I watched the latest straight-to-DVD animated Justice League movie "Justice League: New Frontier" the other day.
At the heart of the story is the entity or being known only as "The Center." Hidden for hundreds of millions of years, it sees life change and evolve on Earth. It sees mankind and both fears and loathes it. Over the millenia, The Center prepares for its day of re-emergence when it will end all life on the Earth.
As The Center’s plans near fruition, its effects are being felt in seemingly random suicides and homicides performed by otherwise normal individuals.
Can our heroes put the clues together in time to stop the impending apocalypse while dealing with the mistrust and significant anti-superhero sentiment sweeping the United States?
Unlike the recent Justice League series, New Frontier is set in the 1950’s during the McCarthy era. The anti-Communist paranoia sweeping the U.S. has resulted in the blacklisting of some superheroes, while others try to work with the current U.S. administration’s policies.
At first blush, the setting seems like D.C.’s attempt to tread roughly the same ground as Marvel’s recent "Civil War" series. In actuality, JL:NF is an adaptation of the concepts presented in the award-winning limited run comic series D.C.: New Frontier that was published during 2003-2004.
Too Much Ground To Cover
It’s difficult dealing with a large cast. Sufficient screen time and sufficient handling is required to enable all of the main characters to introduce and resolve sub-plots while moving the main plot forward. Add to that the requirement of fight scenes and an epic, climactic battle, and the whole thing becomes quite the writer’s juggling act.
If the writers aren’t on top of the game, the pacing suffers and parts of the story feel rushed, which is what I felt happens with JL:NF.
I think the concept of DC:NF would have been better served as a multi-part mini-series instead of trying to squish a lot of interesting story elements and several characters into a single production. I felt there was just too much ground to cover for a single movie to handle.
Animation
The animation quality is uneven with the end battle being particularly rough in some sequences.
What’s notable is that they also threw in a little more gore than what we’re accustomed to with the animated Justice League. There are some sequences with quite a bit of blood flow. However, due to the uneven animation quality, it comes off looking more like spilled catsup.
There’s also dead bodies and some non-human creature rending and dismemberment towards the end of the film. Again, a bit surprising given it’s animated Justice League, but anime fans have seen much worse. 
The Final Word
There are some pretty melodramatic and sappy sequences, notably the ending with the long slow pan montages set to a voice-over of one of (I believe) John F. Kennedy’s speeches. With the 1950’s setting, they could have been intentionally applying some 1950’s style melodrama, though I’m not quite sure.
JL:NF isn’t bad but only fair. There are a lot of interesting elements in JL:NF; 1950’s America, McCarthyism and how the superheroes of the age have to deal with the country-wide anti-superhero sentiment and so on. That’s all wonderful, but the squeeze to get it all into one production really hurts the film overall.
Any Justice League fan is going to rent or perhaps buy this film, but for animation fans in general, mileage will vary greatly. Maybe worth a rental but I’m not going to add it to my film library.
Tags: batman, D.C. comics, green lantern, justice league, martian manhunter, new frontier, review, superheroes, superman, wonder woman
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