Get the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II from Amazon.com

Now having seen the first Superman movie, it’s time to move on to the second installment. Superman II. Not the theatrical cut, but the cut intended by the film’s original director – Richard Donner (who directed the first film). Is it as good as the original, or does the series second installment, as originally intended, lose a few points. There is a spoiler below the cut.

The Premise: Before Jor-El sent his son to Earth to save him from his home planet’s destruction, he sentenced 3 criminals, Ursa, Non, and General Zod to eternal imprisonment within the Phantom Zone. There they remained – until they were freed when one of the nuclear missles that Superman chucked into space detonated and released them. Thus, they are free to conquer Earth, with only Superman to stand in their way.

The Good: Terence Stamp is fantastic as Zod. He was great in the last movie, he was great in this movie. I now understand why “Kneel before Zod” has become a meme – justifiably so. Similarly, Brando (in his limited scenes) is still great, and Christopher Reeve is actually better than he was in the last movie. In the first film there was a broader split between mild-mannered and clumsy Clark Kent and Superman (and his stilted dialog). Here, particularly in the middle third of the film, Reeve strikes an excellent balance.

The Bad: Lex Luthor, who was the shining star of the last movie, doesn’t work nearly as well in this film – likely because of the writing. The competance is halved between the movies, which is unfortunate. I could also do without the running gags about having to go to the bathroom. I know you never see people having to go to the bathroom in science fiction movies and fantasy movies and superhero movies – that’s because it’s assumed that the audience is smart enough to figure out that people do it off camera, as opposed to having to establish it in dialog.

The Ugly: For the love of Christ, did you have to bust out the Time Travel Deus Ex Machina?! Really! The Kiss of Forgetting from the Lester version (which, I admit I’ve heard about second hand) isn’t much better, but there’s got to be a better way then breaking out time travel again! If they keep the time travel up, the people of Earth are gonna get temporal whiplash!

The Verdict: This really isn’t much better than the first movie, and I can’t reccomend anything more than a rental – and only for Terence Stamp’s scenes. If it wasn’t for Terence Stamp, I’d reccomend skipping this movie entirely.

Renee Montoya IS The Question

So, recently, I’ve been catching up on my podcasts, particuarly iFanboy, and particularly their episode on Final Crisis. I read comic books, and I like Superhero comics, but often times it’s the lower tier characters who capture my attention. The Green Arrows, the Deadpools, the Booster Golds of the world. For a moderate part, because it’s a little tricky to get into the big heroes and also around the time I was getting back into comics I wasn’t too into the direction the Bat-titles were going at the moment, I never quite got into Superman, and Wonder Woman never really was my thing. I like the Marvel stuff too, but also around the time I started getting back into comics (and getting a pull box started and so forth), Civil War had begun, and I wanted to see how it turned out before I anted back in – consequently, after the Iron Fascist won, I decided not to delve too deeply into the Marvel U (sticking with just Deadpool), and I went more deeply into the DC universe. However, I went with the smaller characters – Green Arrow, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold. I had JLA on my pull list, but it didn’t come out regularly enough that I could follow an arc – it seemed to be coming out quarterly, so I dropped it.

Now, with Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis, and all of that, there is one development during that arc whole Infinite Crisis-52-Countdown-Final Crisis that I really liked, and I hope stays a running thing. That is the development of Renee Montoya.

Back when I was a kid, I watched Batman the Animated Series, and I followed Batman partially through the trade paperbacks – which were starting to become a big thing then with all the mega-events and storylines going on that helped to make them viable. In Batman: The Animated Series, they introduced 2 supporting characters who carried over to the mainstream DCU who I really liked: Harlequin (Harley), and Renee Montoya of the GCPD, who often ended up partnered with fat, presumably out-of-shape, presumably slovenly, ultimately having a heart of gold Detective Harvey Bullock. They were great supporting characters, and also worked very well with Commissioner Gordon. In many ways, they were the Spock and McCoy of the DCU, not in terms of one expressing the emotional opinion and one voicing the logical opinion, but that Bullock recognized and expressed the view that Batman is a vigilante, is operating outside the law, and in many ways his very presence is antagonizing some of Gotham’s freaks (The Joker would probably have either gone out in a blaze of glory or moved on if he didn’t have Batman to entertain him), whereas Montoya recognized the good that Batman was doing for Gotham City. Ultimately, Gordon was the middle ground – Gordon supports Batman covertly, and recognizes the help he does, but he also realizes that his friend is an outlaw, and if he ever crosses a line, Gordon will have to take him down.

So, Bullock and Montoya became my favorite members of the Batman supporting cast, even more than Alfred or Robin. Time passes, Bullock and Montoya are broken up and Montoya is partnered with Crispus Allen from Gotham Central, another character who I’d come to like, and ultimately Allen is killed off, which I wasn’t too fond of – but one thing that did happen that I found interesting, was that Montoya was outed as a lesbian. It was not awesome for the character how it happened – the awesomeness is yet to come.

I was intersted by this development because it’s a massive shift for a character who came out of a kids television show (though one written with adult sensabilities) – the character, when she was outed, was just like any other member of the Gotham PD supporting cast, in that they were normal people – which put the character of Montoya in an interesting position – in a day and age where the debate over equal rights for gays and lesbians has hit the level of visibility that the Civil Rights Movement had with Martin Luther King Jr. back in the 1960 and onwards through the 1970s, rather than DC introducing a character who is gay or lesbian (they had a gay character on Green Lantern when Kyle Raynar was the star, and would later introduce a lesbian Batwoman), outing an existing character was a different move. There was backlash, but I suspect the backlash was representative of people’s intolerances rather than their tolerances – there were people I observed who hated the reveal who also tended to use homophobic language – not necessarily as a direct slur against a person considered to be homosexual, but using homophobic language in the way other people would use “dumb”, “stupid”, or “lame”. People who had no problems with it or even liked the development, I observed, tended to be more friendly to GLBT people. The people who were hesitant about it, and were concerned about where they would go from here were similarly hesitant about how GLBT people are depicted in the media.

Now, I have to take a moment to step aside and say I have not finished reading 52 yet. I have not read all of Final Crisis yet, I will be reading it when the TPBs come out so I can binge to my heart’s content.

Moving on, when 52 came out, we finally got the answer to where Montoya would go from there – she would become The Question II. Renee Montoya, former GCPD Detective, now was operating at the same level as The Bat. Now, I never did find out if she got an Honorary JLA or JSA membership (which would have been awesome) or if she ever found out Batman’s identity. Anyway, she did end up working alongside Nightwing and a few other characters, and from there to Final Crisis the character’s main focus appears to have been investigating Intergang. In Final Crisis, The Question ends up taking one more step up as she ends up joining forces with a bunch of other heroes to quickly hop from universe to universe to bring togeather a band of heroes from all these other universes to help in the final battle against Darkseid, kicking the character into basically operating on the same level that The Flash, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the late Martian Manhunter end up fighting in these crises – on the front lines.

Final Crisis has only recently ended, so we’ll see eventually how these things turn out for Renee Montoya, and where her long term place is in the DC Universe – but in about 3-4 years, she’s gone from street-level supporting cast to helping on the front lines of a freaking Crisis – how awesome is that?

This isn’t going to be my standard review, in part because I’m planning on re-thinking how I do movie reviews on the site. This, instead is going to be my general overall review of the film. I’ll be working off the Blu-Ray version of the movie here for all of my criticisms, and there may be spoilers here, so be warned.

Justice League: The New Frontier, as far as comic book movies go, is not written for the general public. Now this works because it’s direct to video, but it’s really not meant for the general public. The general public knows who who most of the traditional Justice League members are (if only from the Superfriends cartoon and the Justice League cartoon) but that’s pretty much it. While films like The Dark Knight and Batman Begins have helped to put a darker image of superheroes into the public consciousness, most people see supers in the light-and-fluffy perspective of the way most people know the Silver Age of comics – the Batman TV series featuring Adam West and Burt Ward – where villains had dastardly plots which, while they may have had high stakes, when all is said and done, nobody got hurt too much (or particularly dead) at the end of the adventure. And particularly for adaptations of DC materials – there was no social commentary to speak of – that’s what Marvel is for.

New Frontier turns that on its ear. It’s grim, dark, glum, and has a lot of commentary on the 1950s, and surprisingly violent. The film is set in the transitional period between the end of the golden age of comics of the 1940s and early ’50s, the era of the Justice Society of America, and the late ’50s, early ’60s, before the formation of the Justice League we all know and love. Spanning several years, the film takes us through McCarthyism, and how this effects super heroes, while at the same time setting up a cosmic menace that threatens all of earth and will force the heroes of the Earth to unite the way they haven’t since World War II.

The film has to truncate the original New Frontier series to fit it in about 80-90 minutes of film, but what it does works well and is moderately accessible. However, people expecting a lot of superheroics are going to be extremely disappointed. We get a sum total of 1 named supervillain, out of (suprisingly) The Flash’s Rogues Gallery, in the entire piece. The rest of it is a lot of excellently done character-driven moments. Martian Manhunter, in the disguise of John Jones trying to blend into human society. Wonder Woman and Superman trying to reconcile their responsiblities as heroes and their Loyalties as Americans with the near rejection that the public has of heroes thanks to Sen. McCarthy (who, himself does not appear – though his presence is felt through the whole film from the JSA choosing to retire rather then unmask before the Commitee in the opening credits).

Plus, the film has a suprising amount of blood and death for a superhero anything. I can’t get too in-depth without major spoilers, but the amount of blood here suprised me. It’s not Akira level (it’s only slightly more than Cowboy Bebop), but it’s noticable. All in all, this film’s tone is bleak, which builds up to the final showdown with the ultimate enemy of the piece, the entity The Centre – which really is a lot grimmer then I expected – yes, there are some characters who we know are going to make it, but with the theme of the transition from Golden Age to Silver Age, some of the older heroes who do appear I really wasn’t sure about.

The acting is good, with good performances by, basically, everybody. The primary beef I have with the film is that it’s too short – though with animated films, the longer it is the more it costs, so I kind of have to forgive that. Anyway, it’s good, and worth picking up – by which I mean buying. It’s better than just a rental.

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010AEPHS?ie=UTF8&tag=themillenn0b3-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0010AEPHS”>Amazon.com Link for Justice League: The New Frontier</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=themillenn0b3-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0010AEPHS” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”" style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />