What the hell happened to this movie? I enjoyed the animated Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One earlier this year… thought it was a little disjointed and a little down the DC rabbit hole as far as lore goes, but it was a pretty decent watch. But Part 2 just tosses all that away and does whatever it wants… a lot.
The flick picks up with the antimatter wave that’s still trying to wipe out all the Earths across the multiverse. Instead of focusing on one plot, it focuses on a bunch of DC characters (some of whom I’ve even heard of) across multiple timelines in multiple subplots (none of which I cared about).
This movie is an unmitigated mess. It spends time with characters I have no idea who they are. I’m not a big comic book guy so that’s my limitation as a viewer but, c’mon, if it’s not Batman, Batman, Batman Beyond, Robin 1, Robin 2, Batgirl, Superman, or Supergirl, maybe throw a guy a bone and explain these people to me. We all aren’t comic book obsessives and they went and made a movie for a very very very specific audience of not me.
I mean… who’s the shirtless kid who has beef with super-intelligent apes? Or the guy who can control minds and thinks he’s a pirate? Or this other zillion year old guy who observes everything across every universe? I’m lost… and I don’t even care.
The storylines are all over the place… a bunch of subplots of heroes trying to fix or control anti-grave-wave towers… a plot which, sure, I guess is important to the events of Part 1… but they go nowhere, have very little momentum, and barely seem to matter. They are just different vignettes of this Infinite Earths crisis. This “matters” but it doesn’t advance this three part story at all. It’s just stuff that happens on the way to Part 3’s presumed finale. This whole mid section of the trilogy could probably just be skipped.
For the fact the producers of this very bad film couldn’t get me interested in its subplots to the mediocre action, lack of an actual villain, and gaggle of deep-cut heroes, this is the worst DC animated film I’ve seen. Even worse than that terrible Warworld movie. “Nice” going.
Score: 62