Comics as an art form has drastically evolved with society since its inception. The late, great Dennis O’Neil was quoted commenting that comics are a “post-industrial folklore,” reflecting how characters and stories change from storyteller to storyteller but retain their archetypal roots.

Just look at the Batman character: now over 80 years old, his incarnation in each decade looks very different but still fits snugly into the same cowled silhouette. This nature does open up some fun opportunities for standalone period pieces where a creative team can look back at one of those silhouettes and the world around it – and maybe even celebrate the storytelling of the era.

This is something Batman: Soul of the Dragon does phenomenally well.

Gotta love this super-stylized promotional art.

Set in the 1970s with a backdrop of kung-fu exploitation and espionage action, Soul of the Dragon is able to embody some of the elements that were injected into the Batman mythos during the often-overlooked Bronze Age of comics.

Though Batman (David Giuntoli) gets top billing in this movie, it feels more like a Richard Dragon (Mark Dacascos) story. Dragon, a martial arts master and spy, discovers a dark secret related to his past and goes to Bruce Wayne for help, ignorant of the fact that he’s the alter ego for Batman. We learn that Wayne and Dragon were trained alongside Ben Turner (Michael Jai White) and Lady Shiva (Kelly Hu) by the ancient O-Sensei (James Hong) and that it’s something from that collective past with which Dragon needs help. Through some high-paced, very-70s action scenes, Dragon eventually gets the band back together to stop the bad guy and attempt to save O-Sensei.

It was a fun romp of a movie. I enjoyed every scene and couldn’t stop myself from grinning. Soul of the Dragon leaned into the tropes everywhere it could, and it felt like an embrace of both 70s cinema and comics. It does attempt to rise above the source material, converting Richard Dragon into a Bruce Lee stand-in – opposed to keeping with the Mighty Whitey trope of the original character (Richard Drakunovski in the source material) – and really leans into Lady Shiva’s badassness instead of relegating her to damsel material.

Overall, it has a little something for everyone, more so if 70s media is your thing. The DC Universe Animated Original Movies have had a pretty good track record so far, and this definitely falls in the “hit” category rather than “miss.”

The film is dedicated to Dennis O’Neil, whom I quoted at the top of this article. He co-created the characters of Richard Dragon, Bronze Tiger, Lady Shiva, and O-Sensei. He was also one of the Bronze Age comics creators who helped revive Batman, and his writing truly felt embodied in the film. He passed away on June 11, 2020.

Batman: Soul of the Dragon is available now on streaming, Blu-ray, and 4K.