Review: Justice League: The New Frontier
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
Imagine that the Silver Age DC comics played out alongside real world events of the 1950s. In his 2004-5 six-issue limited series DC: The New Frontier, writer and artists Darwyn Cooke asked readers to do just that. The result was a critical and commercial success, enough so that when Warner Brothers launched the DC Animated Original Movies line of home video releases in 2007, The New Frontier was selected as its second film.
Released in early 2008 and with DC’s premiere superhero team the Justice League given prominence in the title, the film faced the challenge of condensing hundreds of pages and a plot covering roughly a decade into a 75 minute runtime. Could Justice League: The New Frontier retain enough of Cooke’s alternate history to make it a worthwhile watch?
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes. Something perhaps owed to Cooke himself being approached by Warner’s to be involved. Scripting the adaptation outright wasn’t on the cards owing to his work on The Spirit comic, with writer and DC animation veteran Stan Berkowitz taking on scripting duties, but Cooke did storyboard and design work, as well involved with script revisions. (These included, as he revealed in an interview with The Comic Journal, insisting on the inclusion of Wonder Woman and Lois Lane, both initially having their roles cut in the film.) The art duties, with Cooke essentially taking on roles he’d done with previous DC animated TV projects in the 1990s, would also serve to help transition his artwork from the printed page to the screen rather faithfully.
That faithfulness carries over into the script. Many of the set pieces from the comic, from Hal Jordan and Ace Morgan’s Korean War dogfight to the Flash facing Captain Cold in Las Vegas to an attempted Mars mission and, of course, the final battle against the Centre off Cape Canaveral, are all here. A number of character moments and beats join them, from Superman and Wonder Woman in Indochina and the Martian Manhunter’s efforts to assimilate as a police detective in Gotham, to Hal Jordan’s journey from wartime pilot to his eventual destiny. Nor does the adaptation shrink from the wider 1950s issues that Cooke’s comic touched upon which remain here from the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam (when it was still known as Indochina) to McCarthyism, racism, and the sexism of the period. Given the limited runtime and the collected comic running some 400 pages, it’s remarkable just how much of it is here not only in spirit but in substance.
Which is not to say there aren’t alterations. In the featurette Homage to the New Frontier included among the movie’s bonus features, Cooke made note of a number of items cut or reduced to cameos. Among the most notable that was apparent from a recent re-read of the comic series was the absence of Task Force X beyond Colonel Rick Flagg Sr appearing (something which also gets Hal out of mission control and onto the Mars mission itself). A similar occurrence happens with the Challengers of the Unknown, with Ace Morgan retaining the prominent supporting role he had in the comic but with his fellow Challengers reduced to largely non-speaking cameos.
Arguably, the movie’s changes are largely owed to streamlining the plot but also putting a stronger emphasis on the DC trinity of Superman, Batman (who now plays a role in the final battle occupied by other characters in the comic), and Wonder Woman. It is perhaps a testament to the work Berkowitz and Cooke put into the script that on a first viewing of the movie in 2010, nothing seemed amiss, and the aforementioned featurette eventually led to my receiving the two volume collected series as Christmas gifts a few months later.
The changes made for running time and emphasis offer something else. Namely that Justice League: The New Frontier, by following a largely similar pattern of history so to speak to the original DC: The New Frontier, is itself an alternate history. An alternative of an alternative, as it were, where other people fill in similar (but not always identical roles) to their counterparts in another timeline. Something demonstrated in the movie by the eventual fate of US government agent King Faraday that ends in the same place dramatically as the comic (and serves the same purpose) but whose manner comes from a section of the comic not adapted here. The same can be said for making the influence of the Centre felt sooner than in the comic or the Flash’s TV message playing out differently than in the comic. “History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme,” as a saying goes, and the same might well be said of the two versions of New Frontier on page and screen.
It might also help that it’s just a good watch, especially if you are partial to animation. Cooke’s artwork and designs translate well to the screen, capturing the retro feel of the comic wonderfully even in full-on action sequences such as the climactic battle. Given the PG-13 rating, it also meant that the movie could depict some of the consequences more than the comic or other earlier DC animation projects, including showing blood and more realistic (if still fantastical) depictions of violence.
The highlight, though, might be the voice cast worthy of the cliched moniker of “all-star.” They include Kyle MacLachlan as Superman, Lucy Lawless as Wonder Woman, David Boreanaz as Hal Jordan, Miguel Ferrer as the Martian Manhunter, and Neil Patrick Harris as the Flash. MacLachlan and Lawless wonderfully capture the Silver Age versions of their characters, the old guard helping to bring in the new generation. Boreanaz and Harris proved up to capturing the facets of their respective heroes, from their cockiness and humor to their sincerity in the face of danger. The supporting cast also included DC animation veteran Phil Morris as government agent Faraday, and rounded off by Brooke Shields as Carol Ferris and Kyra Sedgwick as Lois Lane, the latter acting (as Cooke himself termed it) as the glue that brings the emotional core of the story to the fore. If there’s a miscast role here, it’s Jeremy Sisto as Batman, with his performance perhaps better suited to a more contemporary version of the character than a Silver Age one.
Even though many of them have perhaps a couple of dozen lines at most, the cast does what the comic itself did: ground the fantastical in reality and emotional consequences without becoming brooding, dark, and grim, losing what was so appealing in the first place about these characters and their world.
Justice League: The New Frontier works far better than it has any right to, given both the strength of its source material and its limited runtime. Even while compacting Cooke’s sprawling narrative and tightening its focus, the heart and soul remains and might even be more tightly presented. As an adaptation, even, it might even be considered an alternate history of an alternate history in its own right. Not to mention a superb animated work in its own right that showcases the medium’s strengths. All of which makes it well worth a watch for fans of both alternate history and the superhero genre.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.
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