an animate, living porcelain doll who joins the protagonist’s journey (see a clip here, although it’s possible NSFW for James Franco reasons). The reason that I bring these up is because what these two things are doing in earnest The Flash does blindly, blanketly, and with no remorse; so, so, so many of the images that we see here look like soulless, shiny mannequins as those glazed figurines that a certain generation of our elders collected. Some of the time, it could be argued, that the images are supposed to look like that (we’ll get to the time arena in a minute), but other times, they are clearly not – most notably and frequently, every time we see two different Barry Allens on screen, both played by Ezra Miller, it’s abundantly clear which of the two was played by a stand in upon whom Miller’s visage was pasted, based solely on how nonplastic and uncanny they look. 

I know that Hayley Mills and Lindsay Lohan were never tasked with playing speedsters in their respective Traps, but the technology in the 1990s and the 1960s was more convincing at portraying reunited twins than this movie is at Ezra Miller walking down the street side by side with themself. And the Flash suit! It’s so … bad. Genuinely awful. I went on a bit of a tear just now in the middle of writing this to see if I could find any behind-the-scenes photos of Miller in the suit on set, and there are none, which almost makes it seem to me like they were never in the full suit on set at all, which would in turn explain why it never looked “real” for a single moment that it was on screen. And I’m not just talking every time that there was a fight scene and everything immediately started to look exactly like a super move from Injustice 2, but every time Barry was just standing around doing comedic bits, the suit looked like someone trying to 3-D animate amphibian skin and doing a poor job of it. Ryan Reynolds’s Green Lantern was at least supposed to look the way that it did; this one looks like a mistake that they decided to go ahead and leave in, which makes it completely bananas that this film was released in this form with this lead performer. It boggles the mind that executives were considering recasting the part of Barry Allen because of Miller’s (allegedly) many, many (alleged) crimes and then decided that they didn’t need to, because this looked good enough to put on the big screen. Bananas! Bananas!

Narratively, the film takes its inspiration from the comic Flashpoint, which was released in 2011 as a way to reset the status quo for DC comics, leading into a new continuity that was, in theory, supposed to make the material more accessible to new readers and thus increase circulation. In most recent versions of the Flash comic-book canon, he’s driven by the fact that his mother was killed when he was a child and his father was arrested and (wrongly) convicted of her murder. Since it’s been part and parcel of the whole Flash deal for a while that he can run so fast that he can either travel through time using his speed outright or by access to something called the Speed Force (let’s not get bogged down in those details), it occurs to Barry Allen to try and prevent the murder of his mother, leading to unforeseen consequences on the timeline. If you’re sure you’ve never read that story but it still sounds familiar, it’s because it also formed the basis of the third season of CW’s The Flash, which just finished its ninth and final season, or perhaps you saw the animated direct-to-video film Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox sometime since its release in 2013. It’s not exactly new territory at this point, is what I’m saying. We get an opening sequence that exists solely to trot out a couple of characters that we’ve seen before and establish that Barry sees Bruce Wayne/Batman as his mentor and that Bruce isn’t necessarily unwelcoming of the younger man but retains his normal aloofness; all of this is here to establish the status quo that they’re going to demolish completely before this movie is over. 

When it looks like Barry’s father (Ron Livingston) is about to lose his appeal, Barry takes off into the past to make one simple change: to make sure his mother (Maribel Verdú, one of the best parts of the film) doesn’t forget to pick up tomatoes at the supermarket the morning the day that she dies, so that his father isn’t absent when someone finds her in a house that they assumed would be empty. As Barry returns to the present, he sees how the wings of that butterfly have affected his life but, before he gets there, something else invades the Speed Force and knocks him out of his time bubble, straight into 2013, on the same day that he was initially struck by lightning and gained his powers. Only this time, since his parents are alive and Barry grew up with a happy childhood, he wasn’t driven to go into forensics to one day learn something that would help him clear his father’s name, so he won’t be in that police lab, so Barry has to take the younger version of himself—differentiated from Present!Flash by nothing more than his longer hair—to the lab to make sure that this happens, which results in the loss of his own powers. Past!Flash, lacking the maturity that Present!Flash had at the same age, grates against the older version of himself, who in turn has to give his younger self a crash course in Being the Flash 101 while powerless and stunned to learn that his little time travel event has affected things that happened even before the changes that he made, including that Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly in Back to the Future as originally cast (a gag that Fringe did once), which resulted in Michael J. Fox taking the leading role in Footloose, which in turn caused Kevin Bacon to play Maverick in Top Gun. Another of the changes he caused is that there are no other metahumans in this timeline, so there’s no one present to stop the Kryptonian invasion led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) that is happening concurrently, but unlike in Man of Steel, there’s no Superman here to stop them. There does happen to be a Batman, so the two Barries seek him out at Wayne Manor, only to find that he’s not the man that Present!Barry has come to know, literally. 

I’m about to reference another piece of media that I’m almost entirely certain you’ve never heard of: a 1984 desktop computer game titled Bouncing Babies, which I played on the very first computer that our family owned (I’m not that old, we were just that poor). In the game, wave after wave of babies are thrown from a burning building, and the player controls a group of paramedics who use a trampoline to bounce the falling babies into the back of an ambulance. The opening action scene of this film is … that? While Batman (Ben Affleck … for now) is embroiled in a high speed chase, Flash is called upon to help prevent the collapse of a hospital that was damaged; this hospital, as it happens, keeps all of the babies in a nursery on the top floor, and when one of the building wings collapses, they all go flying out of the broken windows as the building loses its bearings, and Flash has to whip around on all of the falling debris and such as they fall. One never feels that there’s a real threat, of course, since it’s PS4 Injustice 2 Flash running around saving PS4 Injustice 2 babies, but it’s a fun sequence nonetheless, and that’s something worth noting throughout the film: these are the best action cutscenes from a video game that you’ve ever seen, but there will never be a single moment that you think to yourself that you’re having a cinematic experience. 

And on top of all that, since this is a multiversal story, they end up bringing in soulless CGI golems made in the images of George Reeves and Christopher Reeve as their respective versions of Superman, staring out of the screen like they’re waiting for you to press start to open the game menu; there’s even a bit where a digitally de-aged (or a digitally everythinged) Nicolas Cage fights a giant spider, which was a major point of contention in the direction of the never-finished Superman Lives, with the implication being that there was a timeline in this multiverse where the narrative of that aborted film played out. It’s really banking on your nostalgia factor, which it has to, because while there have been a few good (or at least fun) eggs in this weird DCEU basket of mostly stinkers, there’s nothing iconic in any of these movies onto which one could anchor any meaningful moments. That they went back to the General Zod’s invasion well is very telling here. And if you somehow haven’t been spoiled on one of the big reveals in this movie (the best one, to be honest), I’m not going to ruin that for you here, but to pretend that it’s anything other than a great big nostalgia grab would be pathologically dishonest. 

There’s so much wrong with this movie. The (allegedly) criminal star, an utterly inconsequential love-story plot tumor, the way that Miller plays Barry not so much like someone who’s done some deep actor work on portraying a neurodivergent person as much as they play him like a bully mocking a neurodivergent classmate, the endless parade of ceramic fight sequences, and the way they managed to make poor Helen Slater look like a Lifeforce zombie (that woman deserves better than this, dammit). And yet … and yet …. Twice during this movie I leaned over to my viewing companion: first, during the sequence that adapted Bouncing Babies to the screen, I leaned over and said, with surprise, “I’m … enjoying this?” Later, during yet another action sequence, I said “I hate how much I’m enjoying this.” And, as we left the theater, I confessed: “I regret to inform you of this, but I had a great time.” However, I am once again advising that I do not endorse that you see it, at least not in any way that could contribute to the film financially. If your kids are demanding to watch it, now is the perfect time to trick them into watching the 1990s show starring John Wesley Schipp (I’m not going to link it, but a quick search shows that it’s on YouTube right now, probably illegally), and that will cost you nothing and buy you enough time to Google “how to talk to your family about Ezra Miller” and then just bide your time until this film becomes available in a way that’s free to you. Apropos of nothing, do you have a VPN? I use ExpressVPN, and I love it! (Not sponsored.)

Because yes, dear reader, it’s true, I do regret to inform you that I had a great time. I’m sorry that I saw it in a way that didn’t contribute to the coffers of the Pharisees that canceled Batgirl and that you don’t have that option available to you (yet). Just be patient. You’ll get to look into Superman’s dead eyes soon enough. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy (2009)

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It’s easy to be flippant about superhero fatigue right now, since the MCU & DCEU filmmaking behemoths are both dozens of titles into their decade-long stranglehold on Hollywood, with all possible surprise & novelty long squeezed out of the genre’s lungs.  Still, my exhaustion with superhero blockbusters has less to do with the genre at large than it has to do with those two franchises in particular.  There’s still plenty of surprise & novelty to be found elsewhere in superhero media, especially if you’re willing to stray outside the US.  I was recently tickled by the anti-fascist Italo circus superhero flick Freaks vs. The Reich, for instance, which happened to include similar touches of laboratory torture & Radiohead song placements as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, just in a much more interesting context (time-traveling ether-addict Nazis vs. Totally 90s™ mixtape aesthetics).  I’ve also been enamored with Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind Hideaki Anno’s years-long project of building an MCU style interconnected universe out of pre-existing Japanese tokusatsu properties – first in Shin Godzilla, then in Shin Ultraman, and most recently in Shin Kamen Rider.  The project shamelessly leans into the commercial end of filmmaking instead of the artistic, collecting all of Anno’s superpowered freaks in action figure toy commercials instead of a crossover feature film.  It’s also, just three titles in, the most exciting big-scale superhero media on the market.  Anno’s Godzilla film was more of a governmental bureaucracy satire than a superhero picture, subbing in the titular kaiju god for any number of natural disasters that the timid, rules-obsessed humans on the ground were ill-equipped to respond to with any speed or efficiency.  By contrast, his Ultraman movie (which he wrote, produced, edited, and mo-capped but did not direct) is pure retro superhero fluff, throwing back to its titular space alien’s vintage TV roots.  It’s such an infectiously wholesome, psychedelic superhero story that I didn’t even care that I was missing a half-century of contextual Ultraman lore that would help explain its scene-to-scene idiosyncrasies.  It did convince me to dip my toe deeper into the back catalog of Ultraman cinema, though, finding a movie specifically made for people who grew up steeped in Ultraman Awareness the same way that most current teens aren’t old enough to remember a world before the MCU.  It was a baffling experience but also a delightful one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upQYSSXHv7s

I should have known from the longform title Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends The Movie that the 2009 sequel to the TV show Ultraman Mebius was not going to be as welcoming of an entry point as the series-reset Shin Ultraman (in which “Shin” is commonly translated as meaning “New”).  According to my half-assed Wikipedia research after stumbling into Mega Monster Battle blind on Tubi, Ultraman Mebius is “the 20th TV series and 40th anniversary production in the Ultra Series.”  Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is the second sequel to that show, “preceded by Ultraman Mebius Side Story: Ghost Reverse, a direct-to-video special from Ultraman Mebius.”  As someone who recently rolled his eyes at the news that the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie included plot details set up by a straight-to-Disney+ holiday special outside the 30+ movies of prerequisite homework, you’d think I’d also find this overwhelming mountain of contextual backstory to be an automatic deal breaker.  Instead, I found it freeing.  The infinite supply of Ultraman lore means that there isn’t enough time in my scatterbrained life to possibly watch it all, so the pressure is off.  Walking into Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy having only seen Shin Ultraman before it is kinda like watching Avengers: Endgame after having only seen Captain America: The First Avenger, an out-of-the-loop disorientation that the TV-series recap in its first few minutes does little to soften.  The narrative continuity of the Ultra Series only matters so much, though.  It’s relatively easy to shut your brain off and accept statements like “The Planet of Ultra will perish unless we retrieve the Energy Core” at face value without worrying about what the Energy Core is, or who’s threatening the Planet Ultra with mass destruction to begin with.  If anything, Ultra Galaxy overloads the screen with so many Ultramen, Ultrawomen, and Ultrathems that it’s clear there’s no need or even possibility of getting fully caught up with Ultraman lore as a newcomer.  To put it in American superhero media terms, it’s the Ultraman equivalent of the Spider-Verse, wherein almost every character—good or evil—is some kind of Ultraman variant.  One Ultraman has horns; one red-eyed Ultraman is evil; one pigtailed Ultraman is a girl.  It doesn’t actually matter what their names or histories are, just that it’s wonderfully surreal to see them all share the screen as they collectively beat down an equally infinite supply of resurrected rubber-suit monsters from the Ultra Series’ past.  I may not fully understand all of the characters relationships & insular worlds of Ultra Galaxy, but I do fully understand the joys it finds in excess – flooding the screen with all the Ultramen and all the kaiju all at once.

If anything, this is exactly how I remember watching superhero media in a pre-MCU world.  As a child, I didn’t tune into episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, or Batman: The Animated Series with decades of comic book history or even weekly episodic continuity informing the battles of the day.  I just knew that Shredder, Rita Repulsa, and The Joker were “Bad Guy” villains that had to be constantly, violently be beaten back from victory for the sake of peace on Earth.  It used to be possible to drop into the continued adventures of an intergalactic superhero at any point of their cyclical journey the same way you can tune into a single match of a months-long pro wrestling program and instantly get the gist.  In this particular instance, the evil Ultraman Belial plans to dominate Planet Ultra (where all Ultramen originate, apparently) by resurrecting the ghosts of famous dead kaiju on the meteor that serves as their graveyard.  A collective of elite Ultramen led by Ultraman Mebius, Ultraseven, and the original Ultraman form a Power Rangers-style superhero team to beat back Ultraman Belial and his own evil team of undead kaiju before it’s too late.  There’s also some human Earthling involvement and the aforementioned Energy Core McGuffin jumbled up in that plot, but they’re insignificant to what makes the movie entertaining: the nonstop superheroic martial arts.  Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is a surreal mix of tactile fight choreography and green screen sci-fi effects.  It is pure excess in its relentless Ultraman-on-kaiju mayhem, leaving very little room in the runtime for the audience to ponder the lore before the next rubber-suited monster attacks the superpowered citizens of Planet Ultra.  Lacking any other context, I can only compare Ultra Galaxy to Shin Ultraman in terms of filmmaking craft, and Anno’s film appears to be a cut above other modern Ultraman media in that side-by-side.  Shin Ultraman still comes across as a lumbering, slow-to-act superhero origin story in that comparison, though, as Ultra Galaxy assumes you’ve already done the homework and immediately launches into constant Ultraman battles until you’re well past satisfied.  Maybe if I had already seen 30 other movies in the Ultra Series that bombardment would have left me as numb as the MCU has left me post-Endgame, but there’s still plenty of surprise & novelty left in this particular superhero franchise for me.  In fact, I understood so little about the background lore of Planet Ultra and its infinite Ultramen that the next time I watch one of these out-of-sequence Ultra Sequels I’ll likely be just as baffled (and delighted) as I was this round. I’m looking forward to it.

-Brandon Ledet

Shin Kamen Rider (2023)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

As omnipresent as superhero media feels in pop culture right now, I honestly don’t think it’s much more prevalent than it was when I was a child in the 80s & 90s.  It may be more aggressively marketed to adults now, but it’s always been around. The major difference between post-MCU, post-Dark Knight comic book adaptations and the Saturday morning superhero schlock I grew up with is that adults are now expected to take them seriously as meaningful art, each with their own decades of backstory worthy of literary study.  As a child I was aware that characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men had long-running, epic scale stories that stretched beyond the thirty-minute episodes of their respective animated series.  I would tune into those episodes sporadically, though, and I didn’t really need to know their larger stories to enjoy the simple pleasures of their violent Good Guys vs. Bad Guys morality tales.  In contrast, now you have to watch Batman learn ninja skills for an entire origin saga before he can start Batmanning in earnest.  You have to watch 30 feature films, several streaming series, and a non-denominational holiday special to fully appreciate a talking raccoon whooping ass in space.  Context & lore used to matter way less in our long-running superhero epics, or at least they used to be secondary to novelty & iconography.  That’s why it was so thrilling to return to that vintage style of Saturday morning superhero storytelling in Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider, which hurls you directly into the continued adventures of its titular cyborg superhero without any expectation that you’ll have done your decades of televised homework before arriving at the theater.  Its approach to lore is confusing the same way the subtextual meanings of an abstract art film can be; you’re not expected to know the answer, and it’s freeing to admit you’re lost and just enjoy the ride.

Yes, Shin Kamen Rider is technically connected to a network of other Anno-revived tokusatsu franchises—Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and the latest Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot—all bundled under the banner of the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe.”  Unlike with the MCU, however, each title in the SJHU is designed to work as a standalone project, only crossing over in action figure toy commercials instead of Cultural Event double features like Infinity War & Endgame.  Shin Kamen Rider‘s connection to Anno’s other two “Shin” tokusatsu titles is more one of method than one of narrative.  It carries over all of the retro kitsch of Shin Ultraman and the volatile brutality of Shin Godzilla, now streamlined into one unfathomably efficient superhero saga.  All you really need to know is that our titular hero is a grasshopper-hybrid cyborg man who escapes the evil laboratory that augmented his body and vows to destroy it before they augment the rest of humanity.  Anno doesn’t bother with Kamen Rider’s origin story, nor even his escape from the lab.  He invites the audience to join in three or four episodes into a Kamen Rider TV series, then zips through the next half-century’s weekly storylines so quickly there’s no time to care whether you have any idea what’s going on. You just do your best to tag along for the high-speed motorcycle rides & insectoid hyperviolence or you miss a season’s worth of plot reveals in a single blink.  And if you blink, so what?  There’s still plenty for-its-own-sake pleasure in watching the heroic grasshopper cyborg man beat up the evil cyborg spider man, the evil cyborg bat man, the evil cyborg mantis man, and so on, regardless of why he’s doing it.  I didn’t grow up with the Kamen Rider TV series as a kid, but I did have a very similar experience watching the Americanized tokusatsu series Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, where I would enjoy whatever random, out-of-order episodes I happened to catch on a schedule I was too young to control, continuity be damned.

The paradox here is that while Anno is not taking the longform lore of superhero storytelling all that seriously, his SJHU movies are much more emotionally earnest than the jokey, sarcastic heroes of The MCU.  While all modern Marvel heroes have borrowed a touch of self-satirical Deadpool snark, Anno takes the emotional stakes of his outlandish superhero premises 100% seriously.  Shin Godzilla is a scathing political satire about the inefficiency of bureaucratic government in the face of genuine public crisis.  Shin Ultraman is a loving tribute to humanity’s go-getter resiliency despite that governmental failure to unite & protect.  Shin Kamen Rider is more of a brooding, Upgrade-style tale of a hero horrified by the violence he’s capable of, isolated & alienated by the biological weaponry of his augmented body.  Despite its jabs of soulful remorse between fight scenes, though, it still indulges in the retro kitsch of reviving a 1970s children’s TV show for its 50th anniversary – mimicking the cheap-o action cinema style of its source material for modern audiences’ semi-ironic amusement.  Anno frames every establishing shot and character movement with the attention to visual detail he brought to anime, so that a leather glove casually falling to the floor is afforded the same heft of a building crumbling or a world ending.  He carries over the extreme wide-angle camera work of Shin Ultraman but frees it from that film’s drab office spaces, so it feels less like Soderbergh doing anime and more like the first-person-POV of a bug.  There’s an inherent visual absurdity to following a cyborg grasshopper man on a motorcycle from one insectoid enemy to another that Anno never shies away from, but he also takes that heroic bug man’s self-conflicted emotions seriously as he stares at the blood dripping from his leather-gloved hands.  It’s a tricky tonal balance to achieve, no matter how easy Anno makes it look.

You do not have to be specifically nostalgic for the original Kamen Rider TV series to enjoy the Shin Kamen Rider film.  It does help to be generally nostalgic for the episodic superhero media of yesteryear, though, assuming you’re old enough to remember a time when you were only expected to vaguely know what Batman’s deal was to enjoy a Batman film.  Before the streaming era, it took a lot of effort, time, and money to be a nerd-culture completist, and it was okay to dip your toe into this kind of thing mid-adventure – encouraged, even.  All that really mattered was whether you were enticed to buy the action figures.

-Brandon Ledet