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mygif

I’m afraid I concur. I had high hopes going into it, and there are one or two moments a hardcore DC fan will indulge in (Rick Flagg Sr.!), but the acting is sad, the plot disjointed, and most of the character moments are wasted (Hal’s complex, he finds a ring, he’s Green Lantern).

It’s a curious choice for an animated movie, because this creates yet another animated universe with its own continuity (JLU/BTAS, “The Batman,” Teen Titans), and I’m not sure who it’s supposed to appeal to. It’ll baffle the casual fan who expects some carryover from other series, it’s too vapid for the true fan, and it’s not going to appeal to the unintiated.

I saw it a while back and wanted to write a similar review, but just wasn’t motivated enough. It’s not…god-awful, but it’s not worth getting worked up enough to write a true review, is it?

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mygif

Ding ding ding. Still, the urge for fanboy porn is pretty high. Many of us are still under the impression that anything can be adapted for film or television, so for many of my friends, the thrill of seeing things they like moving around on a screen outweighs the damage to the story.

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mygif

Agree. I went and read the comic after seeing the movie. This movie isn’t going to send adults flocking to theater, and kids are going to be confused.

The comic was fairly cool, but I gotta ask WHY mess with continuity here? It seems… contrived to me. It might just be me, but the story itself is a bit not-quite-elseworlds and very not-quite-useful. It’s just throw various versions together in ways that don’t fit and then watch them be heroic. It was PRETTY (the comic, not so much the movie), and a limited sort of what-if fun, but I didn’t get drawn into that story, it was more jarring than juxtaposition I guess. Why not throw in the Wonder Twins!

But as always, good ol’ animated Supes gets the ever loving gob smacked out of him, and everyone ELSE gets to be awesome. I loves me the animated Superman. *grin*

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mygif

It could have been really good, if they had an extra 20 minutes for set-up, characterization, and subplots. But alas.

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NCallahan said on March 5th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

Part of the problem with the New Frontier (as a movie) is that it works off of the “the past is always wrong” argument. Which is, the story makes the assumption that you, the viewer, have already come in with the impression that everybody in the 1950s was an intolerant moron. Not to say that same intolerence doesn’t apper in the comic (it is, after all, a central theme), but it’s humanized, explained, and expounded upon, rather than just put out because “people in the fifties didn’t know better”. You read the comic, you can see where these ideological divisions come from and appreciate the characters’ growth as they overcome them. In the movie, people are jerks for no good reason and then Superman gives a speech (I should note, he gives Col. Flagg’s speech, to a group including Col. Flagg, which just made me facepalm).

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mygif

I don’t think 20 minutes could save it for fanboys, to be honest. And it wouldn’t make a difference to kids except to make it longer and possibly go over their attention limits.

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mygif
Sam Rauch said on March 5th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

I just wish they’d do the canceled Justice League movie already. I don’t know whether the live action version will help speed this along or ensure it never happens.

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mygif

To be honest, I prefered the movie. All of the WW2 stuff didn’t work for me in the comics. The only thing I was really unhappy with was how they changed the part about John Henry and King Faraday’s demise.

Both comic and movie nailed Aquaman, though.

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mygif
malakim2099 said on March 5th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

I thought the movie was quite good. Not OMG BESTEST EVAR, but still pretty good.

Of course, I recently attempted to watch Dragonlance, so I might have been able to put in POTC 3 and think, “Hey, that’s not bad at all!” ๐Ÿ™‚

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mygif

I was under the impression that Mask of the Phantasm cribbed fairly heavily from Batman: Year Two.

I really need to get around to reading New Frontier.

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mygif
ElBastardoMagnifico said on March 5th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

I was only interested in seeing The Judas Contract because of the vague mention that they weren’t going to use the traditional Dini/Timm style animation which my brain assumed meant that they were going to ape Perez’s art style for it. Keep in mind I probably would have still hated it simply due to the fact that I’m about as hardore a purist as you can get.

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mygif

I admit, you do have a strong point. JLU worked mostly because it dumped most of the continuity and went some truly awesome stories in their own right.

Only counter-example I have to offer is the adaption JLU did of “For the Man who has Everything” which, aside from being very close to word-for-word, is damn good in its own right.

IMHO

Michael

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mygif

I’d put the ten or so episodes of the Cadmus arc of JLU against any Justice League comic you can name. The part where Question is going to kill Luthor so Superman will never have the chance to… that’s some awesome.

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mygif

salmo just pointed out one of my favorite action cartoon moments ever. So, uh, damn that guy for having good taste before I could say it, just so I have a second sentence to put here.

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mygif
Edgar Allan Poe said on March 6th, 2008 at 2:01 am

“I was under the impression that Mask of the Phantasm cribbed fairly heavily from Batman: Year Two.”

You could make that argument. Certainly there are ideas in Mask of the Phantasm that seem to have been inspired by Year Two.

But the movie took a few elements from the comic book and executed them in a very different way. And also implied that the Joker was having sex with a robot, which is pretty cool, especially since they slipped it into a kid’s movie.

Plus, Batman: Year Two sucked breathtaking amounts of ass, and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is really good.

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mygif

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QrBvWdlRDc&feature=related

I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention. If you can tell me with a straight face that’s -not- awesome and wouldn’t be awesome if it got made full length . . . well, I don’t know what I’d do.

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mygif

Wait, didn’t they already kinda do Judas Contract in the Teen Titans series? I mean they had Terra join the Titans, then betray them and it ended up she was working for Slade/Terminator. Of course they completely skipped the relationship angle; the show’s for young audience.

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mygif

Eh, I liked NF. It was certainly better than Doomsday. Sure a lot was left out, but considering they only had 75 minutes to work with I think they did a great job and I like that they at least tried to mention/integrate the parts that were left out rather than just make them non-existent (the fact that Mr. Cooke helped with the story really showed). These movies should be a full hour and a half-two hours rather than the limiting 70-75 min factor they’ve been stuck with- especially if rumors are true and they’re going to try and do Kingdom Come. As for the voice acting- I thought overall it wasn’t bad. Again, it was a ton better than Doomsday.

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mygif

Personally, I find it vaguely entertaining that the faults everyone’s finding with the film are about the same thing that made me hate the comic; it’s poorly paced, the plot makes no sense, the whole thing depends on you buying into the idea that the Fifties were a time of stultifying conformity and rigid adherence to the status quo instead of the vibrant, dynamic period of social change that they actually were, and Cooke spends big chunks of the series lavishing long, slow blowjobs on Hal Jordan, his personal mancrush. (Did I mention I wasn’t a big fan of ‘New Frontier’?)

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mygif

Eh, I liked it, flaws and all. It wasn’t the best adaptation but it was an entertaining movie.

However, no matter how you feel about the thing you must admit this: this movie has offered up irrefutable proof that the Blackhawks’ battle cry is absolutely fucking terrifying. Hawkaaa!

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