Three Films Make A Post: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023): For large parts of its running time, this adaptation of the Mike Mignola, Richard Pace and Troy Nixey Elseworlds mini-series as directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu sticks rather closely to the original. In its first acts, its mostly makes some not terribly creatively handled gestures towards inclusivity it would have been weird not to include in 2023, and allows Oliver Queen a bit more heroism than the original had. For the finale, though, the script by Jase Ricci makes increasingly strange choices that muddle what was a pretty straightforward plot and climax in ways that seem weird, and pointless. I’d understand – if not like – changes to make things slicker or more contemporary, but farting around with a solid structure to replace them with a rickety construct of rotten wood makes little sense to me.

Otherwise, Doom certainly is one of the better DC animated features; it even shows some moments of visual creativity instead of the more factory like approach DC’S animation arm seems to prefer these days.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023): Whereas this misbegotten attempt at some sort of comedic Mission Impossible thing by Guy Ritchie is at times astonishingly bad: jokes never hit – and are generally underwritten - action set pieces are bland and lifeless, scenes that shouldn’t be in the film at all go on forever. Even at his worst – and I’d say that’s at least half of his output – Ritchie usually knows how to pace quick, usually at least semi-witty dialogue and seems to be a director who appreciates the qualities of a good cast, but you won’t even find any of that here. This is just a lifeless, glossy yet cheap-looking waste of a great cast.

Acidman (2022): For my taste, Alex Lehmann’s film never quite rises to the set-up of “woman’s (Dianna Agron) attempts to reconnect with her long-time estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) and fix her own hang-ups in the process is repeatedly interrupted by his obsession with UFOs and his Alzheimer’s”. The film’s neither sad nor weird enough to really pull the set-up off quite as effectively as one would wish it to, and much of it turns out to be a pretty middle of the road “woman meets dad” indie that doesn’t seem to dare to become as strange or emotional as it could and should. It’s a nice enough movie, mind you – it only wastes its potential to be more than that.

In short: Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

Warning: structural spoiler ahead!

It is not a difficult feat to suggest that a few too many of the animated Batman movies made for home video or tiny theatrical releases and then home video in the decades after Mask of the Phantasm have gone back to the well of “Batman: The Animated Series” in one way or another, even when they weren’t actually connected to it. But then, when they don’t, they can easily end up like that absolutely dreadful The Killing Joke adaptation, so while there might be a certain lack in originality in that approach, it does tend to result in a film that’s not a disgusting piece of crap, so it seems to be the right one.

Rather ironically, the villain of this particular film as directed by Sam Liu and with a script by James Krieg that’s based on an Elseworlds tale by Brian Augustyn and the great Mike Mignola seems to share that version of The Killing Joke’s makers opinion of women (at least based on that film), seeing as he’s Jack the Ripper stalking the streets of an alternative Victorian age Gotham.

The Batman (as voiced by Bruce Greenwood whom I like nearly as much as Kevin Conroy in the role), clearly rather early in his role, is there, too, and he is going to be more than capably assisted by a pretty heroic version of Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter, also excellent) whose instant mutual attraction here does make perfect sense. Aesthetically, this one is still clearly indebted to BTAS, with some genuinely successful attempts at injecting a hint of early Mignola into the proceedings (don’t expect shadows quite as thick, though), giving the film’s Victorian era Gotham the proper mood and feeling. There are some fine action set pieces but the film’s also – despite an mere 80 minute runtime – deftly creating its world and its characters.

Part of that is of course the old Elseworlds trick of understanding that the audience of an alternative reality version of Batman and other characters of his universe will have a working understanding of them, so you really only need to emphasise what’s different here; the rest, the audience will do for you. However, the script to this one goes one step further and bases one of its central twists on what an audience will expect from these characters and then delivering quite the opposite, while at the same time playing fair with the audience and – not alas a thing you can expect in plot twist land - still making sense.


All of this comes together exceptionally well, so well indeed the film really doesn’t end up being a copy of BTAS’s approach, but rather one that uses what it has learned from the show like it used its own aesthetic predecessors.