I watched Justice League: Crisis On Infinite Earths 2 and I must say, I did not like it. This article is not just a review of this movie, but a review of the concept of a multiverse. There will be minor spoilers, but I won’t talk much about the plot because I basically don’t care about it, as I will explain.

               I would like to start by talking about the Justice League cartoons in general and their problem with power creep (that would be a cool villain name). Batman The Animated Series is one of my favorite cartoons. I also like all the spin offs, which includes Justice League Unlimited, which has no continuity to the aforementioned Crisis. Or maybe it does, because multiverse! Although I love the shows, something strikes me as amusing. In the Batman cartoon, he starts out fighting bank robbers and similar criminals. But by Justice League, he is travelling through space and time, fighting aliens. Isn’t that ridiculous? I can imagine Commissioner Gordon calling Batman: “Batman, Penguin is robbing Gotham Bank, we need you!” Batman responds, “I’m a little busy right now,” as we see him on some asteroid in space, frighting a horde of aliens.

               This is called power creep. The tendency of stories to ratchet up their stakes to ridiculous levels. We start with small stakes, like a bank robbery. Then we have Superman, who needs to fight more powerful enemies, so he fights aliens and perhaps a city is at stake. Then the country; then the word; then multiple worlds; then galaxies; then the entire universe. Well, you can’t go beyond that, can you? Oh, wait, now multiple realities are at stake! Yeah, I don’t care anymore. What does any of it matter? I have lost all sense of scale and perspective.

               A story about a girl being kidnapped and Batman finding her has much more impact than multiple copies of Earth being vaporized. I just become numb to it.

               Let’s do a short summary of what is happing in Crisis. Basically, there is this guy called Monitor, and his people’s job is to observe significant events in the universe and record them. Why? Don’t know. But that just seems really stupid. You watch entire worlds get destroyed and you do nothing? Whatever, I guess I’m not supposed to understand it. Anyway, there is some unimaginable, multi universe event that will destroy literally everything, everywhere, in all realities. Wow, this must be the machinations of some evil mind. What would possibly be so evil and powerful? Turns out it’s just a wave of antimatter that passes through the universes and erases them. That is lame!

               I can hear some of you saying, “If you read the comics, it’s actually caused by…” I don’t care. The story has already lost me. It doesn’t matter what the real cause is. I have become bored, and any twist will just be stupid. I already don’t care. It is the ultimate McGuffin. It is like there was a template script and the writers filled in the blanks with answers from an 8 year old.

               The __ is threatened by __. The heroes __ need to __ to stop it.

“Ok Timmy, fill in the blanks.”

“Um, universe. No, wait, all the universes!”

“But that doesn’t make sense, there is only one universe.”

“All of them!”

“Uh, ok. Then what threatens all the universes?”

“Anti matter!”

“What is antimatter?”

“Umm, it’s like matter but anti.”

“Ok, then who are the heroes of the story?”

“Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman and the Flash and Green Lantern and Robin and Night Wing and that guy with a T on his face and that guy with no face and that light girl and…”

“Wait wait wait. You can’t just throw in all the characters from your comics.”

“You’re right, we need all the Batmans, and all the Supermans. All of them!”

Sigh “Ok, whatever. So, what does literally every superhero need to do to stop this?”

“I don’t know. But there also needs to be some scary monsters. And they fight, and Batman gets mad, and some people die but it doesn’t matter because there’s like an infinite number of them so everything is ok.”

               And little Timmy nails it. The stakes don’t matter because there is some alternate universe where we can just reboot it. Multiverse is lazy and cowardly. Comic books have reached a point that I call self perpetuating. This when the character has become so famous that you know who he is, even if you have never read the comics. We all know Batman. DC can sell a Batman comic, movie, book, cartoon, T shirt, whatever to people who have never read a comic. But how long can you tell the same story? Batman has been around for over 80 years. How old is he? How many times can he fight the Joker? Forever, because the stories just get rebooted. But they aren’t cleanly rebooted. The company is too scared to do a clean restart because the fans don’t want “their” story to end. So the stories get written with no clear idea of where they fit. The industry are cowards because they are afraid to do a clean reboot.

               This leads to multiple Batmans, Supermans, Wonder Womans, etc. The explanation is that they exist in different universe. Ok, that’s fine. I suppose I would just pick the version I like. Then the writers get the brilliant idea of crossing this Superman with that Superman, so now they are all connected. There is no continuity, because continuity implies that it makes sense.

               The writers now have the ultimate excuse to not have to make sense. They just say it’s in a different universe. This is the lazy part.

Does anything matter? A character can be killed in one run of comics, but he can be perfectly fine in another. Nothing matters and there are no stakes. You can’t count on anything. Brining it back to the movie, we see multiple Earths get wiped out by this lazy writing, I mean anti matter wave. Who cares? I don’t.

We know that when we watch a story, for the most part we can count on a happy ending. We know the hero is going to win in the end. We know that Batman is going to rescue the girl. We suspend our disbelief and pretend that maybe he won’t make it this time. These relatively small stakes are more believable and are more personal. But when entire planets are wiped out in an instant, we don’t care because we know there are an infinite number more where that came from. It’s like playing a video game with infinite lives. You might die a few times, but eventually you will succeed, so it doesn’t really matter.

I don’t read superhero comics, but I love cartoons. The more I learn about comics, the less I want to read them. Usually the DC animated movies are great. Although they do suffer from the alternate reality problem that I described. The first couple movies had continuity with the TV show. But very quickly they stopped, and now I just take each one as a stand alone story. The Batman in movie A has nothing to do with the Batman in movie B. I just enjoy the animation at this point, and that’s too bad.

There will be a part 3 to Crisis and I will watch it, but I have already check out. What about you?