The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend DC’s Creature Commandos
This show was weak.
Given how little attention Gunn could afford to give it because of the crash program demands of Superman, it was always going to be weak. However, its worst problem was clearly a budget cut. In the last episode, it just ran into a wall and stopped dead in its tracks. Worse still, the series commits the original writer’s sin of being completely predictable. Gunn usually throws in a few twists here and there but not this time. It looked exactly like what it was, a girl-boss story.
Creature Commandos is a seven episode animated series that serves as a continuation of Gunn’s two other DC projects The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. James Gunn made these other two projects long before David Zaslov took over Warner, sang his Song of Creation, and called the Gunnverse into being, so they were never really meant to be the foundation of anything.
This series is built around an A-story arc that stretches over the entire series, with each episode providing a B-story for each of the commandos except for Flagg who didn’t get one because you can tell his episode got the axe. Every one of these episodes was completely predictable from start to finish. The curves I expect James Gunn to throw were entirely absent from each plot.
I was expecting so much better from him when it came to the Frankenstein subplot. Say what you want about the guy he can deliver a decent storyline but this wasn’t that. It had been the B-story that was getting a buildup for the entire season. The conflict was between The Bride and Frankenstien who is now called “Eric” for reasons. Their conflict gets a seven-episode escalation and then she Indiana Jones him. Just shoots him with no preamble at all. There are undoubtedly shill reactors going on about how amazing that was. It wasn’t amazing it was cloddish as all hell. Like the rest of the B-stories, the plotline was entirely Woke, thus explaining Gunn’s profound lack of creativity.
All of the stories had to arrive at a predetermined ending dictated by current-year politics. The Bride’s arc is that Victor Frankenstein created her for… Eric… And she screamed when she first saw him. She falls in love with Victor, who promptly has sex with her. Then Eric kills him in a jealous rage and spends the next couple of centuries chasing after her. It turns out she only had to shoot him like a girl-boss a few times and Eric would have died.
In a proper James Gunn story there would have been a fight between them and then an epiphany moment where she screams that Eric was right to kill Victor, she had been less than a year old when their father had had sex with her. Eric would have a last plaintive, “But I love…” And she would yell, “I’m your sister you perverted moron!” Then give him a sister punch. But that would have violated the requirements of Woke screenwriting. Eric had been portrayed as a stalker and therefore he would be executed on screen for it.
So fucking weak.
Weasal of course didn’t kill any of those school children. He was trying to save them and the cops brutalized him for it.
Doctor Phosphorus had a boringly predictable mad science tragic backstory that left him twisted in body and spirit.
The most sympathetic was Nina the Creaturette from Central Casting. So you knew Gunn was going to kill her. The absurd part was the cops killing her father for absolutely no reason at all. Because in Woke World cops kill anyone they want with total impunity just for annoying them.
I was right about the Princess being evil but it turned out that she was only officially evil. She didn’t actually get a chance to do anything to prove it. On the basis of one picture, The Bride was fully justified in murdering her despite the fact that she had no possible way to conquer the world. We were basically ordered to believe this by the Bride and since she’s a kickass girl-boss we have no choice in the matter.
This show clearly had its budget cut at the last second and Gunn was ordered to tie up all loose ends to the extent that he could and just get this thing out the door. There were too many setups without payoffs and again, say what you want about the guy he always pays off his setups. The Frankenstiens I told you about. The Princess must have had some werewolf plot or another because the Weasel ran into a wolf pack and the leader of the pack had marks on her face that matched those the princess had on her face in Circe’s dream.
The DC Gunnverse has stumbled out of the gate. A cartoon was an odd choice to start a new reboot, to begin with, and given the extremely high quality of some of DC animated shows (The Fleischer Superman serials and the 1990s Batman the Animated series), expectations would be set high, this show needed to seriously punch above its weight.
It. Did. Not.
The animation and art design were at best functional. It was nowhere near the kind of distinct aesthetics you would expect from an A-lister DC animated feature.
It didn’t even deliver as a James Gunn story. There was some dialog that was good and if you like Gunn’s taste in music… Well, it was there. However, there isn’t enough of anything good enough for me to recommend it. Consequently…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend DC’s Creature Commandos. (1.5 / 5)
