Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

In my recent write-up of Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, I posited my overall ranking system of these films outside of just a star rating. Superman: Red Son falls solidly in the “Fine, I Guess” tier. Taking its name and general plot outline from a 2003 comic that I once owned and read many times, the film posits the question of what would have happened if the Kryptonian pod bearing Kal-El to Earth had landed in the Soviet Union instead of the American breadbasket? In the comic, we get to see this landing in a Ukrainian collective farm, but the film opens with the extraterrestrial boy already aged four or five, as he runs from bullies through a crop field. His friend, Svetlana (as in Lana Lang) tells him that he should stand up for himself, but he demonstrates that he doesn’t fight out of cowardice, but out of compassion, as he lifts a tractor over his head. We then cut to the now adult Superman, the hammer and sickle in place of the “S” in his crest, as he wears a black and red version of the iconic look. He is the ultimate piece of Soviet propaganda: an invincible symbol of triumph. In the West, President Eisenhower tasks Lex Luthor with developing a means to combat this “Soviet Superman,” both physically and in public perception.

I have no complaints about the animation or the performances here. For the former, there’s nothing really noteworthy one way or the other; it’s serviceable, but nothing exciting. To be fair, that’s largely true of the original comic, as well. Unlike Gotham by Gaslight, which forsook the atmosphere of the source text for animated ease, the original Red Son comic had four different pencillers, so there’s a requisite lack of individualistic flourish to maintain uniformity across the whole thing, which leads to not-very-detailed art. For the latter, Jason Isaacs donning a Russian accent is fun and fine, and I can actually imagine it working a little better in live action, where one can emote for the camera, but I think having to layer that patois over the performance comes at the cost of pathos when we’re talking about animation that’s more utilitarian than expressive. It’s also a strange experience to hear Lex Luthor as voiced by Diedrich Bader, given that I associate that voice with his portrayal of the title character on Batman: The Brave and the Bold (after The Drew Carey Show, of course). Once again, my favorite performance comes from the actor portraying Lois Lane; in this case, it’s Amy Acker, better known as Fred from Angel (not to pigeonhole her). What I’ve always liked about Acker’s work is that she can move back and forth between vulnerability and tenacity over the course of a single line, or even a single word, and that’s such an obvious choice for Lois Lane that I’m surprised it took this long to make it happen. Of course, this world’s Lois isn’t romantically associated with Superman, but with Lex, eventually becoming Secretary of the Press once Luthor ascends to the presidency. 

The story, however, is a little lacking. It’s structured suitably, with events falling as they must when they must, but there’s no real sense of escalation even as the stakes theoretically get higher. Luthor gets permission to attempt to crash a U.S. satellite into Metropolis, drawing out Superman in order to save the city and—in the short term—make Superman more appealing but also allow Lex access to his DNA via shed epithelial cells on the salvaged satellite. This in turn allows Lex to create a clone of him in the form of “Superior Man,” which of course flies around spitting out Manifest Destiny jargon and ultimately dies when Lex pushes him too hard. The most interesting thing that happens occurs when Lois gives Superman a U.S. intelligence file about gulags that Stalin has hidden from Superman by concealing them underground beneath lead shielding; he goes to one and discovers his childhood friend, Svetlana, who has been worked to near death for the sole crime of having known the Kryptonian “before,” that is, before he became a tool of the state whose every historical detail is treated as a matter of national security. When she dies in his arms, he goes directly to Stalin’s palace, where he confronts the man and then executes him for betraying Soviet values, becoming the new leader of the U.S.S.R. 

So much could have been done with this, but there’s not enough room in this film to go anywhere interesting with it while also making sure to shove in all those DC Comics Cameos™. Of course Superman doesn’t get to the aforementioned gulag and liberate it in time to prevent the death of the parents of a young boy, now orphaned and seeking revenge (and who at one point is obscured by a flock of bats, just so that you’re not confused later). Of course Lex Luthor somehow captured the downed ship and biological remains of a Green Lantern in the desert and was able to reverse engineer the technology to create a squad of jingoistic G.I.-Lanterns. Of course we’ve got to have Wonder Woman offering to act as liaison between the U.S.S.R. and the West. It’s the last of these that gets the most focus and is the most worthwhile, but she’s also largely extraneous, as we don’t actually see her do anything in this capacity. In fact, she’s the column upon which two other extraneous, vestigial plot lines rest; the Batman the anarcho-terrorist plot serves only to disillusion her that the Soviet Union is as utopian as she believed, and the Green Lantern thing only exists so that she can show up and play cavalry to save Superman when Lex sets out to kill him. You scoop out all the fanservice and there’s almost nothing to this one, narratively, and that’s a shame when you have the potential to actually tell an interesting, multifaceted story about an alternate history in which the West is in decline while a communism that does not fail internally because of human nature continues to ascend precisely because of the inhumanity of its leader. 

That’s not what this movie (or any of these movies) set out to do. As much as this franchise interacts with the pageantry and theater of politics at all, it does so only in the most broad strokes and confined almost solely to “Lex Luthor is a bad president,” “Not all cops,” “Government hit squads made up of convicts are bad … and badass.” It’s no secret that I’m much more invested in these films when they’re about character relationships and dynamics, so those are the ones that stick with me, but these movies have never set out to be Big or Important in the way that some people think that the live action versions of these characters are envisioned to be. Maybe it’s not fair for me to look at this film, which has so much potential to tell a story with some meaning rather than create a parade of answers to the question “What would [X] be like in this world?”, and demand that it be more than the corporate product based on brand name recognition that it is. But, if we’re not here to demand more from our art than that, what are we even doing here? After nearly forty of these movies, this is the first time that I really feel like what dragged this one down is that it just doesn’t live up to its potential. Instead, all we get is that Superman respects Luthor’s penchant for propaganda, and then the finale is all about an external influence that forces the hand of both sides rather than imagining any other kind of resolution to their ideological differences (I’ll save you the time of checking Wikipedia: it’s Brainiac; it’s always Brainiac). An unremarkable version of a more interesting comic and a disappointingly lackluster one at that. It’s … fine, I guess. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond