Injustice (2021)

Matt Peters's Injustice arrives as the forty-seventh installment in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies line, a distinction that suggests a certain institutional fatigue on both sides of the screen. The premise is efficient: the Joker tricks Superman into killing a pregnant Lois Lane, Metropolis burns, and the Man of Steel responds by installing a global surveillance state. Batman objects. Heroes fight. The animation is serviceable, the voice work committed, and the whole affair moves with the grim momentum of a story that knows exactly where it is going and has no interest in enjoying the trip.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is largely inert. Its voice cast is diverse in the ordinary way that animated DC projects have been for years, and Cyborg appears as a Black hero of the established canon, but the film never pauses to comment on any of it. There is no racial thesis, no LGBTQ presence, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance, no body-positivity subplot, no neurodivergent arc. Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Lois Lane all receive meaningful screen time, yet the film advances no feminist argument. Wonder Woman, in fact, spends most of the runtime as the enforcer of Superman's authoritarian order, which is an interesting choice and almost certainly an accidental one.

What remains is ideology of the comic-book variety. Batman and Superman argue about freedom against control, peace through force against restraint, and the dialogue does lean toward the speechifying this subgenre favors. Still, the arguments are staged as conflict, not as instruction. The film wants to entertain before it wants to teach, and it mostly succeeds at the former. A superhero picture with no lesson to deliver is, in this climate, a modest relief.