Monday at the Movies - March 4, 2013

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, two DC Animated films adapting popular storylines from the comics.

Justice League: Doom (2012) – One of the best Batman stories of the last fifteen years took place in the pages of JLA, when it was revealed that Batman kept files on all his Justice League teammates detailing their weaknesses and how to exploit them should a Justice Leaguer go rogue.  This animated film adapts that storyline, reuniting the Justice League animated voice cast (Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy, Susan Eisenberg) in a battle against themselves when immortal caveman Vandal Savage steals and enacts Batman’s contingency plans as part of a larger scheme for – you guessed it – world conquest.  The film works almost as a coda to Justice League Unlimited, showing the cracks in the team as well as the expanding roster (Cyborg finally joins the team).  The voice cast is first-rate, as always (even if I’m sorry Mirror Master isn’t Scottish), but the animation style is a little too stripped down for my tastes, with streamlined features resembling Saturday morning anime more than the Timmverse style I’ve come to expect from these features.  Overall, there are parts that work and parts that don’t – the choice of supervillains in the Legion of Doom is mostly insignificant, as most characters here are interchangeable with any other rogues.  But the characterizations of Superman and Green Lantern (voiced by Nathan Fillion) are spot-on, with Superman shining in a suicide intervention scene while Green Lantern swaggers through a rescue mission.  Ultimately the film is hit or miss, though it finally achieves Justice League status by creating a threat so big that everyone has a role to play.  Justice League fans will appreciate it, though it’s not quite the caliber of the animated series from the last decade.

Superman vs. The Elite (2012) – My favorite Superman stories always ask the question, “Why do we need Superman?”  The answer provided in Superman vs. The Elite (adapted from Joe Kelly’s “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?”) interrogates Superman’s refusal of lethal deterrent against a team of superpowered policemen who aren’t afraid to kill the bad guys (the execution of a long-time Superman villain is a perfect demonstration of that).  George Newbern (late of Justice League) and Pauley Perrette (Abby on NCIS) star as Superman and Lois Lane, doing good work that melds the animated sensibility with the repartee of the Donner films, and as Manchester Black, the central antagonist of the film, Robin Atkin Downes is repellently smug, spouting language that I think is deliberately out of place in a cartoon like this.  The film creates a new arc for The Elite, establishing them first as budding heroes before their moral code puts them in opposition to Superman – an improvement from the comic, which dropped them into the story without first building conflict.  What works less well is the animation style, which is quite two-dimensional and gives most characters the look of overfed bulldogs with Buzz Lightyear chins.  It’s a shame that the film doesn’t look better, because the writing in it is solid, particularly the ending, in which Superman attempts to prove to a bloodthirsty Metropolis that his way is better.  While not as quintessential as All-Star Superman, Superman vs. The Elite offers an alternate approach to the ongoing relevance of Superman.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, but don’t forget that this Thursday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month, and you know what that means...