Rating:  -
As a life long Justice League fan of 35 years, it was wonderful to see my life long heroes come to life on tv! Great to see Hal Jordan "the real" Green Lantern take center stage. Look forward to many, many more JLA adventures!!
Rating:  -
I don't recommend this as a purchase. I was dissapointed with this being the first High Def Justice League release. I much prefer the Cartoon network versions. The story itself was mediocre as was the villan.
However, I will say the HD video is excellent.
Rating: -
This review is about the movie alone, because frankly, I'm not a big special features fan. I'll try to avoid spoilers in this review, but there's only so much I can do in that respect.
First off, although it was nice to see the justice league again in both their silver and golden age outfits, I'm afraid I didn't really get a feel for the optimism of golden-age comics in this movie. In the trailer, Darwyn Cooke says that he loved to revisit those older times, because everything seemed positive, but he shows little to no sign of actually appreciating that positive outlook in both the original comic books or the movie that was based on them. In fact, his short speech at the end of the comic trades for the New Frontier is a decidedly pessimistic one, painting him, as a comic writer, as being a bit like Alan Moore. In other words, he takes positive figures and looks at them negatively. That's not, in my opinion, such an impressive thing to do, and it's not like it hasn't been done a million times before.
The overtones (and undertones) of this movie are about the negative viewpoint almost exclusively; corruption in politics, illegal government action against its own citizens and eventually, an enemy so monstrous that it forces people to band together and fight it in spite of their differing beliefs, although it's not implied in either the film or the comic that anything about mankind and its problems really changes after all is said and done.
Unlike some people, I have no difficulty with intense violence, with cursing or with addressing the tough issues. I think all three of those things can make the storytelling vehicle that much more accessible to today's audience. However, it's much harder, and shows a much greater artistic talent, to address tough issues with the hope that the situation will improve one day. In the comic, this was a slightly bigger theme than in the film, although not by much. This is the main reason why I, for one, will not compare the New Frontier comic book to Alex Ross' masterpiece Kingdom Come; which at least ended with peace and optimism at the helm, despite the tragedies and wars involved in previous chapters of the story.
This is my first and most major issue with the movie; its overall pessimism. When I heard "silver age," I was expecting something a little more upbeat.
Another gripe of mine is that the background music in this movie is in every way inferior to the music used in the trailer, and is repeated over and over throughout the film, as if to constantly remind you of just how homemade it sounds. My brother can play something similar to the movie's background music on his Casio, and I don't need to pay him a cent.
Still, for all of these gripes of mine, the story is at least complex enough and includes enough major characters from that time period to hold my attention, and it does confront big issues and show another version of the Justice League's formation, and the beginning and ending of the movie (my favorite parts) are done in an art nouveau-type style, the latter of which uses a section of Kennedy's acceptance speech, which was perhaps the only truly positive moment in the movie, but was utterly disconnected from the rest of the movie, and so it left little impact in my mind.
That brings me to my last gripe about the movie. It was simply too short. I see no reason why animated movies; even animated movies made directly for DVD can't exceed two hours in length. For some reason, there's never been an animated movie that exceeded two hours in length, while at this day in age, it's very common for live movies (such as Transformers or King Kong) to push past the two hour mark. Two hours is a good amount of time for a movie, and it's a shame that the animation art form in general has been cheated that way.
Seventy minutes isn't enough time to tell a big story about everybody in the DC Universe, and while they might not have been able to include too many more plot points with the extra time, they could at least have put some more dramatic scenes in and made it really feel epic, instead of feeling rushed, as it wound up feeling.
So why did I not rate this review lower? Well, it's still DC, and at a few points in the story, the characters actually deliver some nice monologues about what you can justify and when, and what kind of responsibilities people have as human beings and as americans. Those are things people don't think about anymore because they find it depressing that they don't measure up, so they try to forget that they have larger responsibilities instead of struggling to attain higher standards of moral conduct with the hope in their hearts that things will get better if they continue to struggle. This isn't really said in the movie, but at least it's hinted at. It reminds us that we've lost something dear and sacred and we show no signs of getting it back, and anything that can do that is worth that fourth star, no matter what other problems I had with it.
Rating:  -
The political correctness on this is really annoying. Just since the 1990's 2 million people have died from starvation in N. Korea. If Hal Jordan had his way, another 2 million may have died had N. Korea won the war. And that does not include the millions since the 50's and the political prisoners.
This bit of political ignorance really annoyed me. This Hal Jordan was a coward.
I did like the 50's style animation though. I agree with other reviewers about the storyline. It was convoluted from a lot of perspectives.
Rating:  -
I was very Disappointed it the movie. It took you in too many directions and there was really very little story line. The bad guy you know nothing about. He (It) just appears and that all you know and then the movie is just about over. Save your money and buy something else.
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