Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)

Justice League: The New Frontier arrives from 2008, adapted from Darwyn Cooke's celebrated comic, and it carries the pleasant burden of being a period piece. The setting is the Korean War and the anxious years that follow, when a paranoid America eyes its masked heroes with suspicion and its government builds rockets it does not fully understand. The roster assembles in unhurried fashion: Hal Jordan learning to fly, J'onn J'onzz hiding as a Gotham detective, Barry Allen quitting in disgust, Wonder Woman arriving from Paradise Island with an invisible jet and no patience. The villain is The Centre, a sentient landmass born of the Earth itself, which has watched humanity's wars and concluded the species should be removed. That gives the film a faint green streak, nature rising against its noisy tenants, though the ecological reading stays implicit and no lecture about carbon follows.

The representation on offer is modest and inherited from the source. Phil Morris lends his voice to the Martian, and the rest of the ensemble comes from mid-century comic books that were not especially diverse. Wonder Woman fights well and the Amazons appear, but the film declines to build a gender-politics argument around her. There is no queer material, no body-image commentary, no neurodivergent character, and no interest in class or capital. The Cold War anxieties function as historical texture, not as an indictment of the military-industrial complex.

Where the film leans forward is in its closing sentiment. Characters speechify about hope and humanity's capacity to set aside its violent instincts, and the tone is earnest, inspirational, delivered with a straight face and a swelling score. It is mild sermonizing, and it asks nothing of the viewer beyond a willingness to believe that people can be better. A handsomely mounted cartoon about unity, agreeable and slightly pious.