Injustice

Normally after watching an abysmal failure like Injustice the question of “why” comes up. Why does this exist? The economic logic that satisfies this question fails to completely explain the shortcomings of this film but begins shine a light on them. To put the question of quality aside for a second, it makes all the sense in the world to make an Injustice animated film if you are Warner Bros.. For Warner Bros. this allows them to exploit a popular sub brand within their DC portfolio by expanding it from video games and comics into animation. Using Warner Bros. Animation’s DTV animated features is a, relatively, economically safe category and one that is growing in importance. With the launch of HBOMax the need for content is ever present and Warner Bros. Animation will increase their output of DC related features from 3 to 5 in 2022. This increase in output means more properties beyond Batman, the Justice League, and Teen Titans will be getting a look as everything eventually feeds back into HBOMax. So Injustice becomes a prime candidate as an eventual solider in the streaming wars.

The technical and artistic shortcomings of Injustice are not all that unique to it and are a byproduct of the economic stability that makes these DTV features function. These films are made with tight budgets and strict time restraints of roughly 90 minutes give or take a few. Morphing stories to work within that time budget is the trickiest part of the process and the reason why a majority of them fail to make a meaningful impact. Time is a luxury the Injustice IP has enjoyed as both a video game and comic book series, primarily written by Tom Taylor. A video just containing the cut scenes to the original Injustice: Gods Among Us story mode runs a little over two hours, when factoring in gameplay that runtime increases to three plus. A similar video of its sequel runs between 2:45-2:54 minutes depending on the edit, without factoring in gameplay. The comic book series for the first game ran for the equivalent of 60 print issues over three years. The second series ran for 36 over nearly two years. Both runs feature issue counts that most superhero comics barely scratch in the last decade. It isn’t just that the creative teams in these mediums had the space to follow any flight of fancy, they had the space to for sound pacing and other basic technical elements of form that gave their products coherence and built over time. With a runtime of 78 minutes (which pushes it on the shorter end of these features) Injustice has no time to build it hits the ground running and stays dramatically flat despite excessive levels of violence, nominal increases in “danger,” and plot elements like a prison break.

To the writing team of Ernie Altbacker and Ian Rodgers credit they made the decision for Injustice the film to be more inspired by the larger brand than a straight adaptation of the Tom Taylor comics. The basic setup of the Joker tricking Superman into murdering his pregnant wife Lois, their unborn son, and nuking Metropolis remains the same but how they end things is different. The writing teams additions and rearrangements fail to enhance the core character drama at play and surprisingly turn the film into poor rendition of the two part Justice League: Unlimited “Tabula Rasa” story. Recounting the plot of the film is futile as that is all that exists and it is already known. There are homages like the variety of costume changes Harley Quinn manages to go through and her “banter” with Green Arrow, the ghostly apparition of Dick Grayson aka Ghost Dick, or a chess game that talks about superhero gun control, but neither of these nods or their original content cohere into engaging story. The producers could not take the simple story at the heart of the property, Superman’s fall into authoritarianism, and make it work. There is no slow decline, Lois is dead and five minutes later he’s overthrowing governments and saying “try me” to world leaders. The failure to develop this aspect of the film or even Batman’s resistance flattens every character into cartoon renditions of themselves. The inclusion of a variant of Damian’s arc falls flat and feels out of place despite having the films best voice actor, Faran Tahir as Ra’s Al Ghul. On a narrative level the aspect that makes Injustice, be it game or comic, stand out among the dozens of other dark authoritarian future stories was its ability to work through the characters, in a mostly nuanced way. Injustice has no time for that.

Nuance is replaced with poorly done excessive violence. The iconic image of Superman punching a hole through the Joker’s chest is faithfully recreated here and the best moment of violence, because it actually packs an emotional weight. Otherwise, the film devolves into a banal splatter effects that lack depth. I’d thought the Mortal Kombat Legends aesthetic might allow for better depictions of cartoonishly gruesome violence. That is not the case as the film leans more into a literal and one dimensional understanding of Jean-Luc Godard’s statement “It’s not blood, it’s red.”

Injustice is a postmodern mélange of signifiers rearranged in an attempt to say something new. This process of reproduction only works to expose that the IP itself is already that mélange (as an Elseworld story) turning the film into a copy of a copy with plenty of fuzz and degradation. Injustice feels like its what people think a Zack Snyder movie is. That is shallow (narratively, thematically, artistically), iconographically driven with an assumption of inherent meaning in these symbols, as it violently moves from scene to scene.

I didn’t think it possible that there would be an animated feature that would get me to think that Superman/Batman: Public Enemies or The Killing Joke were superior products, and yet here we are. Public Enemies is a mile a minute plot and lacks character depth but even that managed to make me care. The Killing Joke is misogynistic garbage but at least has dramatic coherence. Injustice gives away the shallow game and logic underlying why these products are made. It isn’t a good film or Injustice experience.