June 21st, Movies 22

As I was searching through movies for 2021 that I may have missed, I came across the DC Universe film Justice Society: World War II. I always enjoyed a good JSA story so I thought this would be a good film to include in the June Swoon.

The story kicks off with Barry Allen (Matt Bomer), aka The Flash. He was on a picnic with his girlfriend Iris (Ashleigh LaThrop) when he hears an explosion. He takes off to discover Superman (Darren Criss) fighting with Brainiac (Darin DePaul). During the battle, Flash runs really fast to catch a Kryptonite bullet, but he runs so fast, he transports himself accidentally to a different location.

At first, he thought he time traveled, but eventually, Barry realized that he crossed to a different world. In this world, he finds a group of heroes calling themselves the Justice Society was fighting against Hitler’s forces during World War II. The group was led by Wonder Woman (Stana Katic) and included Hawkman (Omid Abtahi), Hourman (Matthew Mercer), Black Canary (Elysia Rotaru), and Jay Garrick, the Flash (Armen Taylor).

Barry teams up with the JSA and their battle takes them to face off with King of Atlantis, Aquaman (Liam McIntyre).

As always, the DC Animation is very well done and this is no exception. The animation was better than normal, I thought and the characters are used in a wonderful manner. I loved seeing some of the JSA characters (although, I would have been up for a few more extra ones).

I liked the story. It was simple and straightforward. The voice acting was fine.

I do think that some of the story beats were rushed and that this could have been stretched out to a two-parter. I know they have done that before. The use of Dr. Fate was too much of a tease and I wanted way more with him. They had several “Batman Leaps”- which is a term we dubbed to describe a time where someone makes an unlikely, impossible, somewhat illogical inference of a clue (like they would do on the old 1966 Batman series). When Barry Allen met Superman in the “past” and realized that there were some differences, he immediately jumped to “different earth”.

Still, these complaints are nitpicks. I enjoyed the film well. I still think this could have been outstanding of they had done a few extra steps, but it was still a lot of fun.