Blu-Ray Review: Justice League ”Thrones of Atlantis”

Every good home release has great special features. The question is, how well do these stack up to past DC movies?

 

Another January brought us another DC Comics animated movie. While I reviewed Justice League: Throne of Atlantis a couple weeks ago, I kept the special features off the review. I wanted to give them their just due. As with every DC release, there are a certain set of special features, namely a series of pertinent DC Animated Universe cartoons, and these all revolve around Aquaman, of course. There was also a special for the music, called “Scoring Atlantis,” a bonus scene featuring Robin and Nightwing, the 2014 NYComic-Con panel and the entire soundtrack to Throne of Atlantis. We’ll get to those in a bit.

The special feature I was most looking forward to was the sneak preview of Batman vs. Robin. The Court of Owls story was, put plainly, a fucked up story that tested the limits of Bruce Wayne and Batman, and Batman vs Robin seems to push this even further with bringing a rather big conflict between Bruce and Damian. The featurette gave you a great amount of detail into how and why Damian and Bruce had this rift, and how the Court of Owls figure into it.

The featurette also debuted a lot more footage than the trailer had, plus a lot of unfinished animations.For whatever reason, I dig how unfinished animations and animated storyboards are making their way into the trailers and panel footage. I saw a lot of this at the TMNT panel last year at NYCC, and this is continuing that trend.

“Scoring Atlantis” was your typical behind the scenes featurette that didn’t really do much, except say, “we picked this because it sounded good.” I can’t really argue, because this was fantastic sounding. The Robin and Nightwing sequence was weird, and was a good choice to cut. It didn’t really feel like it belonged, especially since Robin and Nightwing weren’t really a part of the League. Young Justice, definitely. “Villains of the Deep” went into detail, and really gave a good look into Black Manta and Orm. The soundtrack is also rather self explanatory. You get to play the soundtrack on the blu-ray. It’s like using a CD player again!

I think that the real reason people buy the DC movies are for the movie itself, and the special preview of the next movie coming after. Every release has had these two things going for it. You also get a collection of old DCU cartoons, and it’s an interchangeable formula that Warner Bros. uses to make a special features collection. Instead of getting the soundtrack, I would have liked the story this was based on, also named Throne of Atlantis. Justice League: Doom had “Tower of Babel” on the disc, and Flashpoint Paradox had Flashpoint #1. Otherwise, it was a decent set of features, but nothing really to sing about in the streets. Oh, and please bring back the shorts, please?