Warner Bros. has been doing a pretty good job on their DC original movies, bringing to life stories from the comics that wouldn’t fit into a regular series or with the standard continuity of anything else that has come before it.
Sometimes, they score a hit, like Superman: Doomsday, sometimes they catch a piece of the ball and knock it to the back of the park but in foul territory, like Batman/Superman: Public Enemies, and sometimes they knock it out of the park, like with Crisis on Two Earths.
After watching the preview of this film on the Public Enemies DVD, I’ll admit that I was skeptical. I’ve always been of the opinion that most of DCs “Crisis” story lines were too convoluted for me to follow and too dense with characters I couldn’t remember for me to care, but Crisis on Two Earths, despite its awkward title, really boiled down a Crisis story to its essence and nailed it.
It made me excited over Crisis stories and wish that this is how they were told in the DC Universe, proper. This film opens up with Earth-2’s Lex Luthor and Jester (a pretty generic Joker ripoff) stealing some manner of technology and escaping from the Crime Syndicate, which consists of a Superman riff called Ultraman, a Batman riff called Owlman, a Wonder Woman riff called Superwoman and so on. These guys are evil and on their Earth they’ve completely subverted the people into making them rich gangsters.
Lex Luthor is the leader of this Earth’s iteration of the Justice League and develops a way to get to our Earth, wherein he asks the Justice League for help. The entire league, sans Batman, agree to go back to Earth-2 to help Lex Luthor. Batman stays behind, insisting that The Justice League is tasked with saving only their own Earth from criminals and intergalactic threats and the like, but his attitude soon changes when the Crime Syndicate hatch a plan to blow up Earth-Prime, which would cause a chain reaction that would destroy every Earth in the multiverse.
I really liked this movie, the voice acting was good even though Kevin Conroy wasn’t Batman. I mean, seriously, Kevin Conroy should ALWAYS be Batman. James Woods was excellent as the creepy and psychopathic Owlman and Mark Harmon filled Superman’s shoes quite capably. The animation was top-notch and the action sequences had an incredible kinetic energy to them. They were exciting and fit in with the story to the point where each and every one of them meant something. They were all very, very cool to watch.
On a side note, I can see the Italian American community upset about Ultraman. He’s a greezy goomba and, though it worked for me, they seem to get upset about any iteration of Italian American as a mobster, and that’s pretty much all Ultraman is.
Having said how much I liked this movie, there is a major problem I had with the film and I need to preface this with a MAJOR Spoiler warning.
There, you’ve been warned.
At the end of the film, and Owlman has set the QED device to blow up and destroy Earth prime, Batman changes the coordinates of the bomb, batarangs Owlman to it, and then leaves him to explode. It seems incredibly out of character for Batman to specifically tie a villain to a bomb and send him off to who knows where for him to die. It was very un-Batman. I understand the stakes were high, and this guy would probably try it again, etc, but that’s Batman’s one unwavering rule: The Bat does NOT kill.
So, that was my biggest gripe.
Aside from that, they decoded the film version of a Crisis story perfectly.
As for the Spectre short… Wow… On the disc there is an 11 minute short film that was written by Steve Niles featuring the Spectre. It had the look and feel of a 70s exploitational cop procedural on 16mm and though it was incredibly short, the first rate animation and story concentrated into such a tight time frame worked so well that I’d almost like to see more of these instead of more feature length films. A disc of these would be to die for. I must have watched this five times and shown it to twice as many people, I couldn’t believe how excellent it was.
The last thing on the disc I’d like to mention is the preview for the next DCU Animated film, “Under the Red Hood.” The good news is that we’ll be seeing portions of my favorite Batman story, A Death in the Family, animated. The bad news is that they are basing this off of Judd Winicks lackluster run, taking Jason Todd out of the grave and under the hood. We’ll see how it plays out, but this was my least favorite Batman arc in the last 20 years.
Overall, this disc was worth the price of admission and it has hours of bonus content that will occupy your time for…well…hours…
To order it on Amazon, simply click the link.
