JUSTICE LEAGUE: CRISIS ON TWO EARTHS (2010, Blu-ray released February 23, 2010 – MSRP $29.99)
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, an intelligent, well performed, well animated direct-to-video feature, is perhaps the crown jewel in the library of DC Comics‘ cartoon movies. It manages to tell a fun little superhero tale packed with action and character in an all-too-brief seventy-five minutes. Yet, as wonderful as it is, it’s almost overshadowed by the sheer bounty of compelling bonus features on the extra-packed Blu-ray disc!
Well, let’s start with a look at that feature film anyway, before jumping into all of those extras. Like I said, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is really well done. Sure, it could have been afforded greater depth and have more, well drawn out character moments. But this is meant to be a fun superhero cartoon. And it carries out its task with great aplomb. It provides an alternate Earth filled with evil versions of all of our heroes, allowing for the ultimate showdown of might and minds. As strong as Superman is, Ultraman is just as powerful. And as brilliant a mind as Batman has, Owlman’s evil intellect is every bit its equal. The two teams face off, with our heroes desperately trying to foil a plan that will ultimately destroy all of reality if it succeeds. With killer vocal performances from James Woods, Gina Torres, William Baldwin, Chris Noth and Mark Harmon (whose voice manages to give Superman more of a home-grown farm-boy lilt than ever before!), it’s a super-tight, super-fun hour of superheroing and quite a bit of a good time. I really enjoyed it.
And I think a good portion of that enjoyment came from the look of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. The designs look great here and are, for the most part, pretty well animated with characters staying on-model for the majority of the films run-time. I have to admit, there are a few extraordinary action sequences in this thing that knocked my socks off, not to mention one of the slickest, coolest opening credit designs I’ve seen in recent memory. Kudos to directors Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery as well as Moi Animation Studio, who previously handled the animation duties for the Wonder Woman feature.
Helping the visuals along on the Blu-ray disc is the excellent transfer/encode from Warner. Wow! This disc looks awesome! Another stellar job from WHV. There’s a little bit of banding and aliasing (very similar to WHVs Halo Legends Blu-ray disc, released last week) but nothing that will distract from an otherwise beautiful visual presentation.
The audio, on the other hand, is the ugly stepchild of the Blu-ray disc. I mean, it’s not bad at all, really. It’s just another one of these compressed Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks that Warner seems to think will cut the mustard. It sucks that they believe this old-school DVD quality audio is sufficient when we Blu-ray fans have come to accept lossless tracks as standard. I can, however, see why they would forgo a TrueHD track in this case, when they’re attempting to cram more bonus features onto the disc!
So, let’s talk about those bonus features. First, my lone disappointment. Once again, we’re left without a commentary track. And in this case, there’s also no “making-of” featurette. I think it’s a shame that so many people pour their blood and sweat into these things and don’t get any recognition in the extras included on the disc. Would it kill them to offer up a 15-minute featurette? Instead, we get another lame, self-congratulatory DCU doc, singing the praises of their recent line of comics and trying desperately to convince us that they’re worth reading. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll stick to these fun, non-continuity bound animated adventures!
That being said, the Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths Blu-ray disc offers up a crap load of special features in the awesome department. This release marks the premiere of a new series of DC Comics animated short films which will appear as backup features. And let me tell you, it’s worth purchasing the disc just to get a chance to check out The Spectre short film alone. Produced like a vintage 70′s film, with Lalo Schifrin-style score and yellowed film-stock that has suffered faux-damage, The Spectre sizzles with style and mood and just about manages to best the Justice League film on a lot of counts. The disc also features the live-action pilot episodes for the Aquaman and Wonder Woman TV series’, which manage to look surprisingly decent in their new VC-1 encodes (strange, though, that the WW pilot from the 70′s is 16:9 in favour of its native 4:3). Rounding out the disc are a handful of “First Look” featurettes (including one for the upcoming Batman: Under the Red Hood) and the requisite bonus Bruce Timm Justice League episode picks.
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