Shenanigans & Tomfoolery

As I prepare to write my “Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths” review, I thought it’d be fitting to go back and look at one of the earlier works in DC’s direct-to-DVD line of movies. This isn’t an actual review of Justice League: The New Frontier as it’s a little difficult to dissociate myself from the comic book it’s based it on and look at this movie objectively. There are, however, a number of things that sprung to mind as I watched the movie that I feel are worth discussing.

The first thing I noticed in this adaptation of Darwyn Cooke’s story is that it loses a lot of character because of the lack of internal monologues. These internal speeches are a great vehicle to explore certain characters and Darwyn Cooke uses it to great effect in DC: The New Frontier. These inner monologues are almost inherent of superhero comics and they don’t translate very well to film and the story loses a lot of emotional impact because of this. This is clearly noticeable when Hal Jordan lands in the trench with the Korean soldier and is forced to kill to ensure his survival. It’s an intense read in the comic as Hal tries to figure out how to deal with the situation but it ends up being rather bland in the animated feature. Another good example is towards the end when Barry Allen/The Flash starts to cover The Centre with light from Ray Palmer’s device where he ends up looking perhaps a little less heroic than he did in the comic book.

Since I’m comparing scenes nearly side-by-side here, I think this is a good point as any to mention that the movie is very faithful to its source material, as long as you acknowledge and accept the fact that it’s called Justice League: The New Frontier and not DC: The New Frontier. The focus here is given almost entirely to the Justice League side of the story and a lot of cuts were made to the larger picture originally presented in DC: The New Frontier. The Losers are not here, the Challengers of the Unknown are not here, John Henry is barely mentioned and so on and so forth. They merge characters with events when needed (Hal Jordan goes to space instead of the Challengers) so as to not create plotholes but what is left is very close to what is presented in Cooke’s novel, sometimes even word by word. I did feel like the mystery of The Centre was driving the story in the film for a while though, instead of it being almost completely character driven with The Centre pulling all these different elements together for the finale like it did in the comic. And, of course, the 70+ minute run time ends up hurting the movie as it jumps from event to event with no pauses and little character development. It’s almost like the movie is worried about hitting all the story beats on time and less with the character aspect of it which was a huge element in the comic.

The last thing I want to discuss is perhaps of less importance and has less relevance to the project as a whole but it’s something that, just as it was in the Justice League animated series, I’ve come to notice time and time again: The Flash cannot be accurately represented in any kind of film medium. The concept of a man traveling at the speed of light is almost too abstract to work in a medium where time, real world time, is of such importance. In film, the director handles exactly how and when you receive information whereas in comics it’s ultimately more up to the reader to interpret a single panel as a year’s worth of time or just a single second. In Justice League: The New Frontier, they attempt to show how fast the The Flash is by slowing down everyone else and letting him move in-between static human beings. In the end though, all that’s doing is showing how fast The Flash is relative to regular people. They’re not really showing how fast The Flash is. The Flash, I guess, is ultimately a concept that works best in comic books.

Ultimately, how I feel about this movie is similar to how I feel about Watchmen: it’s a story that was made for comics and one that ultimately works best when it stays in in that medium. The animation and music get the job done, the voice acting is fantastic as usual (thank you, Andrea Romano) and the story works but I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone. If anything, I’d recommend DC: The New Frontier and then, if you liked that, come back and check out this movie to see how it holds up to this amazing ode to the Silver Age of comics.

Related posts:

1. A “Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths” review.
2. On Wally West’s “new” costume
3. A “9″ review.

Posted in Animation, Comics |