Today is the day; after four years and five movies worth of buildup, the cinematic adaptation of the Marvel Comics superhero super-squad known as "The Avengers" has finally hit theaters in the United States. Marvel has really been banking on it being a huge hit, but what you might not know is that The Avengers is not the first movie to feature a comic book company's resident team of superheroes.
Let's go back to the year 1997, when a pair of movies based on DC Comics properties — Batman & Robin and Steel — were released to extremely negative critical reaction. I guess DC figured that television would be a better recourse, because that same year they teamed up with CBS to create a TV show based on their premier team of heroes, the Justice League of America.
And what could go wrong? The Justice League's ever-evolving roster has featured some of the most famous superheroes to appear in DC's pages, so you'd think that the idea of a TV show where Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and others team up would be awesome. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong. It turns out that the show never got past the pilot stage. And to further hammer the failure home, that pilot has never aired in the United States, nor has it ever been legally released in any home video format. The only way you can find it at all is through bootlegs and YouTube. And I'm pretty sure that the reason it wasn't aired or picked up as a series is because it's terrible.
Welcome to New Metro, a sprawling city protected by the team of superheroes known as the Justice League of America. The Justice League's five members — the Flash (Kenny Johnson), Green Lantern (Matthew Settle), Fire (Michelle Hurd), the Atom (John Kassir), and the Martian Manhunter (David Ogden Stiers) — have successfully defeated every villain they've faced despite their problematic personal lives. But they've never gone up against an enemy quite like the Weatherman (Miguel Ferrer).
The Weatherman has developed a way to manufacture natural disasters, threatening to use it against New Metro unless he is paid a hefty ransom. The key to defeating him lies with Tori Olafsdotter (Kim Oja), a meek scientist who works at a local meteorological institute. She accidentally stumbles upon a bizarre device in the institute's laboratory that shorts out and gives her the ability to create and manipulate ice. It turns out that this device belongs to Tara's boss, leading her to put two and two together and realize that her boss is the Weatherman. Tara takes this information to the Justice League, who allow her to join their ranks with the codename "Ice." With their new member in tow, the Justice League sets out to defeat the Weatherman and save New Metro from potential destruction.
You know, I'd heard a lot about this pilot before I actually watched it. And everything I'd heard was resoundingly negative. Now that I have actually seen it, I can verify that every negative thing that's been said is absolutely true. This pilot is so bad, so utterly wretched that I can't say I'm surprised it wasn't picked it up as a series. And if it had been picked up, it probably would have been cancelled pretty quickly. There's no way that a show that followed up on this pilot could have been successful without some major retooling. It's the Murphy's Law of television pilots, in the sense that it gets every possible thing wrong.
At the helm of this sinking ship is Félix Enríque Alcalá, a director who has spent pretty much his entire career working in television. And the truth of the matter is that he does absolutely nothing to make me care at all about anything going on here. It's as if he realized this thing was going to suck and figured he wouldn't bother putting forth any effort to make things better. Alcalá just gives us some generic mid-'90s television direction in all its unimpressive glory. There's no style at all. And the whole thing is just plain boring, too. The movie is so plodding, so unbearably slow that after only an hour, I felt like I'd been watching this piece of crap for days on end. I just wanted this horrible garbage to end, but the end took forever to arrive.
It doesn't help anything that the production looks like crap. The effects are laughably bad, unconvincing and goofy-looking in large part because of the obviously minuscule budget. I mean, I know this is just a pilot for TV and that they probably would have redone it had the show been picked up. But are decent effects too much to ask for?! I could probably whip up something in Microsoft Paint in ten seconds and come close to replicating these effects.
There's also the costumes, which look like cheap Halloween costumes. I've seen cosplayers at comic book conventions with better costumes than the ones here. Green Lantern's costume is actually turquoise instead of green, while the Atom looks like his costume is just spandex with Styrofoam shoulder pads. Fire's costume is especially bad, as she's just wearing a green leotard with her hair pulled to the side and a dab of green makeup smeared under her eyes. The fact that she gets to wear green and the character with "green" in his name wears some other color is bad enough, but it gets worse than that. People pick on the perceived lack of difference in Clark Kent and Superman's appearances, but Fire doesn't even try. Her costume is so transparent that the kid who's stalking her civilian identity puts two and two together after seeing her as Fire on the news for a tenth of a second. The movie tries to say that he noticed her wearing the earrings he'd given her, but you'd have to be a damn fool to not see through that flimsy excuse for a costume.
And you'd better believe that the script is awful too. Written by Lorne Cameron and David Hosselton, this thing is like a bottom-of-the-barrel Friends knockoff combined with a bad Power Rangers parody using DC Comics characters. Whose idea was it to take a superhero team, an idea that could lend itself more to an action/drama format like Smallville, and make a badly-written sitcom out of that? The Justice League of the comics goes up against dangerous global threats on a regular basis, but here, they've got a busted TV and a villain who's a lame substitute of the Weather Wizard, a member of the Flash's comic book rogues gallery.
And I also got the impression that neither Cameron nor Hosselton ever bothered to read any comics or got familiar with the characters. I can't say I'm really familiar with how all of the characters are depicted in the comics either, but the ones I am familiar with are grossly misrepresented. For example, Ice is a meek, mousy ball of nerves who got her powers in a lab accident here, as opposed to the charming girl next door in the comics who was born with her powers as an extension of her Norse heritage. And there's also Green Lantern, whose changes got the most of my attention. His secret identity is explicitly stated to be Guy Gardner, the second of four human Green Lanterns in the comics. But not only is his costume the wrong color (which I've already mentioned), but they give him a personality similar to fellow Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner. The Guy Gardner of the comics is notoriously hotheaded and macho, and the only time the pilot comes close to matching that is when he threatens the Weatherman with a chainsaw constructed from his ring's energy at the end of the movie. But by then, it's too little too late.
I also wonder just how much the low budget affected the script. I say this because there are moments in this that seem like they were supposed to be big sequences yet are whittled down to nothing (or less than nothing). They establish that the Weatherman is trying to pummel New Metro with a massive hailstorm, but it's dealt with in ten seconds like it's no big deal at all. It gets worse when they tell us that the Justice League averted a mudslide orchestrated by the Weatherman, yet they never show us any of it. They tell us the whole thing happened in a news report after the fact, and they barely show the news report at that! If it was a budgetary issue that caused the mudslide to be left out, why not just delete the whole thing altogether?!
I also just plain didn't understand all the reality show "confession cam" moments. I know MTV's reality show The Real World was a huge hit around the same time, but did Cameron and Hosselton really think a Justice League show needed to borrow elements from it? The scenes have pretty much no bearing whatsoever on anything. They aren't funny, don't advance or even reference the story, and frankly feel like they're only there to pad out the running time. Padding is probably why they're there to begin with, what with the aforementioned non-existent mudslide scene.
The only thing left for me to talk about is the acting. And folks, the acting is awful almost all the way across the board. The cast is unimpressive and lifeless. With the exception of Miguel Ferrer, who I almost always enjoy even when he's stuck with lousy material, everyone in front of the camera is awful. They run the gamut from annoying to laughable to just plain bad. It's rare that I see a group of actors so thoroughly miss the mark, but this is one instance where everyone (with, as I said, the exception of Ferrer, who even then is only okay at best) is absolutely terrible.
I'm still amazed at just how bad this thing is. I watched it for free and still felt like I paid too much to see it. I can totally understand why the pilot never got picked up, but I do imagine where the show would have gone, though. Would the Justice League have fought more villains created just for the show? Or would they have battled comics villains like Darkseid or the Legion of Doom? Would any more DC heroes pop up? That's something that actually bugs me, because I have to ask why Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are nowhere to be found. They aren't even referenced. I have to guess that it's due to some kind of legal complications, because if I were making a pilot for a TV show featuring DC's number-one superteam, I'd want DC's top three characters on the show. I can understand why Superman may have been unavailable, since Lois and Clark had just ended and perhaps they didn't want him on another show so quickly. But no Batman or Wonder Woman? Really? That's a real disappointment.
But the entire pilot is a 90-minute mess. It's not only boring, but it becomes frustratingly bad when you start picking it apart like I've been doing here. The more I analyze it, the more it transitions from being a forgettable movie to being so bad that it took serious effort to keep from turning it off in disgust halfway through. If you are absolutely in desperate need to watch something made for television with the Justice League name on it, just stick with Bruce Timm and Paul Dini's Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons that ran from 2001 to 2006. As for this pilot, it's unmitigated crap that is only worth tracking down for the curiosity factor alone. Now if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go see The Avengers. Here's hoping that its guaranteed success will be enough to convince DC Comics to make a Justice League movie that's better than this.
Final Rating: *
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