Justice League of America (1997)

Such a frustrating disappointment

One of my all time favorites.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This was a pilot of a TV series that has not been approved. It uses to be panned as a ridiculous film with the worst costumes and visual effects ever. That is very unfair. To begin, it has a different format relatively to other comedic superhero movies, as it is a sitcom. And, although not brilliant and often silly, it works, with funny moments and some good ideas. The special effects are not very good, but you can find worse in many low budget motion pictures and in most TV series until the 90's. The idea of showing testimonials in between the story as if it were a documentary is also nice, a quite creative innovation. People use to prefer to see the same conventional formula than innovations; that is a shame. This was a pretty nice attempt, which unfortunately did not have the chance to be produced with a higher budget.

Hell, it ain't even your father's. Or your older brother's. Or even yours! The team chosen was a composite of second-string characters (minus the Flash) and missing the big 3; Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Of course, anyone who reads the comics will also notice that the League's origin is completely different.Of course, changes had to be made to adapt it to TV, the budget and make it accessible to new viewers. But, this wasn't anything special. Basically, the movie is your typical 90s superhero TV fare with a predictable plot, cheesy costumes and only halfway decent acting. Basically, it was a buddy movie with powers.

Yeah, the live-action JLA pilot doesn't serve much good past being a collector's item since it never made it on TV, just like that Fantastic Four movie that was made in the early 90s.This show was a terrible depiction of the greatest superhero team of all time. They made Barry Allen a dumb jock (when he's supposed to be a forensic scientist), they made Guy Gardner the leader who always gets the girls (even though the Gardner in the comics was a prick and he looked like Moe from the 3 Stooges), and so on. The only character that wasn't a total loss was Martian Manhunter, and HE HAD A BEER GUT! To top it all off, their first villain was the Weather Wizard. What does he do? He changes the weather.I suppose it could have been worse. Imagine if they used Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. At least they did us the favor of ruining second-rate characters instead of ruining the classics.

This never-aired pilot for a potential JLA TV show was almost universally derided. Mark Waid (a noted comics writer) called it a waste of an hour and a half. From all the stills from the movie which I had seen, I fully expected it to be horrible.Therefore I was pleasently surprised to find it to be a light, airy movie with plenty of nice character development. The characters only bear a passing resemblance to their comic book counterparts, but they are written with such warmth, that it didn't really matter. I found myself liking them, despite my preconceived notions about the movie.I found the characters to be well-rounded and believable (though very different from the comics), and I thoroughly enjoyed the way that they worked together.The plot could have been better, it wasn't all that exciting. Unknown villain manipulates the city's weather, the JLA have to discover who he is. The JLA did most of their work out of costume, making it more reminiscent of spy shows like "Mission Impossible" or "Charlie's Angels" than the JLA comic book.The budget for the movie was clearly non-existant. Some of the weather effects weren't too bad, but most of the other special effects were very lame. This isn't all that surprising for a pilot. What I think hurt the movie the most, and probably is what prevented it from ever being aired, were the Justice League's super-hero costumes. They were embarassingly bad. The man who played the Flash was young and in good shape, however, in the costume he looked fat and middle-aged. Atom's costume was a disaster of foam rubber that looked as if it were about to fall off at any moment. Fire and Ice had good costumes, and Green Lantern's was almost OK. They could probably have played it to better effect, if they'd had the actors perform wearing ordinary T-shirts with the logos silk-screened on them. The costumes from the movie looked comical, and I think prevented a lot of people from even trying to take the movie seriously.From the standpoint of a comics reader, its clear they weren't trying to capture the grandeur of the current Justice League as depicted in the comics and the excellent series on Cartoon Network. They were trying to depict a TV version of the Justice League from the early 90's as depicted by Keith Giffen and JM DeMathiess (and later by Gerard Jones and others). I think they managed to succeed in depicting a close-knit team of people, decidely less super than the heroes we currently see in the comics, but much more human. I liked it.