Sep 5, 2014

[Movies] Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2012)

This is part of my catch-up effort to review the various DC Universe Original Animated Movies that I've seen but I haven't reviewed. On Monday I'm going to focus on the most recent movie that I've had a chance to see. On Fridays I'll try to fill in the gaps among the earlier movies. Let's see how all this works out.

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox was the inevitable effort to bring the New 52 reboot universe to life in animated form. And I'm not at all a fan of the New 52 reboot effort, but of course I understand the business logic behind the move in terms of the comics. I just don't really see why they had to adapt it into an animated feature.

Interestingly enough, one could say that this adaptation was generally more faithful to the source material compared to a lot of other DC Universe Original Animated Movies. The fact that they threw in the term "original" in how they brand these movies is pretty much artistic license to make changes in order to somehow make things more appropriate for the expected audience. I can't quite say whether or not this was done well, but I guess it was done well enough.

Synopsis: Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox is a 2012 direct-to-video animated movie directed by Jay Olivia with a screenplay by James Krieg. It's based on the Flashpoint crossover event written by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert.

At the center of this movie is Barry Allen (Justin Chambers), better known as The Flash, find himself once again facing his old foes, The Rogues. But more than your typical super villain heist, The Rogues have been hired by Professor Zoom (C. Thomas Howell), who has some greater plot to destroy Barry's home, Central City. The Justice League intervenes to help stop Zoom's plan. Or at least that's how it seems at first.

The next day Barry wakes up to a completely different world where his mother is still alive but he no longer has his speedster powers. His wife, Iris (Jennifer Hale), is apparently married to someone else entirely and the Justice League as a whole does not exist as a team either. Aquaman (Cary Elwes) and his fellow Atlanteans have sunk most of Europe and Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall) and her Amazons have invaded Britain. And there are a whole host of other changes out there and Barry has to figure out what exactly has happened to have caused the world to become so different.

The cartoon featured a somewhat stretched and highly angled art style that made it seem like everyone had gone through the wash with the wrong temperature water and all came out wrong. Or maybe stretched is not the best adjective here - they were angled, but seemingly skinny and yet top heavy at the same time. It's like everyone had been reduced to a rather lithe body form where they had very narrow waists and oddly angled chests. It wasn't exactly bad, but I don't think I'm that big of a fan.

Kevin McKidd was an interesting choice as the voice of this universe's Batman. He has such a rich voice and he brought a nice dimension to the character - and you know that everyone (myself included) will always harp on who plays Batman other than Kevin Conroy. Sam Daly voiced Superman, which was fitting enough, I suppose given his father Tim Daly voiced the character in the animated TV series. He did pretty okay, but I think his dad still does a better job. Or maybe he needed to be a little less douche.

There were still a number of changes between the comics and this movie but those don't really matter The core story is pretty solid and the fact that they stuck so closely to the original material really helped things along. And while I was never a big fan of the New 52 reboot, (and I kind of disengaged from DC after that), Flashpoint is a pretty solid story. And that carried through in this movie.

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox is good addition to the DC Universe Original Animated Movie family and perhaps a little better than a few of the other Justice League themed stories. Animation quirks aside, I still enjoyed it quite a lot. The movie gets a good 4 changes after Professor Zoom's secret plan out of a possible 5.


1 comment:

  1. As a Marvelite who has no idea about the source material, I actually enjoyed this! The graphic violence is a little too much though (Mera's head).

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