Beware Minor Spoilers

Just when I thought I’d seen everything that could be done with DC superheroes in animation, along comes New Frontier. I’ve been a fan of Bruce Timm’s animated shows since Batman: The Animated Series and I’ve been anticipating this new one-shot, direct-to-DVD movie ever since Superman: Doomsday was released last year. Timm promised an even better movie this time around and he really wasn’t kidding. New Frontier has excellent characterization, beautiful stylized animation unlike anything we’ve seen from this team before, and the right voice cast to really sell the Cold War era feel. It was worth it just to hear Lucy Lawless as Wonder Woman and David Boreanaz playing Green Lantern, but it has a lot more going for it than just a voice cast full of stars.

New Frontier is based on the graphic novel (which I confess I haven’t read and hadn’t even heard of before this project). It’s set in the 1950s and the government is starting to lose faith in its superheroes, being paranoid that some of them are communists. Batman is basically a fugitive and the government sets a trap to catch the Flash. A giant, frightening being that calls itself The Center threatens the world and after a number of interesting, individual subplots, some which help to set up the villain and others which give us the origins of a couple major heroes (Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter) many of the heroes come together along with the government, putting aside their differences, to stop The Center.

The villain is the weakest part of the movie. I never really got where it came from or what exactly it is. It’s a huge circular, living island with mind control powers and it can create dinosaurs. I can’t say it wasn’t original– I’ve never seen anything like it– but I didn’t get it, either. I think the idea is that the movie isn’t about the villain. It just needed something for all the heroes to fight against. A little contrived, but that’s okay because it let the movie really take its time fleshing out its characters. There are no big villain monologues and no master plan revelations. Just a lot of wonderfully fleshed-out subplots that bring everyone together as a team to fight a big monster. The individual stories are what are really interesting– Flash trying to decide whether to keep fighting evil even though everyone’s against him and it puts his family at risk, Hal Jordon trying to prove that he isn’t a coward even though he had to kill someone in Korea out of self defense, and J’onn posing as a private detective and working with Batman while trying to fit in on Earth.

Visually, it uses modern animation techniques to heighten a fifties style. It looks a lot like the earliest Superman cartoons but with more color, more detail, and more realism. It goes one more step in that direction than Batman: The Animated Series did, and I would have loved to see this on the big screen.

What really kept it fresh was that it wasn’t about Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. They are there and they are great, looking and sounding like serious, fifties versions. Superman is wearing a very early costume where his symbol is just an “s” rather than a Kryptonian symbol, Wonder Woman has her invisible jet, and Batman has a very small cave where he looks at newspapers on microfiche and classic comic versions of the batmobile and the batplane. But they’re really just there to look like the leaders and help focus the plot– the real heroes in this movie end up being some of the “lesser” heroes. Batman is really just there to use his detective skills to find the Center and Superman is put out of commission so early he doesn’t even really get to help save Earth!

This movie is really about Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter, both of whom are invented from scratch here and are very identifiable. Their origins are done more-or-less the same as in current comic continuity, but with a fifties twist. If you’re like me and know a lot about Batman and Superman but not a lot about some of the other Leaguers, this movie clearly explains both the Lantern and the Manhunter and makes them very human characters (or Martian, in Manhunter’s case). Lantern and Manhunter are the characters who really go through a major change by the end.

Good and evil are pretty black and white in this film, but it’s set in the fifties. Superman only has to give one big, stirring speech to make everyone work together once the monster starts terrorizing the city. This isn’t especially realistic but I appreciate how the narrative handles being both a modern movie and a period piece. It tells a Cold War story in a modern way but with all the fifties plot points. I want viewers to be surprised by some of the techniques so I won’t give any more away, but I will say that this is a different take on these characters than I’ve ever seen, and it was a pleasant change. The movie ends with a famous Kennedy speech (which is where the title comes from) which sets up the future of the Justice League, and that montage itself is practically worth the price of the movie.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: Batman, comics, David Boreanaz, DC comics, Flash, Green Lantern, Justice League, Justice League New Frontier, Lucy Lawless, Martian Manhunter, superheroes, Superman, Wonder Woman

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under Batman, Capt Logan, Movies, comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.