Superman

Writer-director James Gunn's latest dissection of costumed heroism opens with a broad-chested, Joe Shuster illustration of a Golden Age Superman springing to life to flex his muscles and pop the paltry chains that encircle him. As an opening note it's not quite as grandiose as Richard Donner parting velvet curtains before blasting off into space but, again, we're being asked to consider the totemic might wielded by those original Action Comics. Almost immediately following, once some cryptic expositional text is out of the way, we're thrust into a losing battle for Krypton's last son with Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, orchestrating this airborne one-on-one from a command room that mixes overlit standing desks with the cranks and dials seen in animated, Fleischer shorts like The Mad Scientist, or Electric Earthquake. Throughout, Luthor screams at the spittle-flecked underlings controlling his slave superhuman, with the madman using the kind of fighting game input notation that you might expect to find seated beneath an ASCII art heading on GameFAQs. 

So, despite a bleached post-processing that resembles a lifestyle magazine that has been left to curl in Earth's yellow sun, Gunn's film, in casting a net wide enough to include minor (or simply old-fashioned) DC characters like Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon's Metamorpho, betrays an adoring sort of fluency for this material. One that goes beyond the expected deification of Christopher Reeve's caped adventures or violent, satirical comics that were published in the 1980s and put the zap on one Zachary Edward Snyder. David Corenswet's frequently astonished Superman, fresh from being tossed about above Metropolis, takes another pummelling a few beats later when he submits to being interviewed, in-character, by his girlfriend, Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane. Even with a waist-coated wardrobe that recalls the vague era of the seventies, if not the specifics of Margot Kidder's 70s-does-30s wardrobe, Brosnahan's Lois is a chimeric creation who brings to mind the small screen royalty of the wider Warner Bros kingdom: the high-pitched register of Courtney Cox's Monica Geller or really any of the leading women in Amy Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls (Brosnahan's breakthrough role in Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel courtesy of the very same writer-director-producer). 

All of which is to say that this Lois is not just written to be intelligent but also principled and atypically argumentative. She's challenging for a character like Clark who, blessed with an ability to shrug off gunfire, is far more forthright and binary in his thinking. You see, Gunn's Superman examines him from a perspective of the supreme, unyielding altruism present in the character's earliest, domestic abuse-thwarting incarnation. The Biblical strain placed on this big screen character by the patchwork screenplay of the 1978 movie lingers here only to be dismissed, conclusively, by a piece that relentlessly positions everything that is great about Superman being the result of him being raised by adoring, older parents rather than the expectations mapped onto him by alien prophecy. Gunn's film also correctly identifies that the rise in fascism, corporatism and authoritarianism that we are all experiencing is, essentially, the same as that which faced a Lithuanian immigrant back in the 1930s. So, like Jerry Siegel before him, the writer-director doesn't chicken out on the implications of a working-class man possessed of a Godly power and the difference they can then make in the lives of everyday people. 

Superman is able to travel incredible distances to help the struggling people of this planet, so he does exactly that. In this instance that means interfering in the US-backed invasion of Jarhanpur by all-encompassing belligerent, Boravia. Although there's a whistling aside about the two countries being situated somewhere in Eastern Europe, the parallels between this film's images of Arab civilians dressed in rags being shelled by white troops kitted out like futuristic storm troopers and the ongoing genocide in Palestine are not just obvious but unmistakable. Rather than unthinkingly side with the expansionist interests of his adopted nation, this Superman intervenes on behalf of the oppressed, demanding pause from the frothing Boravians. Gunn has previously used the fictional countries of the DC comics universe when making contentious points (see The Suicide Squad) but this instance goes far beyond a permissible canvas on which to stage repulsive, gross-out gags. The writer-director now offers up instead a proletariat messiah committed to protecting the weak from moneyed bullies and the soaring, magical sight of Isabela Merced's Hawkgirl - in a sequence which may well be intended to echo the moment that a Thanagarian child, in the throes of retribution, chose to stave-in Lex Luthor's skull from Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again - lifting a bloodthirsty dictator up into the air then, rather than listen to any of his blustering apologia, letting him plunge screaming to the ground below.

DC Extended Universe by Alexye

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three

The present phase of the DC animated universe limps to its own, reality collapsing conclusion with Jeff Wamester's Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three, a flat finale that is presented to us, almost exclusively, through crowd shots and cameo appearances. Notionally a victory lap for a recent spate of direct-to-streaming releases that have very much failed to capture any past glories, Part Three of this multiverse-spanning saga has to delve deeper into the pre-history of the so-called Tomorrowverse to arrive at any genuine pathos. Before every major character is compelled to willingly have their identity crushed into a gestalt, 'prime' version of their super-persona, Crisis on Infinite Earths visits Earth-12, the home of the heroes who began their adventures with Fox Kids' Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series on Kids' WB before burning out brightly with Justice League and Justice League Unlimited on Cartoon Network. 

This belated appeal to one of the deepest veins of branded nostalgia that the DC animated stable has to offer is (despite any associated cynicism at either end of the exchange) comfortably Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three's highlight. Although the dark deco establishing shot used to introduce this brief sequence lacks the pearlescent pow of the original opening title image, the short punch up that follows is, compared to the static posturing that surrounds it, actually quite thrilling. The brawl, between Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's take on The Joker and The Caped Crusader, beautifully describes how a Clown Prince of Crime might stumble on his feet following some sizable and sustained head trauma. Animated flourishes aside, this clip also contains the late Kevin Conroy's final line reading for his signature role. Hissing through his teeth, the voice actor reaffirms his inextricable connection to the Batman character. It's a performance that spanned multiple decades and creative teams but remained so perfect and singular that Conroy could, if heard at the right time in your life, capture your imagination forever.

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two

How many times have we seen a batarang strike the shoulder of a brawny supervillain? How often do these branded shurikens find their way into the unguarded rear of some advancing threat - who barely even acknowledges they've been pinned - before the device beeps then explodes, stunning the creature in question? Cartoon Network's Justice League and Justice League Unlimited were pulling this stunt (equalising the earthbound heroics of the caped crusader when considering the character on a cosmic level) over twenty years ago; delivering the detonations with far more aplomb too, it has to be said. Significantly less animated than your average motion comic, Jeff Wamester's Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two grinds through a middle act for this multiverse-spanning saga, offering up excruciatingly static sequences in which characters sit across from each other and broadcast, monotonously. This straight-to-streaming adventure begins with two such conversations curling around each other from opposite ends of the galaxy. In one corner there's an omniscient being experiencing a glacial emotional awakening; the other a Golden Age master criminal delivers an extended, forensic monologue to a captive audience. The latter, obviously the stronger of the two, reaches for the insistent rhythms of an Alan Moore subject but the staccato situations used to illustrate these ramblings never rise above perfunctory. The real worry throughout Infinite Earths Part Two though is that these desultory chats are leaps and bounds more engaging than the battles with massing shadow monsters that succeed the chinwags. 

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One concludes, after the credits have staggered their way up-screen, with a dedication to George Pérez, the penciller for the 1980s comic book series that this animated feature is based on. The solemnity of the gesture is rather undercut though by the decision to have this particular inscription break up into the same flaking ash that marks the destruction of this film's doomed, two-dimensional heroes. Quite apparently even the briefest of obituaries, for those whose work is being ruthlessly mined, pales in comparison to the sanctity of the cliff-hanger. The dignity usually extended to those who have passed a mere trifle when judged against the maintenance of a mood calculated to pack people back in for Part Two. Other than this worryingly ill-judged addendum, Crisis Part One is everything we've come to expect from these stale, direct-to-video adventures: a neat central concept that is obscured by circuitous writing and a staging so flat and lifeless that no-one can be left in any doubt that the talent that buoyed DC animation through its golden age has long since migrated elsewhere. As if to underline this point, Part One spends a significant amount of its time centred around The Flash's dealings with Amazo, the power-leeching adversary who previously dismantled television's Justice League in 2003's Tabula Rasa two-parter. The strange elegance of an android shaped like an awards statuette, who fought his opponents by physically reproducing their own powers, is replicated here as a busy-looking robot full of accessory chambers who simply holds out his hand, numbing his already static enemies into a state of sleepy repose. 

The Flash

The most fascinating aspect of Andy Muschietti's The Flash is that Warner Bros. was convinced they had a smash hit on their hands. A picture so purely entertaining that it was capable of overshadowing the bizarre (not to mention well publicised) criminality of its lead actor and bid a fond farewell to an era of superhero filmmaking that has inspired a genuinely rabid level of affection. On the day, we are instead treated to a strangely fatalistic money pit that, at least initially, seeks to emulate the light comedic touch of Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future series before the studio edicts pile up then collapse in on themselves. Muschietti's film isn't always a boiling disaster though. Often it's even agreeable, usually thanks to one of the many Dark Knights skulking about. Ben Affleck briefly returns as Zack Snyder's Batman, this time behaving with the unhurried confidence of a Sprangian Scoutmaster. This burly grump is quickly overwritten, after Flash visits a temporal treadmill, allowing Michael Keaton's heavily merchandised take on the vengeful billionaire to spring back into action. 

Every moment spent in Keaton's company is a delight. The actor steering his untouchable take on Bill Finger and Bob Kane's crimefighter towards a kind of gravelly stoicism, one typically associated with Clint Eastwood - incidentally, another Warners mainstay. The Flash keeps on churning though, eventually sinking itself into a computer generated sludge thick with totemic marionettes choking on their own arrested adventures. These plastic depictions of a reality sinkhole are sort of stunning in their ugliness: Ezra Miller's twin speedsters the subject in an enormous colosseum stacked with conveyer belts that teem with hijacked imagery. Rather than tell an engaging story about a buffoon who treats his life like a series of video game checkpoints, we have a piece that literalises streaming services as a stinking cauldron of thwarted ambition. These century-spanning properties, and how they are expressed, are not special to the people cutting the cheques. It's all just content. Fit only to be piled on top of each other in an pulverising attempt to silence the bleating subscriber. No wonder the Discovery regime was so delighted: this Flash is a two hundred million dollar juggernaut premised on the idea that people should, in fact, just shut up and accept the slop that is served to them. 

New Gods #9 by Artyom Trakhanov

The Batman

For a character that has been booted and rebooted to the point where any sense of permanence or progression has been subordinated to an endlessly regurgitating state of origin, Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson's take on the caped crusader manages to eke out a place of its own in this ever-expanding pantheon by making him deliberately inexpert. This desire to play the masked vigilante as disconnected and insufferably weird is just enough to numb the nagging feeling that, perhaps, the Dark Knight might be better served by a period of hibernation. Although the overarching story is completely dissimilar, this The Batman is grounded in themes and ideas that didn't quite make it to the screen when Frank Miller and Darren Aronofsky were circling Warner Bros' prize property in the early 2000s - a Bruce Wayne estranged from the gaudier aspects of his wealth and a Batcave that, rather than occupy a cavernous space beneath a mansion, is actually a cordoned off stretch of abandoned subway. 

Like Miller and Aronofsky's recalibration, this Bruce Wayne isn't portrayed as worldly either. There's zero sense of the globetrotting pilgrimage that underpinned Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale's shinobi cinema take. Reeves' Batman has put down roots then rotted, a phantom committed to drifting along the streets that claimed his parents. Pattinson offers up gauntness, a malnourished cigarette stink that is reflected back to him by a Gotham filled with blaring video screens and neo-Grecian majesty; a city resplendent with ill-gotten gains and drowning in a constant downpour. Suited up, Pattinson's Batman isn't played as intimidating either. The street-level cops he interacts with are not awed by his supernatural presence, they treat him as a nuisance - an unwanted physical affectation that, for some reason, is allowed to pollute their evidence gathering procedures. 

Pattinson has a theatrical, carnival, quality to his looming. The horned cowl he wears more evocative of a Victorian depiction of The Devil than the usual animisitic totem. Batman as a dressed-up, Spring-Heeled Jack style, eccentric rather than the world-shaker who counts Superman amongst his friends. This Batman then has been plucked out of folklore and deposited into a particularly dour police procedural. This clash plays beautifully, at least at first, largely thanks to Pattinson's decision to not adapt in the slightest to the superhero production line. Rather than a gleaming Adonis, this masked vigilante is sinewy and violently unhinged; his venom maintained by poisonous-looking chemicals that can be injected into his body when he finds himself in dire need. Firmly located within sodden squalor, Reeves and Cinematographer Greig Fraser's film very obviously strives to evoke David Fincher and Darius Khondji's despondent work on Seven but the invocation frequently plumbs deeper influential depths. 

A constant technological prickle recalls the uneasy symbiosis of analogue and biomechanical machinery tidied into every frame by Ridley Scott and Jordan Cronenweth on Blade Runner. In the early goings, eyes gather and compute long strings of visual information, spitting out leads for this button-pushing meddler. It's a shame that the demands of Bruce Wayne's case have him leave this visually unusual feedback loop; damning his interactions to yawning exposition dumps and criminals casually surmising their murderous intents. Although the aesthetic is often sublime, the actual structural mechanics underlining this beauty frequently work directly against the spell. As well as an elasticated relationship to bodily harm that (bizarrely) aligns him with his Warner stablemate Daffy Duck, Pattinson's Batman isn't just dim, he's blank. An empty vessel just waiting to be filled up. 

Mouth-foaming data is batted aside, more than once, when Bruce Wayne finds his way to another, contradictory, perspective. There are sequences in the film where Batman dutifully trots from meeting to meeting, instantly rearranging his entire outlook based on nothing more than the last thing that was said to him. The character's strongest convictions are the revulsion he feels regarding firearms, an abstinence he lords over those who plainly weren't rich enough to keep a butler on staff to teach them the ins and outs of Spanish martial arts. In a film where, comfortably, hundreds of innocent civilians are swept away by polluted filth, why shouldn't Zoë Kravitz's Selina Kyle shoot a man involved in the brutal murder of her lover? Similarly, Batman's yelping admonishment of the supervillains he faces comes off as rote and sanctimonious when we've seen that the public-facing 'Bruce' persona is a barely maintained shadow. Scenes designed to draw clear lines under the idea that Batman and his foes are reflections of each other repeatedly fail to land because of the voyeuristic strangeness constantly being generated by Pattinson. If anything, the final Wayne's unholy quest to pummel turnstile hoppers makes considerably less sense than a violent uprising determined to rid a terminally compromised city of its parasitic ruling class.  

Catwoman: Hunted

Like the Batman: Gotham Knight anthology and 2018's Batman Ninja before it, Shinsuke Terasawa's Catwoman: Hunted allows us another glimpse of American superhero characters as interpreted by Japanese filmmakers. This cross-pacific collaboration is a well-worn but still promising conceptual shake-up that the DC animated movies, as they currently exists, are in desperate need of. Director Terasawa, a key animator who has worked on everything from New Dominion Tank Police and the Megazone 23 OAVs to Barefoot Gen 2 and Akira, does weave a few atypical pops into this straight-to-video animated film, but - judging this vid against the last half-dozen - his interjections seem largely limited to the shot-to-shot construction of Hunted's finale action sequences rather than, say, anything that might actually alter the film's formulaic dramatic trajectory. 

Similarly, the film's character designs are obviously indebted to Kotobukiya's Bishoujo statues, a range of collectible three-dimensional pin-ups that depict superheroines - and other pop culture mainstays - as beautiful young women in form-fitting outfits. Greg Weisman's screenplay is at least consistent with this cosplay affect, reaching for the kind of playful trysts familiar to fans of Lupin the Third (and the character's many animated adaptations); Elizabeth Gillies' Selina Kyle taking centre stage as a femme fatale in the Fujiko Mine mould. Catwoman: Hunted sees Bill Finger and Bob Kane's cat burglar traveling to Spain to bump heads with a secret society after stealing a different Gotham import's precious stone vig. Like the rest of the recent DC animated stable, Hunted plays like a feature-length pilot episode for a television series that hasn't been picked up. It's a piece stuffed with go-nowhere introductions and lumbered in the early going by an interminable car chase that inherits none of the elastic mayhem evident in Hunted's Monkey Punch derived inspiration. 

The Suicide Squad

Set on the fictional island of Corto Maltese, a Cold War critical South American territory named for Hugo Pratt's sea captain that first appeared in Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Returns, James Gunn's latest, The Suicide Squad, allows the writer-director - not to mention Warner bros' hundreds of millions of dollars - to relitigate the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, substituting in third-string supervillains for history's well-armed exiles. A military coup on the aforementioned isle has allowed an American black site to change hands from a pro-US incumbent to a war-mongering General eager to lay waste to his former oppressor with extra-terrestrial weaponry. To Suicide Squad's credit, the transitioning country does display all the hallmarks of having been a Washington vassal state - the majority of the population suffer in abject poverty while soldiers drive around in General Motors Humvees, loaded down with heavily customised M-16s. 

Naturally, Harley Quinn and pals are far more successful than their real-life counterparts when it comes to violently evangelising CIA sponsored democracy, ceding power to a small group of electable revolutionaries by, simply, killing everybody else who could fill that power vacuum. Pitched at the gross-out comedy end of the superhero spectrum - see also the Deadpool films - The Suicide Squad revels in the kind of mass extermination that is often weaponised against Gunn's former collaborator, Zack Snyder. The city levelling rampage of a villain lifted from the first appearance of the Justice League of America (1960's The Brave and the Bold #28 - the original Suicide Squad appearing in the previous issues) comfortably kills thousands of civilians. Presumably, the lack of outrage at this outcome is due to the audience's ability to tune into Gunn's tonal wavelength rather than, say, the fact that Snyder's Man of Steel demolished literal pillars of western hegemony, ending middle class North American lives, rather than working class Latin American ones. 

Nominally a sequel to David Ayer's chopped and screwed misfire, Gunn inherits several choice pieces of casting for his own film - the most reliable of which are Margot Robbie's Dr Quinzel, the closest thing the current DC cinematic universe has to a lynchpin, and Viola Davis' cold-blooded take on Amanda Waller. Bizarrely, Idris Elba is recruited to repeat a great deal of Will Smith's arc from the previous film, except this time with a greater emphasis on transforming gadgets. John Cena, recently seen failing to plug the Dwayne Johnson sized hole in F9, is much more at home in this film, consciously leaning further and further into the plastic absurdity of the action figure outline he has cultivated. Armed with a helmet that looks very much like a chromed dickhead, Cena's bloodthirsty Peacemaker is the performance most of a piece with Gunn's violent flippancy; likely the reason that the ex-pro wrestler already has a spin-off streaming series lined up. Gunn's film then, loaded down with exploding mutants and cringing misfits, displays an obvious affection for DC's more obscure comic book characters, if not the persecuted citizens of the Second World.

Justice Society: World War II

Something of a return to form for the DC animated universe, Justice Society: World War II forgoes caped crusaders and the Man of Steel to place Wonder Woman front-and-centre in an alternative history take on the Second World War. Diana (voiced by Stana Katic, an actress who previous voiced Lois Lane in Superman: Unbound) leads a team of Golden Age, Allied, superheroes, including Omid Abathi's Hawkman; Matthew Mercer's Hourman; Armen Taylor as a period appropriate Flash; Matt Bomer as a time displaced Barry Allen and (best of all) Elysia Rotaru as a lovelorn but scrappy Black Canary. 

This portrayal of an Axis-bashing superteam has its roots in the comics and serials of the time - the Justice Society itself dating back to 1940's All Star Comics issue 3. The film depicts a real war of occupation, complete with war crimes and extrajudicial executions, being fought by bright, four-colour, American personalities. Unlike the comics Justice Society: World War II adapts, this film takes place after the United States has joined the war, an event perhaps expediated by the fall of this universe's Soviet Union. Not to be outdone in the propaganda stakes, the Rome-Berlin alliance have their own Übermensch in the form of a blonde, brainwashed, Aquaman - the King of Atlantis providing a friendly dock for German U-boats on their way to New York. 

Although taking clear cues from 2002's Justice League season finale The Savage Time, Justice Society avoids replicating Bruce Timm's Alex Toth influenced character designs, opting for a less stylised depiction that instead recalls the light, wooden, caricature of a television series like Archer. Figure outlines in Jeff Wamester's film are thick brackets separating handsome character drafts from their background. Similarly, the meat and potato action sequences have a marionette quality to them - a uniformity of figure that suggests a baked character model being twisted and manipulated rather than an individual piece being animated from scratch. Still, a sequence where Wonder Woman beats up a squad of advancing Tiger tanks - with her bare hands - has more heft and pulverising weight to it than the last half-dozen straight-to-video DC adventures. Justice Society succeeds for similar reasons to 2015's Justice League: Gods and Monsters, it tackles a formulaic story from a less formulaic perspective; a light shake-up confident enough to be mistaken for a feature-length pilot episode. 

Superman by Victor Santos

Darkseid by Jon Lankry

Justice League vs The Fatal Five

Justice League vs The Fatal Five aspires to be a movie length episode of Justice League Unlimited. The home video release ropes in voice actors from the classic TV series and Bruce Timm's clean, angular, art style to tell a not particularly interesting story about time-travelling criminals and the mental health worries of teenage superheroes. Aside from the above window dressing, the closest Sam Liu's latest comes to summoning up the vim of its antecedent is in the decision to build itself around lesser known characters. At its peak, Justice League Unlimited was a popped-out plunge into the DC back catalogue; twenty-minute gasps that dredged up a procession of heroes and villains to be pulverised by Dr Fight himself, series co-director Joaquim Dos Santos.

Unfortunately Dos Santos and ace collaborator Lauren Montgomery are both long gone from the DC animation team - the directors are currently booked for Sony's various Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse follow-ups - leaving us stuck with a creative team who churn out cynical, supermarket cartoons. At one point the DC animated universe was the go-to place for comic book histrionics and fluid action cracks. Now we're lumbered with an assembly line producing bumbling, misshapen features, each vid spiked with enough light swearing and pooling blood to avoid babysitter video classifications. Never mind that these additions often register as a creep's idea of maturity. Fatal Five's fight sequences (one moment of axe-meets-Lantern-ring excepted) are cumbersome and under-animated too. Rigid, plastic looking figures collide in a flat, centre space; world-shaking brawls executed with a clod's idea of invention.

Batman / Judge Dredd by Eric Canete

Superman: Year One #1 by Frank Miller

Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an odd duck, a straight-to-video crossover between two children's properties that is spiked with nose-snapping violence and second-tier swear words. You'll believe a Ninja Turtle can say 'frig'. Despite being a standalone feature, Jake Castorena's film unfolds like four episodes of a toy cartoon stitched together for a video release - think 1997's The Batman Superman Movie: World's Finest but much less dynamic. The caped crusader plays Akela to his own teenage wards as well as the oozed-up, chainsticking reptiles, beating back mutated Arkham inmates and ninja masters alike.

The story unfolds in self-contained sequences, each structured with the kind of individual beats you'd expect from one of Nickelodeon's 22 minute long schedule fillers. This bagginess, as well as the feature's arthritic sense of moment-to-moment motion, ensures interest flags long before the film's conclusion but at least Castorena and his crew make a real effort to distinguish their characters not just in terms of personality but in how they fight. Batman and Shredder are equally matched, a good father and a bad father locked into contact-combat demonstrations that burn through the animation budget. Best of all, for his finale throwdown with Leonardo, Ra's al Ghul exhibits a twirling, balletic sword style that mixes swashbuckling caddishness with handicapped wuxia.

Hawkgirl by Ralph Niese

Bizarro #1 by Kyle Baker

Orion by Walter Simonson