Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One -Three

Details: By Christopher Symonds; 23 August 2024

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One

Back in the eighties, DC Comics were facing a bit of a sales slump. In a move to reinvigorate their roster of well-trodden characters and titles, they engaged the services of writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez to create a paradigm shifting story that reset a lot of convoluted/contradictory stories from the decades before. Their conception? Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was a rousing success, boosting sales and resetting the status quo for many, if not all, the characters that thrived within the pages of DC Comics.

"This is a really polished culmination of some 20 plus animated movies of the last two decades."

Cut to the 2020s and Warner Bros were facing the same sort of sales slump. The live action DCEU lay in ruins, and yet another new management team had swung their scythe to reboot the IP. They intended to cancel all the former management’s plans and start fresh, providing a cohesive, consistent and incorporated output for the future of these characters. Whether live-action, TV or animated, anything released from 2025 will be connected/canon to the new DCU. A side casualty of this was Warner’s DC Animated Universe; a smaller direct to home media arm that had consistently delivered smaller scale animated films that covered a lot of adaptations of well-known comic series.

Now, I had found the bulk of these films very hit and miss, with more misses that hits, and lost interest in seeing all of them years ago to be frank. Last year, on a whim I decided to watch Batman: The Long Halloween on streaming and was dutifully impressed. It was sophisticated, given space to tell the adaptation well and satisfied completely. Turns out this was part of their ‘second phase’, a final run of 10 films before they hand over to the new guard. Their ultimate goal: to end with a trilogy that adapted the Wolfman/Perez classic. No small feat as this story is massive, told over multitudes of titles and issues and reliant on knowledge of the DC Comics’ history. Now I’ve read Detective and Batman comics monthly for more than 30 years, and casually read other titles such as Action, Superman, the Flash and others. I am myopically familiar with many of their main titles’ benchmark stories (Crisis being one of them) and so have a working knowledge of DC as a whole… and even I find this review challenging. I’ll do what I can, so here goes.

PART 1

The first of three parts centres on the Flash. His ability to enter the ‘speed force’ allows him a unique time-travelling skill and that always runs smoothly, doesn’t it? While indulging this newfound capability, the Flash breaks through to another dimension, a variant to his own world, and without getting bogged down in the many, many, many, many details of that world, he sees its destruction, by way of a wave in space that swallows all matter within its path. Turns out the Flash has inadvertently taken part in the purging of infinite universes, a multiverse, and its not stopping at one. With all questions and no answers, the Flash must start deciphering advice/clues from various worlds’ heroes/inhabitants and times to understand what is happening. There is an all-seeing, all-knowing being, the Switzerland of the DC Universe, called the Monitor that sends a minion named Harbinger to assemble the best and brightest to try and undo this, as he had wanted to remain impartial—simply a watcher—until it became clear this destruction of worlds would cascade. With selective minds, they conceive of towers that can repel the destructive waves on all multiverse worlds somehow and send forth our multiverse of heroes to construct them… but the destructive wave keeps beating them to the punch. The Flash goes back into the speed force to slow down time and give the other heroes breathing room to win, but at great cost for all, personally and existentially. Of course, not before, disguised as an old man, imparting a kernel of info to a Batman variant for a future chapter. It is far from the victory our heroes with the Monitor think it. Harbinger is in fact Supergirl, imbued by the Monitor with new powers, and she quickly realises nothing is safe when her nearest and dearest cease to exist.

PART 2

This one focuses on Supergirl, and an antagonist named Psycho Pirate and the Bat Family. The Flash has bought our chosen heroes enough time to construct some protective towers, which they guard in varying universes. The Monitor is using this Psycho Pirate character to instil calm psychically into the masses of all worlds, so there isn’t a mass panic… It is a lot and he’s struggling. The destructive wave is in fact waves, a tool of the big bad guy of the piece called the Anti-Monitor, and he has a whole new bag of tricks to take out the varying earth’s protectors—invading monsters called shadow demons. He also abducts Psycho Pirate then turns him by entering into a devil’s pact, promising him peace, away from the trillions of voices he cannot abide. Shit goes pear-shaped and many worlds are destroyed, Supergirl murders the Monitor under the spell of Psycho Pirate, the Bat-Family and not their Batman struggle to find common ground, and a Green Lantern of another earth sacrifices his ring of power to save them from the army of shadow demons. Of course this does not work. The remnants of the shadow demons morph into one colossal, world destroying monster. Heroes unite and begin a face off for the ages.

PART 3

When the Monitor perished, he gifted our heroes the power to transport some of their earths to his safe zone, temporarily protecting them from the Anti-Monitor’s colossus. Batman, during a Scarecrow induced fear-delusion, makes sense of the old man Flash’s portent that he needs to get back to the start to end the Anti-Monitor. He, and a whole bunch of characters find the only man that can get them there: an amnesiac named John Constantine. Meanwhile, Supergirl is racked with guilt over the death of the Monitor. When her group of heroes, including a Green Lantern corps, learn from a Lex Luthor that the Anti-Monitor has infiltrated their safe zone and is coming for them, she decides it is her responsibility to sacrifice herself in a suicide mission to end the colossus. Batman, Wonder Woman and a yellow helmeted sorcerer named Dr. Fate restore Constantine’s memory and return to the safe zone with him. He’s able to clear some shit up: the Anti-Monitor is the universes cosmic response to the assassination of an evil man by the name of Darkseid. Turns out when he sent his world’s version of the Flash to take Darkseid out as a child, it created an ever-expanding multiverse of worlds, choking the universe. The Anti-Monitor is the universe’s penicillin. While the Anti-Monitor’s solution is the eradication of everything, Constantine’s alternative entails fusing all realities to create a monoverse, a singular existence the universe can handle. It would mean, in essence, the elimination of many of the heroes’ realities. Of course, they unite (mostly) and save the day, with Wonder Woman sacrificing herself to power the machine that creates the monoverse.

PHEW… that is a really stripped-down synopsis of a big-assed story.

Let’s get to the good, because there is plenty of it with the over 4 hours of content. The animation is a clever mix of bold lines, simple yet attractive (if not faithful to Perez’s brilliant artwork) character designs, and spectacular colouring. All the voice actors turn in solid, at times, moving performances, deftly handling character moments, action scenes and a crap tonne of what plagues some Star Trek shows: extraneous technical exposition (or techno-babble). I doff my cap to anyone trying to write this story, predicated on decades of DC pre-history, and there are plenty of solid attempts at character development and some success in instilling jeopardy, but its not a home run. This is a really polished culmination of some 20 plus animated movies of the last two decades. There’s decent music, spectacle and emotion wrought from this complicated production.

But to be objective, unless you are a DC stalwart, this is a rather deep well of characters to try and recognise, connect with, and follow. Not only are you dealing with multiple versions of the mainstays, but tonnes of secondary characters (that most would never have heard of) and a litany of story threads and exposition that require some serious memory investment. It was hard for me to even write breakdowns for these 3 films, such is the density and complexity of this project. Too complicated for a general audience. If you were invested in the entire run of these films (which I have not), perhaps your investment was rewarded? As it stands, as impressed as I was with the attempt, I found this trilogy a heady mess, at times difficult to follow, and not a series of films I can see myself revisiting. If this was a love letter to the devoted, I assume they’ve put their absolute best into achieving it. But I wouldn’t recommend this to a casual viewer.

3/5 stars

4k details divider

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Edition

Home Video Distributor: Warner Bros.
Available on 4K UHD/Blu-ray - July 23, 2024
Screen Formats: 1.78:1
Subtitles: English SDH; French; Spanish
Audio: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1; French: Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
Discs: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc; Single disc
Region Encoding: 4K region-free

VIDEO

So, the US got gifted with 4K versions of this trilogy (In Australia we only got blu-rays). And I was lucky enough to see it in its highest quality presentation. This 2160p native scan rocks the colours off your screen. The HDR10+ pops effects and highlights. This is a pristine looking scan, bold and attractive to the eyes. Darks are inky, highlights are spectacular. Whether the story is your jam or no, I assure you it looks flawless.

AUDIO

A solid DTS-HD 5.1 mix compliments a stellar picture with plenty of LFE propelling the action, clean and centred dialogue and effective directionality. It could have used a bit more play in the rears but is solid enough. The sub gets plenty of love and the soundtrack soars in moments of crisis ;) Solid stuff!

Supplements:

Special Features:

All three of these flicks came to me in classy looking steelbook packages. The artwork is attractive but does not evoke either Perez’s designs or the designs used in the character animation. Still, they look great! On the discs we get brief but informative features on each film that delve into the productions, laying down some nice tidbits, such as it being the last performance of Batman: The Animated Series’ actor Kevin Conroy, who has sadly passed. Welcome inclusions indeed.

Part One: