The DC Debacle...

What is it with the DCEU, the so-called DC Extended Universe? Are they simply not paying attention? Zach Snyder has left his ponderous and gloomy paw-prints over everything, starting with “Man of Steel” and consolidating the po-faced humourlessness with “Batman V. Superman”. In between, we’ve had the Gods-awful mess that was “Suicide Squad”, a poorly-conceived notion even before filming began and a regular dog’s breakfast by the time it hit the screen. They finally give us a glimmer of hope with “Wonder Woman” and then dashed all hopes by taking the one decent director they have off the follow-up project*. Even “Justice League”, with its flip-flopping directorship and the eleventh-hour signing-on of Joss Whedon, betokens awfulness.

It’s not just the big screen efforts of DC that have me scratching my head. The “Arrowverse”, the TV side projects which – like Marvels’ similar efforts – are supposed to round out and comment upon the larger productions, have increasingly fallen flat. “Arrow” has set the tone – one-note characters in a formulaic, season-by-season fight-fest – which has informed “The Flash”, “Legends of Tomorrow” and “Supergirl”. It’s reached a stage where despite incidents in the spin-off shows, no effort has been made to ensure continuity across the programs as a whole (can anyone explain to me how Ray Palmer, the Atom, can be in “Legends” while simultaneously guest-appearing in “Arrow”, season 4? Maybe Brandon Routh needed to pay the rent that week...).

On the flip-side, there’s “Gotham”, which seems to break the mould on this flat, production-line process. Here, the characters have moral and ethical dilemmas; they confront questionable situations, learn from them and grow. The stories are better, more multi-layered and dense, and the production levels are streets ahead of “Arrow” and its cacophonous offspring. It seems to be the one time when a ‘dark’ approach has actually worked for DC, outside of Christopher Nolan’s Batman offerings (although, from early in Season Two, it starts heading towards some unnecessarily grubby places...). DC (and Warner Bros.) should just bite the damned bullet: the property that they own is a stable of bright, upbeat superheroes – with the sole exception of the Bat – and they should play to that strength, not push them against type. If the success of “Wonder Woman” has shown us nothing else, it’s that this is the true direction to take this material.

In the 90s, DC started this trend of darkening their content, as an obvious and cynical venture to win back fans from Marvel. Batman went to darker and more bitter places; Green Arrow lost his gadgets and went mano-a-mano with street level drug lords and their henchmen; Aquaman lost his kingdom and his hand in a subaqueous palace uprising; Green Lantern became disillusioned and replaced by a continuing parade of no-hopers and uninspiring ring-ins; Batgirl got crippled; The Flash saved the multiverse while no-one was looking; and Supergirl, and then Superman, died. Added to this wholesale grubbying of their main cast, was the generation of a bank of new antihero characters that were designed to cash in on the ‘new dark’, like the new Robin – Nightwing - and Huntress. Even former villains were pushed to the fore with graphic novels showcasing freaks like the Joker, weirdos like Black Orchid and the execrable Suicide Squad.

None of it is really convincing. Marvel was always “street”; that’s where they feed. Peter Parker’s daily juggling of his home-life, career and super-responsibilities made him real in a way that Clark Kent could never be. Daredevil’s origins are about as humble as you can get and his storylines have been arguably grittier than anything thrown at Batman in consequence: if you haven’t read Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil through the 80s into the 90s then you need to drop everything and do it. Maybe it’s because Marvel is set in a real world environment (New York as opposed to Metropolis) that it seems to work that much better. The issues that Supes faced going up against Doomsday felt inconsequential compared to Captain America coming home to his new flat to find that hoodlums had wrecked the joint and trashed his vinyl record collection.

There is a divide between the cosmic, world-shaking action level, where the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, and the day-to-day housecleaning of stopping bank robbers. Even in the comics, this tension manifests itself and often we’re left wondering just how useful Batman really is as a member of the Justice League, or what quantifiable benefit Robin can offer to the Teen Titans? More often than not it’s some annoying stretch of credibility that lets the story down. I suspect that “Justice League” is going to give us more than a few of these moments ("What's your superpower again?" "I'm rich." - Bah!). Cosmic action requires cosmic characters; street-level action cries out for street-level heroes. Every time the Superdude busts up a bank robbery in progress we wonder why he’s slumming it; each time Batman is confronted by Darkseid, we’re left scratching our heads as to why he wasn’t consigned to a bunker somewhere to avoid being collateral damage. Horses for courses, people; horses for courses.

Speaking about Darkseid, it’s clear that DC have wrestled him into the foreground simply to try and rival Marvel’s marshalling of Thanos, the Mad Titan. They have a Big Bad; we need a Big Bad. Unfortunately, Darkseid is a product of Jack Kirby’s whacked-out side project known as the “Fourth World”. This creation springboarded from some cast-off ideas involving Jimmy Olsen and a bunch of young adventurers, designed to appeal to young punters in the 60s; over time, however, it evolved away from these origins into a beast of its own, based on the distant planets of Apokolips and New Genesis, and featuring Darkseid and his corrupt army of ne’er-do-weels including Steppenwolf, Desaad, Granny Goodness, Virman Vunderbar and Glorious Godfrey, among others. Opposing them were Orion, the groovy Forever People, Sonny Sumo, and characters such as Mister Miracle (Scot Free) and Big Barda. Darkseid’s quest to control the universe and seed planets with his devilish Hell-Pits, created by his army of Para-demons, was opposed by Machiavellian court intrigue, heroic action and the unpredictable effects of the enigmatic Mother Boxes. Even in this potted outline, it’s clear that there’s enough here to fuel an entire DC Universe, quite apart from Earth and the Justice League, which exists in a distinctly separate mythology; and yet, "Batman V Superman" and “Justice League” are dripping with Para-demons and Mother Boxes, undermining the origins and rationales of those movies’ heroes. It should be ‘oranges’ and ‘apples’; not ‘oraples’ and ‘applanges’.

I’d happily watch a “Forever People” movie. Give me palace intrigue, cosmic trippiness, the opportunity to skewer Trump as an agent of Glorious Godfrey, the death-camp kindergartens of Granny Goodness and the Prussian-steampunk war machines of Virman Vunderbar. Give me Hell-Pits, Mega Rods and Mother Boxes – just don’t muddle it all together with Superman, Wonder Woman and the rest. Although, I guess, now it’s all a fait accompli...

But all of this muddying of the waters isn’t all. With the release of this year’s iteration of “The Mummy” we’re off to the races once more. It’s all dark, dark, dark in the “Dark Universe”, as Universal Studios demonstrates that they, also, have No Clue. I assume this is all an attempt to get the jump on DC’s nascent discussions about booting the Dark Justice League, but boy, have they misjudged things. The Universal monsters were groundbreaking because they were new and exciting. The only thing that united these films – “Dracula”, “Frankenstein”, “The Wolf Man”, “The Mummy”, “Bride of Frankenstein”, “The Phantom of the Opera”, “The Invisible Man” and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” – was the fact that Universal generated them, and that they inevitably got mixed together later as comedies starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Now we have a mad plan to re-boot all these characters as a “dark universe” of integrated films where these critters beat up on, or pal together with, each other in a cynical attempt to snaffle the punter’s spare change and distract them from the State of the World. At base, these characters are not superheroes and they shouldn’t be given the superhero treatment that Marvel understands, and which DC is still flailing about trying to get the hang of. Re-boot if you must, but stay true to the things that made the originals gold or, if you can’t possibly see your way clear to do that, at least ensure that the original films are available in your back-catalogue so that the fans have something decent to fall back on.

*****

*Rejoice fans! Since writing this, I've learned that Pattie Jenkins is back on board for Wonder Woman 2. *Phew!*