Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (2010)

Powerful

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

This movie is one of my least liked DC animated movies. The action scenes were good enough, but not really anything new. But where this movie really fails is in the story and characters. "Our heroes will face their greatest enemies of all: THEMSELVES!" That's about the common tagline for a cliché that's been done a million times before. And how it is handled determines how unique and original the story gets. Unfortunately, this movie didn't really try hard enough to be truly original. Instead, the story goes like this. You have your good guys, and you have your bad guys. You know who they are right at the start of the movie. Then you watch the good guys fight the bad guys and wait until they win and go back home. That's about it. This movie can almost benefit from some more clichéd story elements, like identity confusion, the tension of trusting a heroic version of a villain, the deeper explanation to how and why your alternate self became such a villain, or the possibility that your evil self is someone you yourself could have become. These are clichés that would have opened up different possibilities, but this film's solution to avoid clichés is to simply try nothing. The only interesting thing in this movie was Owlman, a man who has his own philosophy that destroying everything is the only real choice. He explains that every choice creates a new Earth where the opposite choice is made. And that pretty much explains why in that other Earth, every good guy is a bad guy, and every bad guy is a good guy. Because everybody just happened to have decided to be a good guy or a bad guy at the exact same time, and so there is another Earth where everybody is flipped, right? But that doesn't explain why an off-screen character on our Earth is a pet monkey on that other Earth. The character progression and development are also pretty poor. There is virtually no character development at all. It does have an ignorable love story between two characters from different worlds, but whatever. At the end, almost all of the heroes are just the same as they were at the beginning of the movie. There is no dynamic in developing a teamwork and relationship with each other, not even with Lex Luthor. They knew he was good at the start, worked fine with him, and just got to work until they were done. It doesn't help that the main antagonists look very dissimilar to the heroic protagonists, so the issue of our heroes fighting their other selves was extremely easily forgettable. Even the issue of teaming up with their enemy's heroic other self was not touched upon at all. They were teaming up with Lex Luthor!!! And it was settled at the start of the movie and never spoken about again for the remainder of the movie! In fact, almost all of your WHOs and WHYs are settled at the beginning of the movie, and the rest is just waiting for the good guys to get the job done and go home. That's it!

Cote, although ably written by the great Dwayne McDuffie, inevitably pales by comparison with "A Better World" a two part episode of JL series and one of the finest moments in superhero broadcast. Cote actually goes back to the roots of "A Better World", a 1960s comic-book classic called "Crisis on Earth Three" although Owlman's desire to destroy the multi-verse gives a very big nod to 1980s story "Crisis on Infinite Earths".(Sorry if all these crises are confusing) The story is largely very close to the comic book original. On a parallel dimension, a gang with powers very similar to the JL are using those powers for evil and so call themselves The Crime Syndicate of America (as in the original comic. This differs from " A Better World" since the CSA are NOT the JL whereas in ABW The Justice Lords ARE the JL who have taken a different path.This is a good premise, and indeed in the original comic was an outstandingly novel and exciting idea. However, it must be said that after seeing AB, the idea has been somewhat blunted. ABW was actually going to be a literal reworking of the original CoET story before they hit upon the richer idea of the Justice Lords.Having decided to belatedly adapt the original story, I must say they do a pretty good job, although Batman's keenness to sacrifice Johnny Quick leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Overall a good story and also nicely presented. It's also probably better than 'Avengers'. But then what I've always hated about justice league is that superman very often ends up getting knocked out. He's so strong but still gets beaten up, even wonderwoman's evil twin superwoman was knocking him around quite easily. There's the fight scene between ultraman(superman's evil twin) and superman where both shoot laser from their eyes on each other which makes the lasers collide and ultraman intensifies his laser and superman gives and dodges ultraman's laser beam instead of intensifying his own(maybe superman should take a few lessons about projectile duels from goku). Then superman uses some shiny plate to reflect ultraman's back at him there by knocking him down...now what if that plate wasn't there? I am not trying to be cynical, but sups is supposed to put up more of a fight than this...he has the ability but is always underused, even against super powerful enemies. I also hoped to see wonderwoman fighting superwoman but that never happens. The best thing that martian manhunter does in the movie is scare the evil green arrow...and probably throws two punches and a kick in a fight scene and if this isn't INJUSTICE enough Owlman(the goofiest looking villain in JL history)outsmarts and beats the hell out of Batman yes BATMAN. Batman also takes a beating from superwoman(and outsmarts her)which is understandable but the way Owlman beats the heck out of Batman until the very very end feels like a load of crap thrown straight at your face. So the only superhero properly used is flash.But still if you are a Justice League fan the movie is good enough to entertain you from the start to the end, so go ahead and watch it.

I somewhat enjoyed "Public Enemies", and "Under the Red Hood" is by far the best feature ever, but this edition really could have used some work. It has the same problems as a lot of its predecessors, delivering solely action and a pretty basic plot outline of the much deeper graphic novel. This was pathetic to me, because the premise was pretty promising. Not only that, but Batman spends 90% of his time in the movie getting his ass handed to him, which was insulting really. Chris North, Mark Harman, and William Baldwin, all were decent, but nothing compared to Kevin Conroy or Tim Daly. Although give credit where credit is due concerning James Woods, who did pretty damn good throughout as Owlman. If you're around 10 this will be the best thing you've ever seen, but if you were born in the 90s or older then it will pass off as mediocre.