Justice League Doom Blu-ray Review
The latest DC Universe animated feature arrives and this time it's an adaptation of Justice League: Tower of Babel, simply retitled 'Doom'.
Feature (Runtime: 76 Mins Region: Free)
The latest DC Universe animated feature arrives and this time it's an adaptation of Justice League: Tower of Babel, simply retitled 'Doom'. Adapted by the late Dwayne McDuffie, this latest DC movie brings together much of the voice cast from the original Justice League animated series, Batman (Kevin Conroy), Superman (Tim Daly) Wonder Woman (Susan Eisenberg) The Flash (Michael Rosenbaum) and Martian Manhunter (Carl Lumby) as well as DCU regular Nathan Fillion returning as Green Lantern. The Justice League come under threat when the Legion of Doom, led by Vandal Savage hack into the bat computer and access Batman's files on bringing down the Justice League (via a collection of plans ol' Bats has put together to stop The League if any of them ever went rogue). With the JLA all but taken out, Vandal Savage moves his plan to a more Earth threatening level but with our heroes out of action, maybe no one can stop him. Yeah right. JL: Doom sits somewhere in the middle ground of the 'good' scale for me. It's by no means a weak entry into the DCU animation catalogue but something isn't quite right. Artistically, it's beautiful. Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash look fantastic here Their developed style over the previous projects suddenly feeling the norm and blueprints for future animated projects. Green Lantern feels very right but still needing a bit of an edge and really it's only Superman who looks a little soft and in need of a slightly slicker re-design. The animation also takes another step towards holding up to high end Japanese style animation - the HD image here is stunning but more on that later. So why am I not going DCU crazy over this one? For me it's the story. For all of the human aspects, the dark themes of how to break our heroes and the question of whether what Batman has done is right, there's an elephant in the room throughout. Why doesn't the Legion of Doom simply kill the Justice League when they have the chance? Each member has been taken out in perfect ways (because Batman put the plans together) and even though Batman's original backups didn't involve killing his fellow League members, each one of the situations could go there with very little effort. This wouldn't be a problem if Vandal Savage simply wanted to prove a point but his bigger plan requires nobody to get in his way, so why stop at simply sweeping out The League's legs? Just shoot them in the head while they're down, surely? This question really began to bug me, mainly because each hero was taken out was handled so well and with real dramatic tension. As this all started to come together for the big villain take down (what else did you expect?) this began to feel like a silly Golden Age story that's been given a spit and polish with modern storytelling and a darker sense of drama for our comic book heroes. With that said Doom was still wildly entertaining. The fight scenes were absolutely fantastic. Every time I see Wonder Woman tussle in these animated projects I yearn for someone to give the DCU gang a pop at developing a live action flick because they make her so bad ass. The scrap between Supes and Metallo was awesome with a handful of killer cool moments and all the set pieces here worked wonderfully as did many of the dialogue driven scenes. As for Batman calling The League "Damn fools" and his "Can we just get this done?" attitude towards the supers around him always make me love the Dark Knight more and it's really played well here. The fallout of this tale was pretty great because of these attitudes and even if the whole of Doom didn't blow me away, moments like these sure did.
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