I don’t think I’ve experienced many movies that started out so strong and fell apart so fast and so consistently. If you were to map the movie on a linear graph, it’d make a wonderful ski slope all the way down. What a mess.
Justice League: Warworld is basically three semi-independent Elseworld shorts tied together with a forth overarching story. There’s a story set in the Old West, a Conan-like sword & sorcery epic, and a 1950s Twilight Zone / Monsters are Due on Maple Street segment, each featuring different combinations of DC heroes as alternate versions of themselves.
The Old West story with Wonder Woman that opens the film is actually great. One of my favorite DC animated films… and I don’t even like Westerns all that much.
And then things start to crumble with the sword & sorcery story… and that’s a genre I do like. But why was it so dull? And who were some of these characters? Was the guy with the goatee supposed to be Green Arrow? But, no, they gave him a name at the end and I had to Google it since the movie had no interest in telling me.
The final 50’s alien paranoia segment was where the film truly crashed. And I like pulpy 50’s alien invasion stories.
The cutesy way the shorts handled its heroes annoyed me. Only the first segment with Wonder Woman felt like Wonder Woman. Stuffing Batman into barbarian gear or Superman into a g-man suit basically made them feel like generic characters, not the heroes we expect.
These stories should have been independent instead of being forced into a “clever” overarching narrative. The way they dropped hints at “what’s really going on” felt smug and poorly thought out, as though they were an afterthought to tie the stories together.
I suspect if you read these comics, it’d be really neat to see them on screen. But I haven’t read those books and nothing in this movie means anything to me and the movie couldn’t convince me otherwise. The final moment was a great big “screw you” to audience members like me… and a threat of future misery.
This is the worst DC animated film I’ve seen. There have been ones I haven’t cared for before but at least I could see they were part of a complete consistent story. This was too clever for its own good; a melting ice cream cone set in genres that I’m pre-programmed to like so you know they done messed up when I dislike it this much.
<a href=”https://boxd.it/gqCoC”>DC Animated Films – Ranked</a>
Score: 62