Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018)

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies arrives with a thesis, and refreshingly it is not a thesis about virtue. The Teen Titans want a feature film. Hollywood will not give them one until they acquire an archnemesis, so they go acquire one, and along the way the movie takes a long, unhurried look at the machinery that manufactures superhero product. The villain's master plan is a streaming service. Not a doomsday weapon, a streaming platform, an acronym so labored that it becomes the joke itself. The film's contempt for the corporate appetite that turns caped figures into quarterly content is genuine and sustained, and it lands with more bite than most films that claim to be about anything.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. The team is a diverse assortment of bodies and voices, and the film treats this as furniture, which is to say it never comments on it. Starfire and Raven exist, they fight, they matter to the plot, and the plot remains Robin's anxious quest for validation from father figures and studio executives. There is no romantic subtext to speak of, no ecological conscience, no interest in bodies or brains or the many ways a person might differ from a default. The Titans are strange, but their strangeness is comic, not diagnostic.

The film's affection for superhero history runs deep, and its urge to rewrite that history runs nowhere. It parodies, it references, it puts Stan Lee in a DC movie and lets that be the entire gag. The commentary arrives as slapstick, never as sermon, and the audience is trusted to keep up. A pleasant surprise, then. A children's cartoon that noticed the industry eating itself and said so, briefly, before returning to the fart jokes.