Justice League Dark: Apokolips War (2020)

This is the fifteenth and final feature in the first phase of the DC Animated Movie Universe, a film that opens by killing most of its cast and spends the remainder ensuring the survivors regret it. It is a comic book apocalypse delivered with the enthusiasm of a man closing a restaurant for the night. Cyborg is here. Martian Manhunter is here. The roster is so naturally diverse that nobody in the production appears to have broken a sweat assembling it, which is inherited furniture, not a thesis. Constantine's bisexuality, a fixture of the printed page, has been quietly filed away; his romance with Zatanna is strictly of the heterosexual variety, and the film has no interest in reopening the matter.

Women do a great deal of the fighting and dying. Wonder Woman breaks her own mind free of Darkseid's control, Harley Quinn commands the Suicide Squad, Lois Lane runs the resistance, Raven holds her father in a psychic cage, and Zatanna, dead for most of the runtime, still manages to orchestrate events from the afterlife. This is the source material speaking, not a manifesto. The Reapers drain the planet's magma and knock its rotation off axis, which reads as a doomsday device, not a climate sermon. Lex Luthor schemes and betrays, but the film never once suggests that wealth itself is the problem.

What remains is carnage, competently arranged. Characters of color appear without the film ever developing a thought about race. No body-positive thread, no neurodivergent figure, no historical revision. The grimness arrives through action and grief, not through speeches aimed at the viewer. It ends with a timeline reset and billions of deaths, which is a strange note of hope. Credit where due: it is honest about its bleakness, and it does not pretend to be anything else.