Writing a column about comic book-related movies and TV shows means, more often than not, dealing with the idea of adaptation. Adapting a book into a film is a tricky business; to make it work visually usually means distorting the original in ways that can make a fan wince. It's rare to find an adaptation that hews so close to the original as to be almost indistinguishable.

Then there's Justice League: The New Frontier. Based on Darwyn Cooke's award-winning limited series DC: The New Frontier, it's probably the most faithful adaptation of a comic book I've ever seen. Taking place in the 1950s, between the dissolution of the JSA and the formation of the JLA, the movie follows a number of heroes (primarily Martian Manhunter, the Flash, and a pre-Green Lantern Hal Jordan) as they battle an increasingly-distrustful government, unaware that a sentient island that calls itself the Centre is getting ready to have a wingding with the human race as the main course. It's full of fun 50s references, from the opening credits that evoke Saul Bass and Bernard Hermann, to a wartime killing that recalls the hardboiled films of Sam Fuller. The cultural obsession with the space age is reflected in everything from a casino's decor to the Air Force-centric plot, and the blooming cultural obsession with sex -- Playboy debuted in 1953 -- results in all the women being drawn with the outrageous attributes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. (Amusingly, Wonder Woman, the superhuman epitome of womanhood, becomes an extreme of an extreme, a parody of 50s-era femininity.)

The whole movie looks fantastic in that Bruce Timm way (he's one of the producers), yet nearly every element can be traced back to Cooke's original art. Heck, whole sequences are lifted from the book intact, and some shots are near-identical replications of the comic's panels. Director Dave Bullock and writer Stan Berkowitz clearly love the material, and while they've made changes, the movie is more like a distillation than an adaptation -- at the core, it's the same exact story.

Unfortunately, it's not a very good story. Cooke built DC: The New Frontier around a gimmick: the story covers approximately 1945 to 1960, and no character shows up until their respective comic book hit the stands in the equivalent year. In other words, Martian Manhunter doesn't take on his John Jones identity until 1955 (Detective Comics #225), and Hal Jordan doesn't become Green Lantern until 1960 (Green Lantern #1). There's nothing inherently wrong with this gimmick -- there's a pleasing virtuosity to it, and it gives the story an ambitious scope it wouldn't normally have -- but it seems like the only thing Cooke put any effort into. There's a layer of nostalgia here that's close to impenetrable if you aren't familiar with some of DC's more obscure heroes, like the Losers or the Challengers of the Unknown. Cooke expects you to bring your own cherished memories to these characters, so that when he does terrible things to them, you'll feel something. But if you don't know these people, there's nothing in the story to make you care about them. I actually began to loathe Red Ryan and his godawful "beat" poetry, and all I can do is marvel at the chutzpah of having Wildcat, a boxer, knock out Cassius Clay, an honest-to-goodness real life hero amongst a cast of fictional ones. It's Radioactive Man traveling back in time to defeat Jesse Owens at the '36 Olympics all over again.

Bullock and Berkowitz wisely omit many of these elements from the animated version, but their adaptation still bespeaks a failure of nerve. There's no focus to the story, no one throughline for everyone to participate in, so every scene feels both puffed-up and irrelevant. Take the Las Vegas sequence from the comic that introduces the Flash. It's a terrific scene, with a dandy fight between the Flash and Captain Cold, and ends with a beautiful image, snow falling on the garish neon of the Strip. Except that it has nothing to do with the Centre or the government, the only real antagonists in the story. It's telling that, in the movie, Berkowitz has the Centre briefly possess Captain Cold to announce his presence to the Flash. It's a ridiculous moment -- the Centre has nothing to say other than "Hi", essentially -- but it's obvious why he felt the need to include it. Otherwise, the scene lifts right out.

The terrible truth is that nearly every scene lifts right out. The government's rocket to Mars has nothing to do with the Centre which has nothing to do with the government trying to capture the Flash which has nothing to do with Wonder Woman in Indochina. (And don't even get me started on the late introduction of Ray Palmer.) What's really weird is that Timm's other work -- Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League, et. al. -- are airtight in their construction. It's like The New Frontier's Eisner award acted like an anti-distortion barrier so powerful that not even veterans of the DC animated universe could penetrate it. A shame, too; they would have rendered it unrecognizable, but they would have saved it as well.

Or perhaps Cooke was just making a post-modern joke at the expense of conventional storytelling -- a story with a Centre but no center. If so, well, bravo. Too bad it's not very funny.