Erik Adams
Creature Commandos premieres with its two episodes on Max on December 5, 2024. New episodes stream Thursdays through January 16, 2025.
Creature Commandos is not going to be for everyone. It’s violent, lewd, and graphic. To top it all off, it’s animated, which might turn off some potential viewers (much to my dismay – and Guillermo Del Toro’s, too). It seems like a surprising direction for the first project under the new DC Universe banner led by James Gunn and Peter Safran, but it says a lot about how the DCU is going to operate. While Gunn and Safran have a number of projects with bigger names lined up, their managerial style seems to be more laissez faire than that of their competitors at Marvel. They’ve also decided to pick and choose what pieces of the now-defunct DC Extended Universe overlap with the DCU, which will no doubt be at least a little confusing. With all that in mind, Creature Commandos does a solid job of bridging the old era of DC TV and movies and the new one, while also being a really rad show all on its own.
What’s obvious from the start is how much of a James Gunn project this is. The writer/director/producer/studio head is known for his ability to give the goofiest, raunchiest characters a bit of heart. He did it with the Guardians of the Galaxy, he did it with The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, and he’s done it here again with the Creature Commandos. Every off-color joke or extremely grisly death is set against a backdrop of sincere character work. Each of the Commandos gets their due thanks to steady pacing and an expert blending of the present-day storyline and backstory for every member of the team. Even the feral Task Force X survivor Weasel gets a tragic flashback! By the end of these seven episodes, I was fully endeared to the entire squad – making the emotions of the finale hit even harder.
Ensemble casts can be fun, especially in a show like Creature Commandos where you’re not quite sure who the protagonist is until the end of the story. The focus shifts as every Commando takes their time in the spotlight – but this is TV, so there has to be someone who carries the arc of the series on their back. After watching the two-part premiere, you might think that’s Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) – but that changes as things progress. The Bride (Indira Varma) quickly takes the reins as the breakout character, with many of the best scenes of action and emotion revolving around her personal journey. She’s the reanimated heart of Creature Commandos, and Indira Varma does a fantastic job pumping blood into the role.
The performances are an across-the-board highlight here, even those from actors more accustomed to live-action projects. Grillo and Varma are the deep-in-character standouts, but Zoë Chao and Viola Davis do great work as Nina Mazursky and Amanda Waller, respectively, and Alan Tudyk and Sean Gunn are well suited for their various roles. David Harbour doesn’t always hit the sweet spot as the curt and aloof yet irrationally immature Eric Frankenstein, but that might be more about the writing for the lovestruck monster. But when it works, it works, and it’ll be interesting to see how these characters are translated to live-action – according to Gunn, the actors will reprise their roles in other corners of the DCU.
Creature Commandos also features the carefully curated soundtrack you’d come to expect from a Gunn project: The next evolution of the oldies-radio mixtapes that give Guardians so much of its personality, or the ’80s hair metal heroics that back Peacemaker’s greatest triumphs. With Creature Commandos, Gunn matches the Old World setting and heavy focus on The Bride and Frankenstein with the fusion of European folk music and punk rock played by bands like Gogol Bordello. The soundtrack is as weird and wacky as its cast, and brings a playful, immature-on-purpose attitude to the whole enterprise.
The one thing about Creature Commandos that doesn’t always work is its sense of sexuality. It’s an extremely horny show: The characters are eager to get it on with one another, and they’re seemingly designed to fulfill the wildest fantasies of the revved-up straight guys watching at home. Even as Gunn and company attempt to critique this uber-masculine viewpoint – and the obsessiveness and disregard for personal boundaries that can come with it – through Eric Frankenstein’s arc, the outlook colors the entire show in a way that can be off-putting. It certainly makes for a few moments of genuine immature laughs, but it also feels like something we’re trying to move past in the entertainment industry in 2024.
While it often feels like it’s teasing us with little details about what’s going on in the wider world of this fledgling DCU, Creature Commandos is never too bogged down in world-building to focus on telling a contained story. It’s elevated by a sense of cohesion: Everything comes together so satisfyingly, and every little detail feels like it really matters to the big picture – and the episodes remain light on their feet, fun, and entertaining. If this is the kind of quality we can expect from the new DCU, the future looks bright. It’ll be interesting to see what DC Studios can offer when a project isn’t fully spearheaded by Gunn, but I’ll be immediately excited for anything that comes out of this shared universe with his name in the writer/director credit.
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