DC Showcase - Batman - A Death in the Family Interactive Animated Film

[Dark_Tzitzimine]

There's two relatively good endings, the Red Hood one and

spoilers:

One of the Red Robin rote possible endings[

end of spoilers

[Vakanai]

Glad to see the Red Hood path is different from the last movie, so it'll be worth seeing how it differs.

[Dark_Tzitzimine]

Glad to see the Red Hood path is different from the last movie, so it'll be worth seeing how it differs.

Is not different, they're just expanding in a few scenes.

[Vakanai]

Is not different, they're just expanding in a few scenes.

Still gives me more to look forward to.

[Dark_Tzitzimine]

I recently saw the film so I'm just going to quote myself from the Jason Todd thread

I had forgotten about DITF.

Personally, I found it thoroughly mediocre. There's five major paths but ultimately only one doesn't end up being a rehash of UTRH with a different costume, the writing is also all over the place with some decisions ignoring the internal logic presented in the original UTRH story (since is the baseline for the whole thing) just to create shocking moments or drama, while other options outright throw away any character development Jason goes through that specific pathline for the aforementioned reasons. Brandon Vietti also seems to enjoy punishing Jason (and the viewers for association) any time he picks the "good" choices while the "evil" ones lead to the better outcomes. All branches have their high and lows but the Hush one is certainly the worst of the bunch, being entirely lineal and the writing coming off like a self indulgent fanfiction that goes hard into "Jason is an angsty badass that can't be stopped" and makes every other character look like complete morons.

The animation is also pretty poor with a bunch of scenes that are just slideshows while an off-frame voice narrates what's happening. Also as I mentioned before, like 60% of the total runtime is just rehashed scenes from UTRH with the only big differences being what costume Jason is wearing and the addition of some explicit (and at times, gratuitous) gore. The voice acting is pretty good, even if that is mostly to DiMaggio doing an astounding job as The Joker since Bruce Greenwood has very few lines and while Martella does a decent job as a teenager Jason, he's horribly miscast as Red Hood, and having him redub an entire scene from UtRH just highlights how poor of a replacement he is for Ackles.

As others have mentioned, the absolute best part of the film is how hard it leans on Bruce seeing Jason as his son, that unsurprisingly, takes the front seat during the UtRH recap.

Ultimately the film was slightly better than what I expected but my expectations were low to begin with, so isn't that big of a feat, still a nice addition to the collection of any Jason fan but UtRH continues to reign as both the definitive animated appearance of Jason and the best modern DC animated film.

[Derek Metaltron]

Just watched all of this on Blu Ray. A fun experience but let down by focussing the interactivity to just one core path. Hush route has a great ending but only one ending. Red Hood path is just a narrated 20 minute retelling of the UTRH film. Only the Robin lives path has an array of options (though one seemingly important choice leads to the same place). I feel like this would have been better and more expansive if they let it be a full film rather than a showcase one. But it does show the promise of the medium and I would certainly enjoy more movies with the same format based on DC events.

[Mojo]

I could go on about the various path's in the film and my opinions of them but regardless.. to me the ENTIRE THING is justified in it's existence for the Diner Scene. That one scene was near perfection and some of the best Batman related content in a long while. Certainly some of the best Jason and Joker stuff.


And Dimaggio delivered the Joke there better than Hamill did. He's getting up there with Hamill now in Joker voices and really should be tapped to do it more.