JUSTICE LEAGUE: GODS AND MONSTERS (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

If one must yield to the temptation to go where "Mirror Mirror" has gone before, one could at least put a little thought into how the characters in the alternate world, who are "good" in the normal universe, take on negative traits. Certainly almost any amount of thought would be superior to the clumsy building-block approach of the unjustly celebrated FLASHPOINT PARADOX.

Unlike that opus, GODS AND MONSTERS-- a title borrowed from a line in the 1935 BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN-- seems to have no comic-book prototype, having originated from a story by Alan Burnett and Bruce Timm. The writers refreshingly diverge from the usual alternate-universe trope in that all the action remains in the alternate dimension, with no crossovers to the "normal" cosmos. Further, the script concentrates only on the changes fate wreaks upon "the trinity" of DC's most famous characters-- though two of the three are barely related to their originals-- and they're not precisely evil here, but simply ruthless in their quests for justice, as if the characters were being seen through a "Punisher"-lens.

The Bad Superman keeps at least the general outline of his template's origin. He's still rocketed to Earth when the great planet Krypton starts to explode, though he begins the journey as the unfertilized egg of his mother Lara. Jor-El is just about to apply male input to the egg via their advanced tech (rather than the old-fashioned way), when evil General Zod intrudes. In this iteration Zod has actually caused Krypton's destruction with his martial ambitions, but such is his arrogance that he inserts his own genetic material into the birth-matrix. The rocket delivers its cargo to Earth, but this time baby Kal-El is taken in by a kindly Mexican couple, so that he takes the adoptive name Hernan Guerra, and dons a very different costume when he becomes Superman. (He also sports a sinister goatee, possibly a shout-out to the aforementioned STAR TREK episode.) He has various run-ins with Lex Luthor as well as a fractious relationship with such legal authorities as Steve Trevor and Amanda Waller.

In contrast, Bad Wonder Woman has nearly nothing to do with her template. She comes not from an island of Amazons but from the culture of New Genesis, one of two outer-space "god-cultures" introduced in Jack Kirby's epic NEW GODS concept. Rather than Diana, her name is Bekka, a cognomen borrowed from a minor character in the Kirby opus. The script devotes a fair amount of time to the origin of Bekka, but none of that material bears that strongly on the main plot. Her closest tie to the normal Wonder Woman is that she apparently had a relationship with Trevor, though they're no longer a couple in "real-time." The script also refrains from resorting to the old chestnut of a Wonder Woman-Superman romance.

Bad Batman is still rich, but this time he's Kirk Langstrom (aka "Man-Bat" in the comics), not Bruce Wayne, and I'm not even sure if his parents got killed by despicable criminals. Unlike Langstrom this hero doesn't transform into a hybrid-creature, but at some point before the main story, he's been transformed into a vampire. His powers aren't well defined, though he does snack on a few corpuscles, and he does wear a Bat-costume with built-in gimmicks. Prior to his vampirism Kirk was close friends with robotic expert Will Magnus and with a young woman both men loved, Tina. (In DC comics Magnus is renowned for creating a sextet of heroic robots, the Metal Men, one of whom is named Tina.) Both of Kirk's friends play a central role when Batman investigates a plot designed to make the hardnosed Justice League look like full-fledged criminals in the eyes of the law.

The script sets up Luthor to look like the instigator of said plot, in which one-eyed robots carry out a campaign of systematic assassination against many of the world's greatest scientists, killing off such DC luminaries as Ray Palmer and Victor Fries. Naturally, Luthor isn't responsible, and since the script doesn't have time for red herrings, it's pretty obvious that the true villain is that little old Frankensteinian mad scientist and robot-maker Will Magnus. 

This version of Magnus resembles the comics-template only in that the alternate-world version has only created one "Metal Man," name of Tin, though at the climax we learn that Will's wife Tina isn't all she seems to be. Magnus doesn't have a really strong reason for creating a horde of killer robots and framing the Justice League for those murders, but he's largely just the script's means for putting the three almost-antiheroes through the mill, so that to some extent they clean up their act and start functioning for the good of mankind. Overall, while none of the "bad" heroes offered any stunning new psychological or sociological insights, each of them did get a decent melodramatic arc, with a particularly interesting turn for Wonder-Bekka in the romance department. Additionally, though Lois Lane makes a few appearances in the story, she's initially no more a friend to Bad Superman than Luthor is, though the denouement leaves the door open for a change in feelings. Only poor Kirk gets all his romantic bridges burned in the finale, with not even the suggestion of a Good Catwoman to offer some romantic respite.