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The internet currently seems to  be awash with thirty to forty something men (it’s mostly men) pissing and moaning about Justice League, the latest entry in Warner Brothers attempt to exploit their DC Comics properties and rival the MCU juggernaut. Opinion seems divided between those calling it out as a complete stinkbomb, and those reckoning it the greatest piece of cinema since Francis Ford Coppola was handed a film camera and an airport timekiller about the American mafia.

Perspective gentlemen, please. We lived through Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and the Schumacher Batman films. Nothing Zack Snyder has done has yet come anywhere close to rivalling those turkeys,  but given that 2016’s Wonder Woman has been the best entry in the DC cycle so far it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see why they don’t just get Patty Jenkins to oversee the whole thing and be done.

Yes millennials, this film happened.

Which brings us to Justice League itself. My initial impression of the movie was that it was enjoyable enough on its own terms, but ultimately played out like a special effects company showreel with a bit of plot edited together as an afterthought out of the endless acrobatics and masonry smashing. Now, this is  a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine, and I’m sure I’ve probably banged on about it in a previous blog, but spectacle is a poor substitute for narrative. Once upon a time directors knew how to balance these elements to drive the story and build characters that the audience could engage with. Then along came the Simpson/Bruckheimer axis and the MTV generation and it all went to shit. Every time we see the slate of new summer blockbusters, we see that we’re still seeing the baleful influence of those ‘high concept’ tosspots, and still they threaten us with Top Gun 2.

Okay, rant over, back to the movie.  Justice League’s story such as it is, follows on directly from Snyder’s expensive mish mash Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. Superman is dead, and Bruce Wayne aided by Diana Prince set about forming a team of ‘metahumans’ to combat an imminent invasion by the clumsily explained god-alien-thing Steppenwolf and his horde of cyber fleshy insectoid warriors (this is all explained in a leaden flashback exposition sequence where it is difficult to hear any of the narrative for all the noise). And that’s about it folks. The rest of the movie’s running time is essentially one long fight punctuated by members of the team asking each other what they should do and explaining what’s left of the plot to each other.

I realise I sound like I’m being really down on the movie here, but don’t get me wrong, I know that ultimately I’m not its target audience. I admit it, I’m jaded by this stuff. Twelve year old boys will see Justice League and probably think it is the greatest thing they have ever seen, and that is just fine, I’d have felt the same at that age (I still feel aggrieved that my  younger self didn’t get to see the awesomeness of GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra). If you want dark and gritty ‘’grown up’ comic book adaptations, then watch the mighty fine Marvel Netflix series (Daredevil and The Punisher being the standouts.)

Is Justice League a bad movie? No, but it is an empty vessel if you are looking to be engaged by anything more than a string of explosions. Should you go see it? If you want a popcorn, leave your brain at the door, beat ‘em superhero movie, then yes, it certainly delivers on those terms. To help anyone still wavering here is my pros and cons guide to Justice League:

PROS

  • Ezra Miller. Easily the breakout star of the film. His anxious, on-the-spectrum version of Barry Allen is bang on the money.
  • Jason Momoa has real screen presence. Here he banishes the memory of his Conan the Barbarian misfire and doesn’t waste a minute of his screen time. Bodes well for the solo Aquaman movie.
  • Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman. End of story.
  • It’s not Batman vs Superman. It maybe something to do with Joss Whedon’s involvement, but there is definitely a lighter tone on show here, without sacrificing the established darker, more visually textured feel of the DCEU. It is also coherent and doesn’t play out like it’s been edited by a Warner Brothers accountancy intern.
  • Its vastly more entertaining than the dull and turgid Age of Ultron.
  • Superman and The Flash have a race.

CONS

  • Unlike say, Man of Steel, it doesn’t feel like like anything is at stake here. We see very little of the outside world being threatened by Steppenwolf and his hordes. No one ever seems like they are in any real peril.
  • Steppenwolf is a weak villain. This is the central problem with the DCEU so far. With the exception of Michael Shannon’s General Zod, all of the series’ villains so far have either been underwritten CGI ciphers or pantomime turns like Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor. Darth Vader and Hans Gruber would never have stood for it. Sort it out DC.
  • None of the supporting characters have anything to do. Lois Lane and Jim Gordon are completely superfluous to the film.
  • Henry Cavill’s upper lip. You can’t take your eyes away from it. Just tell him to shave off the bloody moustache and screw Universal.

One last related thing. I read a lot of fanboy commentary either slagging off DC or Marvel and that one is better than the other. This is codswallop. Both have long and ignominious histories when it comes to prostituting their intellectual property in the pursuit of greenbacks. Yes, DC has produced its fair amount of turkeys, but anyone claiming that Marvel’s slate is clean in this respect has never sat through Albert Pyun’s Captain America (1989), or the hilariously bad David Hasselhoff vehicle Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD (1998). Like I said at the beginning, perspective is all.

Bat nipples for Chrissakes. DC fans had it much worse before the DCEU.

I promise that this will be my last superhero movie related post for a while. I’m in the mood to dive right back into watching and writing about a lot of my midnight movie loves, so watch this space for some treats from the underworld of cinema.

Till the next time…

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I’m a bit late to the show with this review, what with the annoyance of real world responsibilities constantly throwing obstacles in the way of me actually being able to get to the laptop, but such is life. It’s been a few weeks since I parked my bum down the local fleapit for the latest spandex extravaganza, but I’m glad to say that the memories remain fresh enough for me to review the movie for your reading pleasure. Onwards! –

I love comics, and I think it’s fair to say that if you’re reading this blog then you’ve got more than a passing affinity with the medium. But here’s a confession: I’m not the biggest fan of superheroes. Maybe this is because being a Brit, the spandex clad dominant in the US market wasn’t the stuff I grew up with, and as I remember it, neither Marvel nor DC imports were that widely available in the UK during my formative years.

As a kid growing up in t’Grimm North in the early 80’s, comic books were mostly bog paper anthologies concerning WWII era derring do from the likes of Hurricane pilot Johnny Red and German Tiger ace Hellman of Hammer Force. The sort of schlocky pulp action beloved of small boys, whom it makes disappointed that they missed out on the fight against Adolf. But then along came the discovery of 2000AD, and the rest was, well, that’s for another blog…

My first real exposure to the American stuff was Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), starring the late, great Christopher Reeve as the Last Son of Krypton, and for my money still one of the most successful attempts to transfer the spirit and exuberance of the comic book form on the silver screen. At around the same time the Wonder Woman tv show starring Lynda Carter was still enjoying reruns on UK TV. Before the likes of The A-Team and Airwolf drew my attention, and in the pre-VHS era, this was pretty cool stuff. In contrast the Spider Man tv show was short –lived, and in my eyes suffered from the lack of the Green Goblin, whose lurid visage adorned my lunch box locked in mortal battle with Spidey. In the battle for my affections, DC inched it. They’d been first to market cinema and tv wise, and for the time their parent company Warner Bros certainly weren’t parsimonious with the budgets. In contrast, with the exception of The Incredible Hulk tv show, Marvel were the poor cousin on screen, and seemed confined to Saturday morning animated shorts.

Fast forward to now, and how times have changed. After a few faltering steps, Marvel Studios’ IP juggernaut has steamrollered through the box office with a series of competent, if increasingly generic superhero actioners that have at least done visual justice to Marvel’s universe. For a while, DC seemed to have been left in the dust, forever playing catch up (Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy aside). Crucially, Marvel replicated its joined up universe on the silver screen with each film either directly joining up with the next or at the very least referencing events in other films in the same stable. Even Netflix’s excellent Daredevil tv show ties in through oblique references to the climactic battle at the end of the first Avengers movie.

DC finally got its act together with 2013’s Man of Steel, I film I liked if not quite loved. Zack Snyder’s reboot of the Superman mythos certainly divided opinion, but also heralded the beginning of DC’s cinematic universe. Now, instead of a stand alone sequel for Supes, DC have kept faith with Snyder and served up a face-off movie bringing in not only Batman but also a certain Amazon warrior too. And the results are…interesting.

This is a huge, sprawling, incoherent, glorious, flawed over rich pudding of a movie. Visually it’s vintage Snyder: dark, desaturated and rich in the director’s trademark visual texture. Plot and structure wise, Dawn of Justice is all over the place, leaving the suspicious and distinctive whiff of heavy handed interference by the studio brass, leaving me me with the impression that a a awful lot of the movie ended up on the cutting room floor ( Snyder has already promised his own cut for the DVD release.) As ever with such farragos it’s the audience that suffers. The plot kicks off on a simple but flimsy pretext: Bruce Wayne, blaming Superman for the destruction and loss of life visited on Metropolis during the climactic battle in Man of Steel decides that Superman is a loose cannon who needs to be brought down a peg or two (other than dressing up in an armoured batsuit, we’re not quite sure how the Dark Knight is going to defeat Supes and what the consequences for Superman will be if he does). Then a supremely hammy Jesse Eisenberg turns up as Lex Luthor (somehow seeming to have lots of advance knowledge about Kal-El?) with a plan to bring Superman low using that pesky old green kryptonite. And then mixes his blood with the corpse of General Zod, which creates Doomsday, for no other reason that the plot demands a big gribbly for our heroes to have a big scrap with (he’s on screen for about ten minutes at the climax and completely wasted). Wonder Woman gets thrown into the increasingly opaque proceedings followed by several sledgehamer allusions to terrorism and 911 in particular. By this point I’d completely lost my admittedly tenuous grip on what little attempt at narrative there was, but still kept in my seat gazing at Snyder’s visual swirl and wondering how it was possible to make such a dog’s breakfast of such a paper thin plot.

Along the way there are lots of cameos and easter eggs for DC fanboys to get excited over, with sneek peeks at Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg. Henry Cavill cruises on through, and Ben Affleck makes an intriguing Batman, on the edge of being burnt out and walking along a moral tightrope that he looks unsure of staying balanced upon. The breakout star of this overcooked celluloid soup has to be Wonder Woman herself, played with enigmatic relish by Gal Gadot. To be honest she was the only thing that was keeping me watching towards the end, and I await next year’s stand alone movie with cautious anticipation.

Compared with Marvel Studio’s more consistent, but formulaic output, DC seem to be much open to taking creative risks with their properties, an approach which has the potential to produce perhaps some memorable movies in the future, but whose down side is a greater risk of producing an expensive misfire. Such is the result with Dawn of Justice. An interesting mess.

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Or should that be Marvel vs DC? It’s the question that divides geekdom, our version of the Elvis or the Beatles conundrum. Well the answer is of course, that it’s okay like both (I know, I know, it will come as a revelation to some. Make yourself a cuppa and have a sit down before you carry on reading if you need to).

In this post I’ll be deconstructing the rivalry between the two US comic book giants, and exploring the differences between their two superhero universes, with a bit of a potted history of the American comic scene as we go.

Regular visitors to this august blog will doubtless be aware of my love of the comic book  medium, both as a vehicle  for storytelling and for showcasing some great art (yes, art teachers, comics are art). Being first and foremost a fan of British comics, starting with the war comics popular in the 70’s and early 80’s before progressing on to the delights of 2000AD, I never had a particular preference between either of the American giants, having been exposed to only  a handful of imports stocked in my grandparents newsagents. It was mostly through film and TV that I got into the Marvel and DC stuff with the the fondly remembered Christopher Reeve Superman films (the first two at least) and a bit later on the early Marvel animations shown infrequently on British TV in the 80’s. I also have memories of the late 70’s live action Spiderman series starring Nicholas Hammond that showcased some hilariously inept blue screen work (and his webslingers shot out rope! ROPE!). I distinctly remember waiting for the Green Goblin to make an appearance. The first of many youthful disappointments.

Despite Marvel getting in the act of exploiting its intellectual property early by sending Stan Lee of to Hollywood in the early seventies, they were gazumped by Warner Brothers acquisition of DC. With some serious financial muscle behind them, DC’s heroes made the leap to the silver screen first with Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), followed swiftly by its sequel in 1980. Batman’s journey to the big screen was somewhat more tortuous, finally culminating in Tim Burton’s splendidly gothic noir vision in 1989 (still the best of the Dark Knight’s live action outings for my money, but still outclassed by the superlative early 90’s Bruce Timm animations – check out his Green Lantern series on Amazon Prime).

All of which left Marvel with its metaphorical pants around its ankles. Apart from the aforementioned Spiderman TV show, Lee had scored some success with syndicated animations and a hit with the live action Incredible Hulk show (’you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry’). But transferring the Marvel universe to the silver screen would prove elusive, particularly without the backing of a major Hollywood studio that allowed DC to steal a march on its rival. It’s true that to do justice to many of Marvel’s creations would have required a prohibitively expensive (at the time) effects budget, and truth be told, the technology probably just wasn’t there at the time. You only have to witness the abomination of Albert Pyun’s Captain America (1989) and the thankfully unreleased Roger Corman version of The Fantastic Four  to witness the cold hard truth of this. Not that money was enough to save any version of the Richard’s family’s adventures as it turns out. And why Marvel ever let an inept schlock peddler alike Pyun anywhere near any of its properties, one can only guess. Be careful with your intellectual property rights, creatives!  In any case it seemed that the famously short attention span of Tinseltown quickly moved on from adapting superheroes for the screen, and for the time being the exploits of costumed heroes and villains remained in the realm of four colour ink. Marvel continued to sell film rights off to different parties (later resulting in a decades long court battle over bringing Spiderman to the screen, with Sony retaining those along with the X-Men film rights, resulting in their non appearance in the MCU when it came around, Homecoming notwithstanding).

Which brings us right up to the present day, with Marvel Studios owned lock, stock by the Disney behemoth, pumping out noisy high definition exploits of its pantheon seemingly at ten to the dozen while DC plays catch up with a, so far, uneven clutch of films kicking of its ‘extended universe’ or DCEU. And it’s the differing approaches each studio has taken with their universes which highlights their contrasting natures. Marvel favours a very clean, bright look to the MCU, one film seemingly blending into the next installment to such an extent that it’s difficult to tell the difference between directors, no matter how talented or high profile. If this sausage factory approach has led to a very tight cohesion in look and feel, then the downside is that creativity is sometimes sacrificed in order to maintain the format. Amid all the CGI and explosions, it’s difficult to feel connected to any of the heroes (or villains), something that the first two of Sony’s X-Men films (unconnected to the MCU – those pesky rights issues again), skilfully managed to avoid.

And is it me or do some of these films seem to have an unnecessarily long running time? Overplotting seems to be becoming a recurrent problem for me with some of the Marvel pictures, I’m thinking of Age of Ultron and Thor: the Dark World in particular here. I remember starting to lose interest halfway through with these two, in a way that I didn’t with say, Iron Man.

DC on the other hand seem happy to let directors take more creative decisions, which has led to rather uneven results, perhaps best exemplified by the mish-mash of Dawn of Justice, and the triumph of the long gestating Wonder Woman project.. The DCEU certainly seems to spend more time on characterisation, and is noticeably darker in look and tone. In retrospect, it’s not a great surprise that DC made it to the movies first, regardless of being bought by Warners, as it’s most famous creations (Supes, the Bat, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and the Flash) all emerged during the Golden Age of the 30’s and 40’s and were well embedded in popular culture by the late 70’s. Even your mum could tell you what planet the son of Jor-El came from. Marvel’s glory years were predominantly in the Silver Age of the 60s-70’s when the golden duo of Stan Lee and Jack ‘King’ Kirby along with the now legendary Bullpen, virtually created the foundations of the Marvel Universe as we know it today. This meant that it had a way to go before gaining the sort of cultural traction enjoyed by DC.

The other major difference between the two is that Marvel’s Silver Age heroes were conceptualised as deliberately flawed human beings who just happened to have superpowers whether through accident, experiment or mutation. If anything these all too human flaws are magnified  by their acquisition of superpowers (‘with great power, comes great responsibility’) Their surroundings were self consciously contemporary, and grounded in the real world, being centred in and around New York City. In contrast DC’S pantheon inhabit imaginary stylised urban sprawls like Gotham and Metropolis or lands like Themyscira and Atlantis, giving the universe a semi-mythical ‘nowhere-time’ milieu. Sure Clark Kent and Diana Prince may appear flawed like you and I, but it’s all just an act, a mask to be discarded when the call to action inevitably comes. These contrasting approaches to the staple of American culture that is the superhero comic book, whether consciously planned or organic in execution (I suspect a bit of both) define the look and feel of the two most valuable and well known comic book universes today.

If I had to make a choice, I’d probably come down just on the side of DC, as I personally prefer the slightly darker feel, and I’m a big Batman fan. As with the DCEU, they seem to be more prepared to get creative, as exemplified in the ‘Elseworlds’ series. My all time favourite Superman book has to be Red Son, for instance, the self contained tale of a communist Superman arising from his spacecraft crashing on a collective farm in 1930’s Ukraine is one of the all time greats of the modern era in comics. If you haven’t read it, go do so. Immediately. Marvel’s recent questionable decision to out Captain America as a secret Hydra agent, just doesn’t cut it, and has only succeeded in dividing fandom. Perhaps if they’d done it as a stand alone alternative universe story?

On the other hand I’m really into Marvel’s Netflix originals series at the moment. Daredevil is another favourite character of mine, and the two series so far have been nothing short of excellent so far, with the showrunners riffing off Frank Miller’s 80’s and 90’s run on the character. Currently I’m bingeing on Jessica Jones, a lesser known character brilliantly brought to neurotic, cynical life by Krysten Ritter, that continues the dark look and themes of Daredevil. What stands out most in this series is that all the protagonists are actually really, really terrified of the baddie, an on form David Tennant, knocking it out of the park. When Hollywood needs a great baddie, always hire a Brit.

While the Netflix shows have gone for darker, more adult  themes than their cinematic cousins, they are still bound up in the wider MCU, with plenty of references to the films and characters to set geekdom all aquiver, unlike DC who have intentionally kept their TV and film universes separate from each other.

Back in the DCEU, the helmer of both Avengers flicks, Joss Whedon was hired in to finish the Justice League movie after Zack Snyder’s family tragedy, and word around the campfire is that Warners have retained his services for their planned Batgirl feature. Advance trailers for JL look promising, and it’ll be interesting to see what Whedon brings to the party.

A lot to look forward to then. DC have stand alone films slated all the way to 2020, with Aquaman, Flash, Cyborg and Green Lantern Corps (I liked the Ryan Reynolds movie. There. I’ve said it). And that’s before I’ve scratched the surface of reading any of the Rebirth stuff, in the comic universe’s latest reboot/universe/whatever – currently I’m ploughing through Aquaman: The Drowning, by the always reliable Dan Abnett..

On the Marvel side, there’s the mooted Punisher stand alone series, more Daredevil (yay!), Doctor Strange still to watch, the second book of Brian Michael Bendis’ Iron Man reboot comic series to read…

Really, it’s okay to like both.

 

And on an unrelated note, I’ll be taking a sabbatical from the Book of Face shortly, so if you’d like to continue reading my irregular missives, then may I suggest subscribing in order to receive them straight into your inbox? Any suggestions/comments/constructive criticisms are of course welcome in the comments, and if you like what you read, feel free, in the words of the ABC Warriors, to Spread the Word!

 

PS – for anyone interested in the history and background of American comics, I suggest picking up a copy of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. It’s a fascinating read if you are at all interested in this corner of popular culture, and is also available as an audiobook on Audible.

 

See you on the other side.