After a string of critical and box failures including The Flash, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, and Aquaman 2, the DC Extrended Universe ended the film franchise it started with 2013’s Man of Steel last year. While Marvel Studios has made three of the top ten grossing movies of all time, DC films and TV shows have always been hit-or-miss, peppered with successes like The Batman and Zach Snyder’s Justice League and bombs like Wonder Woman 1984 and Joker: Foile a Deux.
DC’s films needed a new direction, so after Disney fired James Gunn, the successful writer-director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, over inappropriate tweets from his past in 2018, DC immediately signed Gunn on to make a new Suicide Squad movie and a TV series of his choice, which wound up being the HBO hit Peacemaker. After these critical successes, new Warner Bros. Discovery David Zazlav put Gunn and Conjuring universe producer Peter Safran in charge of rebooting DC Studios.
While the revived cinematic DCU will launch with Gunn’s Superman film next July, Gunn and WB streaming service Max have dropped an animated series as “a nibble… to see [what Gunn’s vision of the DC Universe] tastes like”: Creature Commandos. Based off an obscure comic book series that launched in 1980, this new show is very funny, very violent, very unpredictable, and sets up a fresh comic universe where it feels like anything can happen.
The series centers around DC’s big bad government agent Amanda Waller (once again played by Viola Davis) sending a team to protect a princess in Pokolistan, a European country that sells oil to the US. While she would normally send out Task Force X (as established in Gunn’s The Suicide Squad), she says that Congress has banned the use of human prisoners with bombs implanted in their heads in special operations after Waller’s daughter exposed the existence of Task Force X to the public at the end of Peacemaker season 1. These two details quickly establish that Gunn’s new DCU is willing to keep some stories and characters from the pre-reboot universe (particularly the projects Gunn made) while ignoring others.
To protect the princess, Waller creates Task Force M, a group of nonhuman prisoners with bombs implanted in their heads that go on special operations. These “creature commandos” include Batman villain Dr. Phosphorus, a man of living fire voiced by Alan Tudyk; GI Robot, an android built in the 1940s to kill Nazis voiced by Sean Gunn (James’ brother); Weasel, a giant weasel-like animal from The Suicide Squad film also voiced by Sean Gunn; Nina Mazursky, a fish-human hybrid that breathes water voiced by Zoe Chao; and the Bride, a revived patchwork corpse created by Victor Frankenstein as a partner for his creation Eric Frankenstein (voiced by David Harbour) voiced by Indira Varma. Nina and the Bride are considered by Gunn to be the leads of the seven-episode series along with their human leader Rick Flag Sr., voiced by Frank Grillo.
The animation for the show looks like something out of a comic book put onto the screen—it uses thick lines and vibrant colors, a contrast from the muted look of older DC and newer Marvel films. The stylization of the show also fits the show’s overall dark comedy tone and is a good indication of how the new cinematic DCU will look, as all of the actors in Creature Commandos have agreed to play their characters in live action if Gunn wants them to. The animation for the action of the show also flows nicely from scene to scene and uses Gunn’s signature needle drops to accent action scenes, which makes the series so much more engaging than other recent superhero TV series.
Creature Commandos has only released three episodes so far but has been able to maintain a good blend of comedy and action in each one. Episode one is the weakest of the episodes by a large margin, as most of the episode is spent setting up the team and Pokolistan, but episodes 2 and 3 explore the backstories of characters that elevate the stakes and the story. The best part of every episode is its fight scene: episode 1 has a superpowered one-on-one fight, episode 2 has a two-on-one fight that uses magic, and episode 3 has an all-out team battle against a sieged castle. The fights work because the creativity of the choreography is on the same level and detail as a film, and the song choice backing each brawl works to build up the hecticness of the fight.
For fans, the show is able to connect itself to the comics and wider DC Universe quite effectively. The main villain of the series so far is Circe, a very popular Wonder Woman villain from the comics that hasn’t made it to the movies yet. Flashbacks with GI Robot show him with Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, which was DC’s most successful war-themed comic, and there are hints toward other off-beat DC hero teams like the Doom Patrol and the Metal Men. Some background shots of scenes have cameos from the weirdest corners of the comic world, including Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man and the Crimson Centepede.
The only massive complaint for the show is more of a complaint of James Gunn’s DCU as a whole than just the one show. Gunn’s projects seem to constantly center around Amanda Waller and one of her teams instead of major heroes like Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, or Wonder Woman. The projects are entertaining, but the focus on characters most audiences won’t recognize like Vigilante and Polka-Dot Man are starting to make these projects become stale. Hopefully, this will change with both the upcoming Superman movie and future episodes of Creature Commandos, as the end of episode 3 teased Superman, Supergirl, Starfire and the Teen Titans, and Wonder Woman.
Despite using characters from DC’s back catalog, Creature Commandos is still very much worth the watch, as it is very entertaining and surprisingly emotional at moments. Keep in mind that this is a mature series: Gunn is definitely setting the DCU apart from Marvel with the tone of this series, which includes nonstop swearing, sex and nudity, and enough graphic violence to make Art the Clown blush. If you have previously liked James Gunn’s other works, you will love this series as it has a very similar vibe to them. If you aren’t a fan of James Gunn or mature content though, maybe sit this one out and wait for Superman to come out in July.
