The Monsters Come to Town

James Gunn has made a name for himself as the go-to guy for superhero content. After starting off as an indie director with Troma, Gunn has brought that low-budget, weird ass sensibility from the indie film company (known for whack ideas and cheap horror thrills) into many of his works. Super was a darkly comedic teardown of the superhero genre while Slither was a great, disgusting and hilarious alien invasion comedy. Those films led to him somehow getting the greenlight to make the equally weird and delightfully great Guardians of the Galaxy, and he’s since gone on to also reinvent The Suicide Squad before getting tapped to co-lead DC Studios.

All of that is prelude to say that with Gunn in charge over at DC there was no doubt he’d be making some interesting, strange decisions. While his SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s. film is already getting praise (via its teaser trailer) for finding the heart and soul of DC’s Big Blue superhero, it’s actually not the first project for the new DC UniverseThe successor to WB's failed cinematic universe, the DCEU. Headed by James Gunn and Peter Safran, this new DC Universe carries over some continuity from the former film and TV series while crafting a new, rebooted universe for the future.. That honor goes to a team of superheroes that feed all of the usual vibes Gunn likes for his films. An oddball team of mismatched “heroes” forced to work together for the greater good and to save the world? Yep, that’s Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad and it’s also Gunn’s newest teamup: the Creature Commandos.

Launching the DCU with a show like this is an interesting choice. On the one hand it does show that Gunn hasn’t lost his sense of perspective. This is a show that’s gory and strange and, at times, over the top. It works well when compared to The Suicide Squad or his TV follow-up, Peacemaker. Gunn has said that both of his previous works in the DC Extended UniverseStarted as DC Comics' answer to the MCU, the early films in the franchise stumbled out of the gates, often mired in grim-dark storytelling and the rushed need to get this franchise started. Eventually, though, the films began to even out, becoming better as they went along. Still, this franchise has a long way to go before it's true completion for Marvel's universe. are canon to the new DCU, and this show only confirms that Gunn intends to continue making stories in that vein. But at the same time, it is (at least from what the teaser trails tells us) at odds, tonally, with where Gunn’s Superman is going. It’s clear the writer / director / producer wants to have room in his universe for both kinds of stories, but this early on, in a burgeoning universe that needs to find itself and make its stories known, is a show like this the best first call for the franchise? That’s a much harder question to answer.

The show focuses on the new Taskforce M, a team put together by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, reprising her role from the old DCEU), which consists of monsters. Due to the exposure of teams like Taskforce X, which paired up various meta-humans to go on dangerous missions no one else can tackle (see the last scenes of Peacemaker), the U.S. government banned the use of humans (meta or otherwise) for these kinds of ops. So Waller pivots to creatures that aren’t human at all: the Bride (Indira Varma), one of Frankenstein's creations; G.I. Robot (Sean Gunn), a military robot designed to kill Nazis; Weasel (also Sean Gunn), a beast-man who can barely talk; Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), a skeleton made covered in living, radioactive flames; and Nina Mazursky (Zoë Chao), a fish-woman who seems an ill fit for the rest of the team.

Put together, the new Taskforce M is assigned to Rick Flag, Sr. (Frank Grillo) and sent off to Pokolistan, a technologically advanced Eastern European country. There they have to protect Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), heiress to the throne, after a legitimate threat is made upon her life. The evil Amazonian sorceress Circe (Anya Chalotra) wants to kill the Princess, and for the sake of world relations, Waller doesn’t want this to happen. But as more information comes out their whole mission, and the fate of the world, could hang in the balance. Could the murder of one princess save the world… or destroy it? It’s up to Taskforce M to find out.

The Creature Commandos are the kind of strange, deep-cut superhero team that James Gunn loves to adapt. Taking a team of monsters (based loosely on the classic Universal MonstersThis franchise, started off with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, was a powerhouse of horror cinema for close to two decades, with many of the creatures continuing on in one-off movies years later.) and making them into superheroes is a weird enough idea that you can clearly see why Gunn selected them as something to adapt. Plus they don’t seem like a group that could work in a superhero adaptation, which is the exact same thing that people said about Guardians of the Galaxy, and yet Gunn turned that team into one of Marvel’s most successful superhero teams to date. Could he work the same magic for these monsters?

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, honestly. On the one hand, this team does perfectly feed all of Gunn’s best, weirdest impulses. Being able to play with a team of actual monsters allows Gunn the ability to really let loose and have fun. Each monster brings something to the team, both in terms of their powers and their characterization, that allows Gunn room to explore and riff. In the same episode where we have G.I. Robot unleashing all hell on a bunch of enemies, we also have his backstory that lends the guy pathos and heart. Each episode is designed to not only further the plot but also elaborate on the characters on the team making sure we care about each and every one of them by the time the series is over.

I think the show works best when focused on the characters. While the show opens up treating the characters as a kind of lark, acknowledging how silly it is to have, in effect, the Universal Monsters as a superhero team, it quickly works on investing in each of them, fleshing them out and making them into real people. Dr. Phosphorus feels like a joke, right up until you learn the tragic way he gained his powers and what it did to his psyche. The fact that the show is able to do this while still having a gloriously gory time says a lot about the deftness with which Gunn can handle this kind of material.

And yes, the show is over-the-top with its action and gore. It honestly goes hard a lot of the time, reveling in all the carnage and mischief these monster soldiers are able to cause. The use of animation should blunt how disgusting the gore can get, but I think Gunn understood that, so he let his team go even harder. Bodies get blown around, faces melt, blood and guts and brains go flying. This is a show that absolutely lets loose in the DC Universe in all the ways Gunn’s Troma sensibility desires, and it’s great… even if it feels like a weird fit for where the universe is going.

The first major issue I think this show has to tackle is the fact that this, somehow, fits into the same universe as the upcoming Superman. That film (what we’ve seen from the teaser, anyway) seems like it’s full of hope and brightness, turning its central hero into a shining light for the future that we expect from Big Blue. That stands in stark contrast to the dark, delightfully disgusting storytelling we get here, the exact opposite in tone and style which does feel very strange when you realize these are both part of the same universe. I have less of an issue believing Creature Commandos exists in the same universe as The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker than I do that it exists alongside Superman, and that feels like a flaw with this release strategy.

And even if we take this series on its own, unconnected to almost anything, I do think it still needs a bit of work. The season is seven episodes long and, despite spending plenty of time establishing its characters, it doesn’t do nearly as much work with its central plotline. It’s so interested in getting its characters into position that it actually feels like it rushes its own ending. The story of Pokolistan and its (maybe) endangered princess should be the main thrust of the story, but I feel like it often gets sidelined so we can spend more time with our central heroes and learn about their backstories. And, don’t get me wrong, these central characters are great. I love how they’re developed. It just seems like the show had a specific order of episodes it had to fit into instead of letting the series breathe once everything was established, taking extra episodes at the end to do the main tale solid justice.

It’s weird that it feels that way when you consider that Gunn is in charge of the studio and should have been able to take however many episodes he wanted to get the job done. Either someone above him cut off the episode number or this was a conscious choice on the part of Gunn to fit the story into this fast, seemingly rushed format. And if it’s the latter, well… that makes me more cautious than I’d like to be for Gunn and the future of this universe.

Again, having this as the first adventure we see for the new DCU is weird. It’s a strange flex, and at times it feels like an uneven one. I respect Gunn as a writer / director. He’s done great work in the past and, even with this series being somewhat uneven I still enjoyed it episode to episode. I don’t feel like it builds the way it should and its ending feels a tad rushed, but it’s still a very watchable, disgusting and enjoyably gory good time. Is it the best way to launch the DCU? Probably not. Maybe we should have gotten Superman first and then this after. Maybe long after.

On its own, I like Creature Commandos a lot. The flaws I see in it could easily be fixed in a second season (which it’s already confirmed this series is getting). And then, who knows how good it could get from there. But in the context of the larger DCU this series is an odd fit and I’m just not sure, right now, how that gets solved. We’ll just have to see what Gunn has cooked up for the next few adventures, the next shows and movies, before we can really judge for certain if making Creature Commandos the launch title for the new universe was a good move or not.