At the San Diego Comic Con last week, I was lucky enough to see the world premiere of the seventeenth DC Universe animated feature, which hits DVD and Blu-ray on July 30th. I’m going to admit right off the bat–I’m going to have a hard time being totally objective in this review of Warner Brother’s and DC Entertainment’s latest animated straight to video film Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, which is based on Geoff Johns’ mini-series event Flashpoint from just over two years ago. You see, Flashpoint was the event that led to DC’s universe wide relaunch known as “The New 52,” which, in my opinion, has been frought with more negatives than positives. But even putting that negative bias aside, the truth is that The Flashpoint Paradox is a movie that while exhibiting some entertaining ideas and fun action sequences, tries to bite off more than it can chew and ultimately suffers for it.
The story of The Flashpoint Paradox is relatively straightforward, and much like the comic, centers around the Flash, Barry Allen. This is the first DC animated film to center around the Flash, and although the official title has the words Justice League in it, make no mistake…this is a Flash story through and through. The opening shots of the movie feature Barry Allen as a little kid, and shows us a close relationship with his (single?) mother Nora. One day, she is brutally murdered in a home invasion while Barry is away at school, and this quest to find her killer is what leads Barry to the life of a crime scene forensic scientist. It is during his time as a forensic scientist that Barry has the accident that makes him into the Flash, but we don’t see that presented here. I realize most hard core comic book fans are at least vaguely aware of the Flash’s origin story, but having said that, many casual fans who don’t know it might be sampling this movie, and jumping from the traumatic event of Barry Allen’s childhood to his adult superhero career might be jarring. If you are wondering how Barry Allen becomes the Flash, it isn’t covered in this movie. In fact, almost all of this movie expects you to know the basics of the DC Universe in some form, and that is but the first example of many.
So we flash forward (no pun intended) to the Flash fighting his villains,collectively known as the Rogues, and just as he is about to succumb to their evil machinations, Flash calls in his Justice League friends to bail him out. This is where we get our Batman cameo, with classic Batman the Animated Series voice actor Kevin Conroy providing the voice of Bruce Wayne once again. Conroy is the definitive voice of Batman in my opinion, so any chance to hear him as the Dark Knight is a treat, even if it is really brief in this movie. This is maybe my favorite sequence in the whole movie, as the Justice League have to individually disable a bomb planted on each of the rogues by Flash arch nemesis Zoom, the Reverse Flash. Unfortunately, we don’t get a whole lot of insight into what makes the Reverse Flash hate the Flash so much, although he is pretty brilliantly voiced by C. Thomas Howell. If you’re not already a comics fan, you are screwed if you want further insight into just what his deep seeded animosity is based on. Still, this brief scene of the JLA doing their thing and finding unique ways to disable each bomb is maybe my favorite part of the whole movie. Sadly, for me it all kind of goes downhill from here.
After the opening credits, we cut to Barry Allen waking up in his office to a very different world. Barry wakes up to a world where his mother Nora was never murdered and is alive and well, but in this world, Barry is no longer the Flash and has no super speed. There is a very different (and gun loving) Batman protecting Gotham, Cyborg is America’s #1 hero, and Wonder Woman and Aquaman are at war (or, more truthfully, Themyscira and Atlantis are at war.) A war that has resulted in Aquaman sinking continental Europe, and Wonder Woman and the Amazons taking over England and killing all the men. Superman is nowhere to be found. Barry doesn’t understand or remember how this world came to be, so he seeks out the one person he thinks can help him…Batman. But this Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, and to say anymore is a fairly massive spoiler, so I’ll stop short of that. But I will say it is one of the cooler reveals of both the movie and the original comic. Barry and Batman try their hardest to restore the alternate timeline back to the normal one, all while an impending World War III is about to happen if Wonder Woman and Aquaman go to war.
So all of this sounds cool right? Cool alternate universe story, good animation, all the stuff of fanboy dreams. But something about the whole things bugs me, and I can’t put my finger on it. And it could very well be under the circumstances that I saw it at San Diego Comic Con, to a packed house of enthusiastic fans. While that sounds like the ideal conditions, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. See, this world exhibited in this movie is extremely violent and dark; Wonder Woman and Aquaman start a war simply because they have an affair that goes sour for example, and Wonder Woman kills Aquaman’s wife Mera by beheading her, and then begins wearing her crown as a trophy. We even have a rather gratuitous shot of Diana holding Mera’s severed head up (this got cheers from the audience for some reason.) Also getting applause was a Batman who killed wantonly, lot of severed limbs and horrible deaths, and even a scene where Wonder Woman kills a little kid. The more over the top the violence, the more they ate it up, and this seems to be the version of these characters we’ll be seeing for years come. It might be the DC Universe that these fans wanted, but it wasn’t the one I wanted. So while technically this is what you’d call an “Elseworlds” story, it sets the stage for a much darker animated DC Universe, and it isn’t one I’m really looking forward to, but it going to be the one we’re stuck with.
There are also tons of cameos from other DC Universe characters, to the point where they are just there as fan service and not much else. Lois Lane (once again voiced by Dana Delany) is a war correspondent and underground freedom fighter on “New Themyscira”, and we get even more cameos from characters like Etrigan the Demon, Deathstroke, (voice acted once again by Teen Titans‘ Ron Perlman) and even Captain Marvel, renamed Captain Thunder. But due to the movie’s eighty minute running time, there just isn’t time to properly develop these characters beyond just as “hey, I know that guy!” and on to the next shot of someone being bloodied up a bit. Some of the subplots should have been cut out entirely to make the movie flow better and seem less like cameo-palooza.
Overall, this movie is a mixed bag. The voice acting is hit and miss; Barry Allen is voiced by Grey’s Anatomy’s Justin Chambers, and I hate to say, his voice acting is rather flat and bland, which doesn’t help when the character who he is portraying has a bit of reputation as being a bit boring and bland as well. Other voice actors fare better, like Kevin McKidd from Rome as Batman II, and veteran actor Cary Elwes as Aquaman. But unlike most DC Animated movies, where the voice acting is often the best thing in it, this time it wasn’t very memorable. The animation style is more anime influenced than any other DC animated movie thus far, and is actually pretty good and a nice change of pace from the usual style these movies go for. This is the first of the DC Animated films without the influence of Bruce Timm, and you can tell. I miss his guiding hand, and I just can’t help but feel he would have made the production team of producers James Tucker and Alan Burnett and director Jay Oliva try a little bit harder. The final product is perfectly ok, but I kind of expect better from Warner Brothers animation and DC at this point.