Film Summary DCCLXXI (Teen Titans: The Judas Contract)

 


The Judas contract film is a decent but simplistic adaptation of the 1980s comic book of the same name. 

The original story revolves around the antics of Tara. A super-powered girl with the ability to move the Earth beneath her feet.
She was an infiltrator who was meant to discover the weaknesses and flaws of the Teen Titans. 
That could then be utilized against them by Deathstroke the Terminator (or Slade as he's known by most people now). 
It's a story with a crap ton of character development, emotional turmoil and high-energy conflict. 

The film is adequate at capturing some of the fighting. However the film falls a little short on character. Oh sure everyone's there and their drawn and voice acted quite well in that you can believe who these characters are. 
But they're not giving a lot to do. 
It's only an hour and 20 minutes long and a decent amount of that is taken up by Brother Blood and Deathstroke. 
Then you have to divide up your time with the Teen Titans and no one's really given a moment to truly breve and have any sort of meaningful dialogue. 
There's a little bit between Nightwing and Starfire. A kind of secondary romance put into the story. 
We have a little bit of interaction with Tara and her kind of romantic attraction with Beast Boy. 
But Raven and Blue Beetle are just extremely secondary. 
Raven could be removed from the whole story and you wouldn't have lost anything. 
And Blue Beetle secondary story really doesn't have that much to do with the rest. 
He just wants to get closer with his family which he can't do because of the afro mentioned Blue Beetle that for some reason has a problem with his father. 
I don't know a lot about Blue Beetle so that part of the story left me kind of confused. 

Which is another problem in this movie in where if you don't know any of the previous Teen Titans lore you're going to be left in the dark and probably disinterested.

Luckily the overall plot is solid enough to keep you entertained even if you don't know a lick about any of the characters. 
It involves a crazy cult man wanting to acquire power for power's sake and he has to kidnap all the Teen Titans to do it. 
In a way I think the entire character Brother Blood should have been removed from the story and we could have just focussed on Deathstroke wanting to kill the Teen Titans. 

So this movie is inspired heavily buy the animated show from the early 2000s and that it tries to bring a bit more sympathy for the character of Tara. 
But it also wants to make her more gritty and destructive like the original comic. 
However it doesn't really achieve that goal. 
I get why you'd want to have sympathy towards Terra. At this point she's an established character that's liked by a large group of people. 
But the original Tara from the comic is a real nasty person. 
Who had very few redeeming qualities and had no Hang-Ups about putting the Teen Titans in danger to achieve our own goals. 
She also had a weird sexual relationship with Slade which makes him dirty birdy. 
Something that is kind of brought up in this film but never explicitly seized upon. It's implied that they'll have this type of relationship after their mission is done. So good job Slade Wilson is still a creep.

The film over all is fine. It's art style is nice and I like the way every character look. The animation is livable with the main characters movements being satisfactory, though the background environment leaves much to be desired. 
DC animated films and some of their cartoons have always been kind of lacking in secondary objects and detail. 
It's kind of part of the style. 
There's some weird computer-generated cartoon affects that looks a bit off but nothing that'll take you right out of the movie. 
If you like the DC Animated Universe or just the Teen Titans in general than it's worth a look. If you just watching it as a random movie I'd suggest finding something else first. 

Oh and cyborgs not here cuz I guess he's still part of the Justice League.

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