天下制覇

  

One thing we can agree on, Superjuan.

Impressions:

See if you can follow this crazy, crazy premise. An alternate version of the Justice League, which is arrogant. In a world where the government fears them and has developed something to deal with them. Boy, that’s certainly not ground trodden, although possibly never quite this lazily since the super plan to deal with them was “bring some tanks, choppers, and guns.” Wow, it really took a brain trust of scientists to come up with that one, didn’t it? I really have no idea why this even has the Justice League name attached to it since it’s just completely different characters who happen to go by the same names. I guess that’s probably to pad out the run time with new origin stories, except that two of the three are totally vestigial to the plot. Might as well have called it Dracula vs Roboman in the Case of the Dead Scientists and focused on just that instead of what in the end amounted to a hodgepodge of fanservice where things were vaguely different, but actually the exact same as always.

There was some eye candy, but it was all tucked away at the very end and still a bit far and away from a lot of DC’s other animated stuff. The plot’s a mess as well with pretty much everything about the villain and his plan coming out of nowhere literally ten minutes from the end when he had to explain literally everything because his great master plan was… to get into the Hall of Justice for about fifteen minutes when nobody was around. So of course, the obvious plan was to murder every scientist in the world using robot quasi-clones of the Justice League. Christ, two plot points were that he and his bots could teleport when they weren’t supposed to be able to, and Wonder Woman couldn’t teleport into the building because its shields were up. Even the “characters are totally different but not really” thing was done better in Flashpoint Paradox with about 15 minutes fewer origin stories for characters who in the end, just ended up fighting random robots.

Aaaand since I am immune to any kind of fan wankery, I was fairly unimpressed. The story and characters were kind of a mess and relied entirely on the audience clapping their hands like excited harp seals to see something ‘different’, but actually not. The only time it was really entertaining was when it was being just weird, like Disco Porn Star Cheetah, or Ray Palmer and his incredible mini-horses. It really strikes me as just another hollow “What If” while then falling right back into the extremely worn out groove that the greater DC series has carved itself for the last decade.