Justice League: The New Frontier.

I picked this up for $5 at the shop down on the corner. What follows is an account of my experience. You’re welcome!

The time is Cold War Time. The place is PARANOIA TIME. New Frontier is set in the 1950s and 1960s in a world where superheroes are still making names for themselves. And the names they are making are DIRTY COMMUNIST NAMES. Not really, but if you object to that conclusion jump YOU ARE A COMMUNIST. This is why the cold war era is fun. Anyway that isn’t actually what the film is about because that would be too interesting, it’s actually about punching a giant monster. More on that later.

The movie opens with a rapid-fire set of scenes detailing who is who and what is what. Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) is not Green Lantern yet, he’s still a pilot. He crashes and has to shoot a guy in the face to convince him the war is over. It works. Martian Manhunter has accidentally been teleported to Earth by a scientist. Flash is saving Las Vegas from one of his lame villains, because the Flash has the dumbest villains ever. Look out Flash, he’s got a gun that makes ice! Good thing you’re the fastest man alive, making that fucking useless.

Superman is off looking for Wonder Woman because she is his only friend. He finds her in some Korean jungle where she has freed a bunch of women who were raped and tortured and had their families murdered in front of them and then got raped again. Wonder Woman basically let them out to go nuts on their captors and, because you don’t mess with women, they kill the shit out of them. So you see, Cold War Wonder Woman is a badass. She even wears an actual skirt instead of wunderpants. That’s because she looks like Xena, and is voiced by Xena, and is basically Xena. If they really want to make a Wonder Woman movie, they should just dress Lucy Lawless in a Wonder Woman costume and have her act out any three randomly selected Xena episodes. I would watch the hell out of that.

Superman and Wonder Woman have a conversation in which he is a whining nancy boy who is worried the government will turn on them. To which Wonder Woman is all ‘OF COURSE THEY WOULD, TYPICAL MEN’ and then she downs three tankards of Korean moonshine.

Sounds absolutely compelling, but these opening scenes are a filthy lie. This is almost all you really get from the whole “superheroes are dangerous for AMERICA” plotline. There are a few spots here and there – Batman is apparently a fugitive from justice even though he is the one who is just a guy in a bat suit – but overall it’s a bunch of boring scenes that eventually lead to a battle with mutant dinosaurs and a big floating lump of generic laser fist. The sequence of events that leads to the climax is so intensely haphazard and pointless that I had forgotten both the original Cold War storyline AND the real monster plot about three quarters of the way through.

The art is very nice though. Darwyn Cooke (the artist behind the graphic novel behind the film) has that very amiable retro style that reminds you of the 1950s when everything was totally fine, men wore hats and women cooked while having babies. It’s basically perfect for the movie this should have been, but wasn’t. You know, the movie where the real-world concept of Cold War paranoia was played into the idea of superheroes as both a dangerous ‘other’ and living weapons of mass destruction. Not the movie about a blob blowing up everyone with yellow and trilobites.

The only problem I have with the art is that when Martian Manhunter changes his form to be more “acceptable” to humans, he has a terrifying HUMAN FACE pasted onto his green alien suspenders-with-underpants body. It looks like someone on the internet photoshopped a piece of my deepest nightmare onto his bald Martian head. I still hear the screams.

A few random notes. Hal Jordan is a skin-tearingly boring man. I know he’s the Green Lantern in most people’s minds, but he’s not interesting. He’s a guy. He does stuff. The most interesting thing he ever does is HAVE A MAGIC RING and even that doesn’t get used until the very end of the movie. New Frontier is very focused on Jordan and his journey to become a space cop, and it is exactly as exciting as you’d expect watching a handsome, white, male American become a handsome, white male American in space.

New Frontier does carry on one grand DC tradition, which is that you always need the Flash. No matter what the situation, the only way to save the universe will be if someone can run really, really fast.

Good bits: the aforementioned bitch version of Wonder Woman (who is just a sad woman in an invisible plane who needs a man by the end), when Batman threatens to kill both Superman and Martian Manhunter in one sentence because he can, Manhunter watching TV and shapeshifting into Bugs Bunny. Martian Manhunter. There should be a show that is just him being totally awesome. His only weakness is terminal sadness.

Bad bits: mostly everything else, except the parts I can’t remember because I fell asleep and dreamed I was watching a better film.