Batman Beyond #3

Something's happening!

This is apparently the comic book review where I begin by talking about a movie I just recently watched. But the only movie I recently watched that didn't star Albert Ingalls and Willis Drummond pretending to be autistic was Apartment 1303 and that movie isn't worth talking about at all. I guess it's worth saying things like, "I have no idea why this movie was made or what it was supposed to be about." And I suppose I could say something like, "Everybody in it was a horrible actor except maybe the decaying corpse in the hammock." Most people aren't going to even recognize the movie by the title which gives away the whole movie anyway! If there is a thirteenth floor in your apartment building, it's probably an imaginary space full of ghosts and dead people! Which this floor is! It was so surprising! The main problem with the movie after all of the other problems with the movie that are essentially the entire movie is that it has no theme and barely any plot. Perhaps the theme is the fear of growing up? Maybe it has something to do with madness? Dysfunctional families? If one is willing to severely contort logic, one might come up with a theory that would at least be more interesting than the movie. As far as I could tell, the movie was about a haunted apartment where a ghost that loves to throw people off of balconies lives. It does it to one woman so the woman's sister moves into the apartment for reasons that the writers decided not to spend much time on. Then she convinces her dead sister's boyfriend to spend the night with her two nights in a row when her sister could hardly even get her boyfriend to answer the phone. Then the ghost decides it wants to change its plan of attack which it's loved for at least three or four other victims. This time instead of throwing the woman off of the balcony, it decides to frame her for the murder of her sister's boyfriend and her mother. The end!

What I really think is the movie is a poorly constructed story about a woman who murders her sister and her sister's boyfriend and her mother because she's mentally ill and sick to death of everybody's faces. But the only real clue there is that one time the mother asks her daughter if she stopped taking her medication and one other scene where the woman has a nightmare about suffocating her mom. I don't know why there is a ghost girl except that there always has to be a ghost girl. The rapey ghost landlord only makes an appearance for shits and giggles, I guess. The convenience store located in the lobby of the apartment building was the biggest unexplained mystery of all! I think it was an Asian grocery!

I guess I got what I deserved for watching a movie on Netflix with a one and a half star rating. I have to assume I'm at least four or five times smarter than everybody watching movies on Netflix, so if they can tell they're watching a turd instead of a movie then the movie must be really fucking awful.

Now that I've vented about it, I'll ask Lord Google about the movie. And--no surprise although I'm surprised!--it's based on a Japanese horror movie. Now I want to watch the original! That totally fucking explains why the ghost crawls up the wall one time. Also unsurprisingly, the movie was completely rewritten in a way which would make it completely incomprehensible. I suppose it's still about an apartment and a ghost and people falling off of a balcony. Nailed it!

Reading the plot summary of the 2012 version causes me to wonder what movie the person writing the plot summary was discussing! Did the American release cut a bunch of scenes from the European release because it explains a bunch of stuff that was simply not in the version I watched on Netflix, like who the landlord and the little girl actually were, and how the decaying corpse in the closet became a prostitute (before becoming a corpse!). It is possible I fell asleep at several different points while watching the movie.

The issue begins with Brother Eye recounting Tim Drake's history for Tim Drake. Or the readers.

Or maybe just to remind readers that DC Comics thought it over and decided that Tim Drake discovering Batman's identity was really the way to go even if the whole "Batman being impressed" thing never actually happened in Scott Lobdell's revision of his own story about how Tim and Batman got together.

Remember how Lobdell's first version pissed everybody off because Tim Drake almost figured out Batman's identity but he guessed the wrong person? And then remember how Lobdell rewrote that scene so Tim Drake was only pretending to think Batman was the wrong person to allow Batman to preserve some dignity? So either way, Batman could never have been impressed enough with Tim Drake's detective skills to bring him on as a sidekick. No, the real reason Batman took him on as a sidekick was because Tim hacked into The Penguin's bank account and stole all of The Penguin's money and The Penguin found out. So Tim's parents had to go into hiding while Tim was allowed to live in Batman's mansion before going on to be a completely boring idiot in Teen Titans.

Brother Eye has decided to turn Batman Beyond into a cyborg like all of the other superheroes. But Alfred the A.I. has other plans. Like telling Tim not to become a cyborg. Luckily Tim listens to him and breaks free! Now he has to battle Inque while trying not to giggle too much over her stupid name. Although he's only heard it so far so he probably doesn't realize that it's spelled stupidly.

Meanwhile on the moon, Brother Eye stops looking.

Of course he foresaw this! I hate supervillains who are never surprised by anything! Brother Eye might as well be Harvest. Except Tim Drake is Harvest, so that would wind up just being needlessly complicated. Like the X-Titles in the nineties.

The child on Brother Eye's moon belongs to Inque and is the reason why Inque is not a cyborg and yet still doing what Brother Eye says. I bet Brother Eye has a whole moon full of children! They're probably forced to make candy all day long. How long is a day on the moon?

Tim tells Inque that he'll go to the moon to save her daughter if she helps him destroy Camp Happiness. Or, at the very least, if she simply doesn't interfere. That allows Tim Drake to beat up all of the cyborgs and save Barbara Gordon and Max while Brother Eye shakes his fists in the air and yells, "DDDDOOOOOOOOOM!" I mean, "NOOOOOOO!"

Batman returns Happy Max and Barbara Gordon to Neo-Gotham and everybody lives happily ever after. Or at least they will once Tim Drake deals with Brother Eye who infected his suit which allowed him to shut down Alfred and learn the location of Neo-Gotham. So that happily ever after will probably have to wait for several more issues. Hopefully it can happen before this comic book is cancelled.

Batman Beyond #3 Rating: No change. After forty-eight issues of Futures End, I figured everybody had had enough of it. But this is just more of Futures End. And I was bored of Futures End after about twenty issues of it. If I had the confidence to tell my comic book store to stop putting this comic book in my pull box, I'd do it. But the way I know Peter would look at me when he discovered I was no longer going to read every DC Comic book gives me pause. I guess I'll plod through it every month and just spend most of the commentary talking about a stupid movie I'll have recently seen!