A movie review of DC’s 2020 release
By Jane Diokpo, Contributor
0/5 stars
DC keeps trying to copy Marvel and they have failed yet again.
DC’s 2020 release Justice League Dark: Apokolips War was hot garbage.
I have a conspiracy theory that the vast majority of people praising it were either held at gun point or paid off to do so. Justice League Dark: Apokolips War has ridiculously generous scores and reviews online that are misleading; the movie got an 8/10 from IGN, a 100 percent on rotten tomatoes, and a Google audience rating summary of 4.8/5. It seems that only IMDB had any sense when rating the movie by giving it a 7.8/10… but quite frankly, even that is too high a mark for such a criminally mediocre movie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a die-hard DC fan—but this was just an atrocity. Here I was thinking the DC live action curse would never touch the DC animated movies—I guess I was wrong.
The entire movie seems like a poor and shallow attempt for the DC cinematic universe to have its own Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame moment. They cram almost every DC character they can into the movie like tuna, just like Marvel did with its own characters for its own movies, except Marvel actually knew how to execute it properly. With Justice League Dark: Apokolips War it feels like DC was desperately grasping for straws on how to replicate Marvel and incorporate its own “impressive” congregation of characters into a movie. Even by the name Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, it indicates it is a shameless reference to Avengers: Infinity War. Unfortunately, DC keeps trying to copy Marvel and they have failed yet again. I ponder if they will ever learn their lesson that it never works. After mediocrities like Suicide Squad and Justice League, you would think they would have gotten the memo by now.
Countless DC fan favourites are included in the film, but they may as well have not been included at all because most of them accomplish nothing. Sure, they assist in fighting bad guys, but they’re barely given any time to do much else. Most only get about five seconds of screen time tops before being killed off. So, viewers are left to wonder “What was the point of DC boasting that multiple characters would show up if the only reason they show up is to die?” The movie also has excruciating dialogue. The characters speak as if they all have spots on SNL and their edginess feels forced.
Justice League Dark: Apokolips War has no substantial plot. It might as well have been released on April Fool’s Day because the plot is a joke: nonsensical and pointless. Many irrelevant details are shoved in—leaving you wondering what to focus on. The ending is equally insulting because it contradicts the point of the plot in the first place and trivializes everything. One of the characters does the equivalent of pressing Ctrl+Z and everything goes back to normal—not that there’s anything wrong with that since Marvel’s Tony Stark did the same. The difference is that with Endgame, it feels deserved. In Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, it does not feel earned due to poor execution which renders the entire movie pointless. It seems as though DC half-heartedly created the whole story because they knew they could just press undo right at the very end.
In conclusion, I wasted one-and-a-half hours of my life which I will never get it back. If you want to try DC’s animated features (since the live actions are god awful), look elsewhere. DC has made far better animated movies, so don’t make yourself suffer like I did.