Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)

(On Cable TV, April 2020) One of the most interesting things about the creative freedom allowed to the DC Animated Movie Universe are the occasional leaps into alternate realities that play with familiar characters. In Justice League: The New Frontier, the film adapts the classic Darwyn Cooke run of the Justice League being credibly transposed in the 1950s. It’s not unpleasant to watch, but it’s familiar, rushed and busy. While I’m not that big of a DC comics fan, I do have a nice slip-cased edition of The New Frontier (Why? Because of how Cooke draws his women characters, that’s why) and I’m slightly disappointed by the adaptation. It can’t quite play by the same codes of the original, nor sustain Cooke’s very distinctive visual style. But worse is how The New Frontier tries to condense a silver-age-style story into a far-too-fast 75 minutes focused on plot. This is a film that could have used 15 more minutes of atmosphere and character development in order to let the plot breathe and the 1950s styling make more of an impact. One word of warning to casual fans: the pace at which the film goes means that it does assume a lot of knowledge about the characters: that works for some of the more familiar ones, but not so much for the niche characters. In the end, well, The New Frontier is serviceable but not particularly satisfying, and a significant step down from the comics run itself.