Doomed for Watching
Bleah. This could have been something. They were adapting the “Tower of Babel” to the animated screen, which was one of the bigger and one of the most stunning JLA storylines by Mark Waid, who I unabashedly claim as one of the very best comic book writers of this generation. Unfortunately they fell short in copying his masterpiece, and they did it badly too.
First, it was over too damn quick. Like so many of these adaptations, they compress way too much in order to fit the movie in barely over an hour. Why? Why can’t they actually try and extend things and make an actual length animated movie? Particularly when you’re dealing with a team like the JLA which would mean—GASP! Multiple main characters! I’m not saying it has to be a three-hour long epic but surely you could use an hour and an half, maybe two at the most. It’s more like they’re trying to make a slightly longer cartoon episode.
Second; they truly botched things by changing several of the booby traps to some truly stupid methods of incapacitating the JLA. I mean a bomb strapped to the Flash's wrist that would detonate if he slowed down? Clearly somebody had been watching Speed. A robotic decoy that was killed to destroy Green Lantern's confidence? A weird drug that made Wonder Woman see the Cheetah everywhere? And burying Batman in his parents’ grave and having him forced to dig his way out—somebody was obviously watching Kill Bill 2. And a kryptonite bullet for Superman was right out of Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. Would it kill you guys to show a little originality like Supes being exposed to the artificial Red K like in the Babel comic?
Third; I had no idea why they created that anti-Justice League except maybe they thought they needed one big JLA team fight at the conclusion. They just seemed to serve no real purpose in my opinion.
Fourth; they totally skipped over Batman getting kicked out of the JLA like at the end of the Babel story which I thought was the biggest and jaw dropping moment to the whole plot.
Fifth; the conclusion was … bad. They save the world by making it intangible. I was left feeling that the writer was really, really lazy and just wanted to resolve things without working it out.
And finally, why on Earth did they include Cyborg, who is not even a member of the League in the middle of this whole crisis and had him join at the end? It seemed like a poor attempt to model the JLA after the current JLA comics. Not to mention that they totally dropped Aquaman as well.
Whew. Now that my rant over what I thought was horrible about the movie, I have to say that the animation was of excellent quality. They rarely screw up in that aspect. And as far as the voice actors, I was genuinely surprised at that they brought back so many of the old great voice actors from Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy, Carl Lumbly, Michael Rosenbaum, and Nathan Fillion to reprise their old roles. I had no complaints there, they were some of the very best at their roles.
But I went in with some serious high expectations after Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths and the fact that they were adapting one of Mark Waid’s storylines. And I was utterly let down. All and all, Justice League: Doom starts off with a bang and finishes with a whimper.
RATING: 1 STAR.
