BATMAN: DEATH IN THE FAMILY (2020)

 

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

If I were judging this release purely for the titular Batman sequence, I'm not sure I could even rate it "poor." It's not really a narrative at all; just a recap mostly consisting of footage from the 2010 feature UNDER THE RED HOOD. It was somehow tied to an interactive game, and I don't review games. FAMILY itself is more like a commercial for a story than a story itself.

However, I imagine the true purpose of this collection was to monetize four short cartoons that DC Comics produced in collaboration with HBO Max. Though the stars of the four shorts are well-known in the comics community, they're non-entities to the casual buyer-- hence, bundling these four actual stories with a faux Batman offering. Something similar was done with the collection SUPERMAN/SHAZAM, which also included shorts featuring the Spectre, Jonah Hex, and Green Arrow. For what it's worth, FAMILY's offerings are on the whole much better than those on the SHAZAM collection, and the worst one is out of the way first. 

Surprisingly, "Sergeant Rock" was directed by BATMAN alumnus Bruce Timm and co-written by Walt and Louise Simonson. But not only is it one of the hoariest conceivable plotlines-- WWII commandos must bust into a Nazi installation to destroy a super-weapon-- it jerks around the mythos of DC's venerable soldier-hero for no good reason. A Nazi assault apparently wipes out all of the soldiers serving in Sergeant Rock's unit. Rock (Karl Urban) immediately wants to return to the field-- which no sane commander would allow. But in this case, Rock is supposedly the only one who can lead a squad consisting of three grunts changed into traditional Hollywood monsters by Allied science. The cartoon never uses DC's name for this "weird war" series-concept, The Creature Commnandos, but that's who the characters essentially are. The effect is that of mingling the peanut-butter realism of Sergeant Rock with the chocolate escapism of this goofball Monster Squadron. There's some okay action as the unit breaks into the Nazi fortress with ridiculous ease, but even that virtue is cancelled out by the dopiness of the second hoariest cliche, that all of Rock's missing buddies have been turned into zombies. 

The second short, "Adam Strange," is only better in terms of including a couple of exemplary action-sequences. Most of the action takes place on some planet's asteroid mining-colony, and the colonists there are bracing for an attack by alien spider-creatures. The colonists barely pay attention to the local town drunk, but flashbacks soon establish that the drunk is actually the former hero Adam Strange (Charlie Weber), whose adopted planet Rann was invaded by the Hawk-soldiers of Thanagar. (This is a reference to a comic-book sequence to a martial conflict between the two worlds, though it's no more than a toss-off reference here.) For some reason the Zeta-Beam that normally transports Strange from Rann to Earth screws up and deposits him on the asteroid, where he gets drunk over the loss of his wife and child. Eventually he proves his mettle as a hero again, and the Zeta Beam arrives to take him back to Rann, for what one assumes is yet more heroic destiny.

Even viewers who know nothing of the nature or genesis of DC's "Phantom Stranger" may be get some amusement from this short. Short recap: though the titular character originated in the 1950s, he gained his greatest fame when revived by DC in 1969. A handful of these revival-adventures gave the mysterioso hero a small following of hippie-like supporting-characters, and it would seem that scripter Ernie Altbacker decided to get the most of the phantasmal protagonist's "Age of Aquarius" associations. Indeed, it seems to be the Late Sixties when twenty-something Marcie is lured to a mysterious mansion by a group of rebellious young acquaintances. The dark-clad Stranger (Peter Serafinowicz) appears to utter dire but very vague warnings to Marcie (though not to the other young people) against the mansion's owner. Marcie blows off the mystery-man's counsel and finds herself charmed by her host, the urbane Seth (former Lex Luthor Michael Rosenbaum). However, the Stranger's admonitions are borne out: Seth is some sort of demon-creature who's already drained his minions of their lives (which I guess is why the Stranger doesn't try to save them). Director Bruce Timm does a fine job with all the hallucinogenic Day-Glo imagery and with the concluding battle between Seth and the Stranger. The script's only big flaw is that Marcie's character changes to suit whatever the writer wants to have happen.

The finale episode is "Death," starring the incarnation of a not-so-grim Reaper who looks like a young Goth girl (voiced by Jamie Chung), which incarnation was first introduced in Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN cosmos. In this short, a young would-be artist name of Vincent (how *appropriate*) meets the capricious young woman and never realizes until the end that he has an "appointment in Samarra" with her. Writer Marc De Matteis succeeds in capturing the voice of the comic-book Death, but the story as a whole will probably be predictable even to those not familiar with the comics. There's an irrelevant subplot about Vincent's "inner demons" that isn't given a satisfactory resolution. Nevertheless, the relative ambitiousness of this episode and that of the Stranger outweigh the banality of the other two, and result in the higher mythicity rating.