Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham

In Brief: Solid 7/10 - Well rounded experience following the major plot points of the graphic novel with above average VA work and lovely anime-esque animation.

Caught an advance screening of this over a month ago and have been waiting to review it ever since. David Giuntoli lends his voice to Bruce/Batman in this outing and honestly it decent justice to the legacy of batman voice acting, sounding pretty much exactly how you'd expect - closer to the Arkham games than to more recent adaptions. The same can also be said for Harvey and Alfred, who are particular high points, but sadly this doesn't extend to the supporting cast, with the younger voice actors coming across a little rigid at times.

Animation wise, it leans into an anime style for the action oriented series and falls back to traditional western styles for backgrounds and story moments, providing a well rounded experience that looks excellent for the vast majority of the movie.

Why have you given it a 7 instead of X?

Without spoilers, there's some younger characters (Sanjay, Kai) who lose a lot of their agency between the source material and the adaption and are relegated to "let's drive the plot forward" instead of having motivations or proper backstory but y'no, it might just be the best elseworlds adaption to date!

Give it a watch, if you liked Red Son, Gotham by Gaslight and felt utterly betrayed by the Injustice adaption, then this will likely be for you!

This movie tries to be to much like Gotham by Gaslight and it just doesn't work. The story is not very interesting and just throws in random things to introduce characters that reference the comics. Also, this doesn't feel like Batman to me. You could replace Batman with almost any other character and besides some plot changes, the movie would feel the same. Some of this may because this isn't really a Batman story. This isn't a noir or a crime-fighting story. It's about ancient legends and things that usually wouldn't apply to Batman. The animation itself was pretty good but it doesn't make up for a bad script.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham doesn't live up to the potential of a lovecraftian take on the world of the Dark Knight but it's still good thanks to a reasonably engaging central mystery and a period setting that allows it to have some fun with the pre-established characters and events.

David Giuntoli is a good batman once again, he isn't given particularly memorable material but he certainly has the required gravitas for the character. The rest of the voice cast are all fine, with some DC animated veterans in fine if forgettable form.

The animation is good overall, it's nowhere near as stylish as it could've been but it looks nice enough. The music by Stefan L. Smith mostly goes unnoticed but does have a few fun moments where it does come to life. The longer run time is also appreciated, even if the ending feels rushed.

For DC animated films, it's often hit or miss on quality and unfortunately, The Doom That Came to Gotham is the latter. While it has fresh ideas and is visually entertaining by introducing new designs for some classic characters. Other than that, I found myself bored and waiting for the already short runtime to hurry up. The voice cast does their best to draw you into the mystery at hand and they are all fairly enjoyable in their roles. As an adaptation, it does the source material justice, but just because a comic exists, does not mean it needs to be adapted. It is by no means the worst of DC Animation, but in this case, boredom definitely came to Gotham.

If you are a fan of Batman and want to see what this entire universe would be like in the early 1900s, you are in the right place, however, if you want to watch good animation with an incredible script, you are in the wrong place. Throughout the film several characters appear and this is the coolest part of the film. The curiosity to know what the characters are like in this universe is really cool, the problem is that the characters are just thrown into the movie and that ends up making the script worse precisely because it doesn't know what to do with so many characters. The only reason the movie isn't terrible is because of these references, which are really cool to catch, but by the end of the movie, it's already tiring that this happens so much. The film is quite mediocre, at times it is tiring and most of the time the action doesn't work so well. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, just Batman fans who are curious about this type of situation.