For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two superhero movies currently in wide theatrical release: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) & Superman (2025).
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, Boomeris 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.
When I first started this project, I knew that I would eventually have to watch these shorts in addition to the features in order to hit that magic number, 52. At that time, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max still hosted just about every DC project ever made, as a result of Warner Bros. folding the DC Universe service into HBO. All of these shorts were available there, until they were slowly offboarded from the service. Never forget what they, and by “they” I mean David Zaslav, took from you. Most of these were only released as special additions to the DVDs of the feature films, which meant that tracking them all down proved no small feat. Ironically, although I have no issue with the wider internet at large knowing that I will soon have watched all of these films, I’m not exactly hot to expose this side of myself to the ubercool clerks at my local video rental. Somehow, we got there.
This short film, clocking in at just twelve minutes, is a strong start for this project. The Spectre features the voice of Gary Cole in the role of Jim Corrigan, an LAPD detective who inserts himself into the investigation into the death of a film producer. It’s not his case, as the assigned detectives and his chief remind him, but he has a vested interest in the case as the producer’s daughter Aimee (Alyssa Milano) is an old flame of his. His boss tells him to instead investigate the strange deaths of the suspects in the case of the producer’s death. The list of enemies is fairly long, but the potential motive of a few of them relates to not being hired for the guy’s most recent production. The first of these is a special effects man whose own macabre creations are animated by a spectral (naturally) being called The Spectre, an avenging spirit. The second suspect is killed while trying to flee to Mexico, as The Spectre forces him to flip his vehicle and, when he miraculously lives, repairs the vehicle supernaturally and has it run down its owner, Christine style. Finally, Corrigan confronts Aimee directly and accuses her of involvement in her father’s death, and when she manages to distract him long enough to pull out a gun, her shots pass through him without effect. Corrigan reveals that he is The Spectre, before avenging Aimee’s father by surrounding her with a cyclone composed of the money she was paid by the two dead men in order to give them the security code so that they could slip in and kill her father, killing her with a thousand cuts before the police arrive on the scene as Corrigan departs, unnoticed by the living people whom he passes by (and through) before driving away.
This is a neat one! A sly little horror story/renegade cop pastiche that features seventies style funk music and some genuinely creepy sequences. The Spectre himself is effectively scary, and his sense of punishment-by-irony is fun. The sequence set in the special effects warehouse allows the animators to go wild, as the SFX guy gets attacked by Dracula, the Wolfman, and even a (similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from) possessed Reagan animatronic, which dutifully vomits on him. The sequence in the desert in which the second suspect meets his fate is also a lot of fun, calling to mind the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” as The Spectre’s sudden appearance in the car in the guilty man’s rearview mirror, and he proves an unshakeable avenging force. Even the death of Aimee is brutal, even if it’s mostly offscreen, as she screams to her dying breath before the windows of her father’s sleek Beverly Hills MCM mansion are coated in her blood. This short form really allows the animation team to go all in on something that would be unsustainable for a feature length film (even one that only clocks in at around only 80 minutes like most of these do) and focus on a character who would be a hard sell for a solo outing. Of these movies, over a third of them are Batman flicks, and it’s not because there were simply so many of these stories that demanded to be told; it’s purely a matter of marketing, because the Batbrand sells. The Spectre … not so much. This is the perfect bite-size story for the character and to give the team the chance to work on something different and weird. You can probably trace a clear line from this one to the darker, more horror-oriented flavor of later outings like Justice League Dark and City of Demons. Worth a watch.
Another strong early showing for these shorts. There’s not a huge demand for a full-length Jonah Hex animated film (hell, there wasn’t a market for the live action feature, which came out the same year), so one of these shorts was the right call to tell a little western story. In the animation, an outlaw named Red Doc shows up to a saloon, drunken and boisterous, and claims that he can outdraw any man in the place. The saloon’s proprietor, Madame Lorraine (Linda Hamilton) invites him up to her bedroom, and once he’s comfortable, she kills him, robs his corpse, and has two henchmen dispose of the body. The next day, bounty hunter Jonah Hex arrives in town on the trail of Red Doc, but the bartender at the saloon claims to have never seen the man when presented with his “wanted” poster. A bar girl (Michelle Trachtenberg) tells him that Madame Lorraine sometimes takes men up to her parlor, men who are never seen again; Hex allows Lorraine to see his billfold so that she invites him to her boudoir as well, but he knocks her out and takes care of her henchmen. When she awakes, Hex forces her to take him to the abandoned mine that she and her flunkies have turned into a mass grave pit, and Hex retrieves Red’s body to collect his bounty and leaves Lorraine in the hole with the evidence of her crime.
Jane is doing great voice work here with Hex. He’s such a passionate fan of the character that he petitioned to play the lead in the ill-fated live action adaptation by getting a make-up artist to give him Hex’s trademark scarred face to audition for the role, losing out to Josh Brolin, so he’s bringing his A-game here to make up for it, and it shows. Hamilton’s aged rasp lends a lot of gravitas to her frontier serial killer character, and our innate association as an audience of her voice with Sarah Connor means that her world-weariness comes naturally to mind. Although this one lacks the overt horror elements of The Spectre, there’s a creep factor to it that makes this more of a “weird west” than a standard saddle-and-spurs bounty hunter story. The final images that we see of Lorraine, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her victims as her lamp slowly dies, is chilling, and it’s interesting to note that the animation team behind this studio was willing to put in such good work on something that was destined to be seen by very few people (I’ve had Under the Red Hood on DVD for years and never even considered watching this short, which was bundled with it, until this project). I might be giving too much away about when I’m writing about this, but alongside The Spectre, this one would make a great addition to a playlist of spooky season shorts.
It’s very strange to hear Green Arrow voiced by Neal McDonough. The first piece of his work that comes to mind (after this role in Star Trek: First Contact, of course) is his longtime role as DC villain Damien Darhk in the CW TV series universe, where he first appeared as the primary antagonist on Arrow in that show’s fourth season before becoming an antagonist on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s also interesting that this one, which is a little lackluster in comparison to the previous two, is directed by the same person, Joaquim Dos Santos. After this, he mostly spent time focused on TV projects (notably working on every episode of Legend of Korra in some capacity) before he went on to become one of the co-directors of Across the Spider-Verse last year.
This short features Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen trying to get to the airport to pick up his girlfriend, Dinah “Black Canary” Lance, fiddling with an engagement ring in his pocket. He faces some difficulty in getting there on time as he’s fighting traffic that’s the result of a visit from royalty, the child princess of Vlatava, Perdita (Ariel Winter). It’s fortunate for her that he’s there, as he assists in the foiling of an assassination attempt, but the sheer number of snipers and goons forces him to protect her as they try to escape from them. As it turns out, Perdita’s father died the night before, making her the heir apparent to the throne and the only thing preventing her uncle, Count Vertigo, from ascending instead. Vertigo has hired the villainous archer Merlyn (Malcolm McDowell) to take out Perdita, and although Arrow has faced him before and been bested by him every time, he’s been practicing.
This one is serviceable, but nothing to get too excited about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dos Santos was simply spread too thin, having to get all three of these first few shorts out, all for release in one calendar year. This one was penned by Greg Weisman, who I wrote about more extensively in my review of Catwoman: Hunted, and if you’re a Young Justice fan, Weisman has stated that this short is (essentially) in the same canon, so that may make it worth your while.
Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam (2010), released only in the DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection
This one is pretty rote. Orphan boy Billy Batson (Zach Callison, of Steven Universe fame) is living in a rundown slum after being kicked out of his foster home by his abusive parents, and he’s the runtiest of the street kids so he’s a target for bullies. The closest thing he has to a friend is Clark Kent (George Newbern), who is writing a series of articles about the boy’s struggles. When Billy is attacked by the supervillain Black Adam (Arnold Vosloo), Superman is thus close at hand to rescue him. From there, he gets an infodump from a mysterious wizard who tells him that Black Adam was once the wizard’s champion and had then been corrupted, forcing the wizard to banish him to a distant place, so far that he has spent the last 5000 years returning for his revenge. The wizard bestows his powers on Billy and tells him to speak the name “Shazam,” and you know how this goes from here. Billy turns into the adult superhero Shazam, he and Superman team up and defeat Black Adam, and he chooses to turn back into his human form and age into dust instantly rather than be banished again. And, of course, Billy gets to turn the tables on his bullies as Shazam, much in the vein of Bastian at the end of The NeverEnding Story.
There’s nothing special about this one, I’m afraid. It’s serviceable, but not special. The only thing interesting about it is, perhaps, that this features both a previous Superman voice actor reprising the role (Newbern had previously voiced the role on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and would later reprise the role further in Superman vs. The Elite and Justice League vs. The Fatal Five) and one who would play the character in the future (Jerry O’Connell, who voices Batson’s superheroic alter ego Shazam, would portray him in all of the so-called DCAMU movies). The animation is up to par, and the narrative is sufficient. Not exactly high praise, but this one may set the tone of the exact median of quality of this whole franchise overall. Perfectly balanced, not that interesting.
This one is unusual in that, unlike the others on this list, it was intended to be a tie-in to the film with which it was released. Eliza Dushku reprises her role as Selina “Catwoman” Kyle from Year One, this time on the trail of a Gotham heavy with diamond teeth called Rough Cut (John DiMaggio). After his thugs, trying to kill a cat, chase the poor thing over the edge of a bridge, it’s revealed that the cat was rescued by Selena, who recognizes the ornate collar the cat is wearing. She tracks Rough Cut down to a strip club, where a dancer named Buttermilk Skye (Tara Strong), who gets a diamond from Rough Cut as a tip, is warned by fellow stripper Lily (Cree Summer) that another girl got the same tip the week before, and no one has seen her recently. Catwoman appears through the back door and convinces the ladies to take a break, whereupon she takes the stage in her latex get-up, to much enthusiasm. Even her whip-cracking is appreciated, at least until she starts taking out Rough Cut’s lackeys. He escapes her, leading to a prolonged chase sequence that ultimately ends with the gangster driving off of Gotham pier in a hook truck, taking out the ship that was arriving to take on his latest shipment: trafficked women. One of them is a friend of Selena’s who returns her bracelet to her as the rescued women are tended by paramedics.
Catwoman is … weird. It’s not bad, per se, but much of it feels more like late night 90s softcore than anything else. Lauren Montgomery was the director on this one, having previously directed First Flight and Crisis on Two Earths, and having been a storyboard artist on Under the Red Hood and All Star-Superman, so she’d worked on pretty much all of these projects that I enjoyed until she left this franchise in 2016. It’s an unusually cheesecake-y product for her, although given that she’s spent so much of her career working on these superhero franchises, maybe she just wanted to direct a short film that’s twenty-five percent stripping. The work is impressive; Buttermilk and Selena both move with lithe, athletic grace, which I assume is pretty difficult to capture in a short that was budgeted as the add-on to a DVD that was already destined to haunt CVSes all over the country for the next fifteen years. But it’s also intended to capture sexiness for an audience that I am not a part of, so I mostly spent that time waiting for the scene to move on. At least when Tony Soprano and the boys are at the Bada Bing, there’s some narrative happening. I recently put on a David DeCoteau film in the background for some housework (it was Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks, if you must know, because of Sean Faris), and there were so many lingering scenes of swimming pools, locker rooms, and shirtless football tossing in that one. Those sequences exist solely because those movies are just material that you can fap to but also have on the shelf in your mid-aughts dorm room without having to come out to your roommate. Maybe the problem is just that I’ve never understood erotic animation, which this very much is, but I’ve honestly dwelt on it for so long that it’s starting to feel strange, so I’ll just say: to each their own. The chase sequence that follows is pretty good, and the dock setpiece works, but overall, this one didn’t leave much of an impression.
This was the hardest one of these to find. Most of them were available online to stream or download on the grey market, but for Sgt. Rock I had to go out and find a physical copy of Hush to watch this on. Luckily, there was a blockwide pop-up shopping experience going on outside of my local rental shop this weekend, so I was able to get in and get out with the movie without anyone paying too much mind to my renting of something so embarrassing. And, since I was only able to rent a BluRay copy, that also meant fighting with my extremely finicky machine just to get it to play (tweezers were involved).
This short stars Karl Urban as the titular army sergeant, who awakens in a hospital after his squad is killed in the line of duty in WWII. A superior officer tasks him with taking leadership over a small group of “unusual” soldiers to take out a Nazi base that intelligence reports indicate houses a facility that is in the middle of creating a doomsday device. Said group turns out to be the “Creature Commandos,” a trio of monster dudes: a wolfman, a Nosferatu-esque vampire named Velcoro, and a reanimated Frankenstein(’s monster). On the mission, they manage to enter the facility and discover a full Frankensteinian reanimation set-up, which the re-alived private sets out to destroy. As it turns out, this is the final weapon: undead, reanimated troops made up of the fallen enemy, with the first successes having been Rock’s previous squad, who attack their former leader and his current crew. Rock’s current forces emerge victorious, and when the Nazi major on-site teases Rock that he knows that they must be taken as captives as Rock must have been ordered to bring them in alive so that the U.S. could incorporate this research into their own war effort, Rock allows Velcoro to drain the Nazi scientists dry: “Bottoms up.”
Again, I might be giving away too much about how far in advance I am working on this project, but this strikes me as a perfect little Halloween short, and would work great in a mini-screening with The Spectre and Jonah Hex, although it beats the hell out of me how you’re going to get ahold of this short and somehow get it onto a playlist for you and your friends. I had no idea what I was going into with this one, and when it started, I was immediately bored by yet another scene of soldiers engaged in infantry fighting, but this is really only the prologue until we get to the good stuff, like a wolfman devouring Nazi soldiers and a vampire turning into a bat so that he can fly over a wall and open the reinforced door from the other side. This is the first of these shorts that I think would have really benefited from being extended to a feature length, as this was a pretty fun little ride.
Another little spooky short, this one both sweet and near and dear to my heart. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is my favorite comic book series of all time, and my favorite character within it (after Delirium) is Death, a personification of the concept and a member of “The Endless.” The Endless are not gods; they existed before mankind dreamt of gods, and are as old as the universe itself. First came Destiny, who was born alongside existence, as existence required Destiny to, well, exist. With the first living things came Destiny’s sister Death, as life does not exist without Death; she was followed by Sandman’s title character Dream, whose existence was necessitated when the first living thing to dream did so. (And so on and so forth.) Death was presented in Sandman as a perky goth lady, which has become a huge influence on the idea in pop culture and in real life, and some of my favorite stories from that series revolve around her (notably issues #43, “Brief Lives pt. 3,” and #20, “Façade,” which is my favorite Sandman story of all). It’s weird to see her being written by someone other than Gaiman, but this one was penned by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written the screenplays for Justice League Dark and City of Demons at this point, so his spooky DC credentials were already demonstrated.
Death follows a man named Vincent Omata (Leonardo Nam), a painter who never made it. Despite his love for making art from his youth, he was discouraged by his father as well as his art school professors —one of whom told him that he had no real talent for art and should consider transferring to the university’s dental school program. As an adult, he now finds himself unable to keep a job painting gates, as in, covering the entrance gate to Arkham Asylum in a new coat of paint rather than painting landscapes with such fixtures within them. His various personal demons appear to him in the guise of fiery specters that take the shape of people who have discouraged him, speaking the harsh words to him once again. After a chance encounter with a cute goth girl who gives him her top hat, she reappears later when he sparks up a cigarette to warn him that “Those things will kill [him],” and he offers to show her his artwork. He asks if he can paint her portrait, and he does; however, even realizing that he must have worked all through the night and it should be morning, he notices that the sun has not yet risen. In reality, Vincent has died, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette, and that the woman he has painted, Death, has shown him a kind of tenderness by stopping the night from passing until he could complete one last work of art, one that he can be proud of. He begs her not to let the painting burn, and as she takes his hand to lead him to the door that opens into whatever comes after life, she does ensure that the portrait he painted of her survives, leaving it behind in the charred ruins of his apartment like that viral Stanley cup that survived the Kia Sorento fire.
This is another entry in the horror-adjacent shorts that form this sub-franchise, but one that focuses less on fright than on the only thing that all humans share: the inevitability of death. Like Sandman before it, the short chooses to imagine Death not as an end, but a transition, and not as something to fear, but as something to accept. It’s a lovely little story, and, if you’re only ever going to see one of these, this is the one to catch.
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, Boomeris 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.
I’ve seen the first fifteen minutes of this movie a few times now. It’s not boring, really, but it was something that I just kept trying to watch in the late hours when I didn’t feel like expending the effort to think about what to watch, so I would often put it on and then fall asleep. Now that I’ve managed to make it all the way through, it’s another solid but unexceptional entry in this franchise. And man, this period of films sure does have a hard-on for Solomon Grundy, don’t they?
After a pre-credits opening in which teenaged Kara Zor-El (Meg Donnelly) learns from her mother that she has been accepted to the “military guild” on the same day that Krypton is destroyed, she escapes in the only working pod, only to be knocked off course. When we catch up to the present day, Kara—still a teenager even though her infant cousin has now grown up and become Superman because of her pod having taken longer to reach Earth—is having trouble adjusting to life on our planet. Everything is technologically inferior in a way that isolates her. When she attempts to stop Solomon Grundy from going on a rampage, she’s confronted by a man who is upset that her activity has resulted in wanton property damage. Batman (Jensen Ackles) pulls Superman (Darren Criss) aside and says that Kara’s impulsivity makes her dangerous, and that something has to be done about this. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the same as the beginning of Apocalypse. As in that film, the solution is to send Kara off to train elsewhere with people who are more like her; in this case, that means heading off to the 31st Century, to train at the academy of the Legion of Superheroes, a kind of interplanetary Justice League of the future. There, she’s initially smitten with Mon-El, a flying invincible hero of the Superman mold, and has an instant altercation with a man she recognizes as Brainiac, but whom she later learns is fellow legionnaire in training Brainiac 5 (Harry Shum, Jr.). A quick tour of the grounds sets the groundwork for action later in the film, including foreshadowing the presence of a vault of confiscated weapons, which is subject to a heist later in the film.
Here’s a bit of a meta-spoiler; the animation studio is going to do a massive reset of this continuity after just one more of these, a film titled Warworld. That means that this is, for all intents and purposes, the second to last in this sub-franchise. After one Superman film, a sort-of Flash movie that mostly took place in an alternate past, a king-sized Batman flick, and a Green Lantern buddy space opera, we’re on our fifth film, and we’re already leaving a lot of story potential out there on the court to be swept under the rug as having happened between movies while racing toward a reset button. That begs the question of why they would even make these as interconnected movies in the first place if that interconnection is purely a matter of branding (oops, maybe I just answered my own question there). For all its flaws and variances between the films that made it up, the DCAMU at least felt like there was a reason for it to exist, and there was some reward for following them in the form of longer character arcs. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Here, we get a few brief minutes of Superman and Batman in the present before Supergirl’s gallivanting off to the future, and a quick check-in right in the middle of Kara’s adventures in superschooling to let us know that there’s a terrorist organization that almost managed to acquire Brainiac 1’s head from the lab in which it is being studied. Other than that, there’s no reason for this to not simply be a solo Supergirl outing, or it could keep the title it has now if there’s some concern about the movie selling fewer DVDs if it’s more obviously about a woman (the poor sales of Catwoman: Hunted probably contributed to this). The target demographic of this movie is very, very concerned about cooties.
What we do have is pretty rote. The rest of the student body at Legionnaire Academy is pretty lackluster. The most impressive is a woman who can split into three (and only three) versions of herself; the rest include your normal assortment of ragtag underdogs whose uncool powers are completely useless, until they’re all working in tandem at the end and everyone gets a moment to shine. There’s a guy who can turn himself invisible (but not anything else, like his clothing), a shy “phantom girl,” a man who can inflate himself and bounce around, and everybody’s favorite actually-a-comic-book-character Arms-Fall-Off-Boy, whose arms fall off. None of them have any hope of becoming Legionnaires when they complete their training, as it’s widely agreed that superChad Mon-El has the single open position on the team locked down. For half a second I got excited that they might be teasing a Mon-El/Brainiac 5 romantic pairing, but instead we have a pretty rote story about Kara having a crush on Mon-El before her friction with Brainiac 5 turns into begrudging respect, which is itself replaced by romantic interest. Brainiac 5 is a total Spock, though, since he won’t shut up about how he’s the smartest, most logical guy in the universe; I get the appeal. There is a traitor in the ranks, though, and given that this is little more than a futuristic variation on the stock “nerds vs. jocks” plot, you can probably guess who turns out to be the mole. Turns out they’re a member of the same terrorist organization that Bats and Superman dealt with in the 21st Century, which has existed for over a thousand years now and which serves one goal: help Brainiac (1) conquer the universe. Of course the man behind everything is Brainiac; it’s always, always Brainiac. I’m so tired.
As it turns out, one of the things in the superweapon vault has the potential to rewrite existence and Brainiac wants it but even he wasn’t smart enough to bypass the security system, so he let successive generations of himself become smarter until Brainiac 5 came along, whose sense of heroism could be manipulated into opening the vault. For what it’s worth, I am giving the film an extra half star purely because Brainiac 1 shows up at the end with Brainiacs 2-4 sticking out of his lumpy flesh and crying out in pain like Monstro Elisasue, so that was fun (he’s even defeated because all of his constituent parts decide they want ultimate power for themselves, and he’s torn apart by his own absorbed clones). Some amount of world shattering wigglies do expand, which I wouldn’t normally mention, but it might be important later since we’re speedrunning toward a crisis-style reset. In the end, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 make out and get together, and the Legionnaires who were conveniently kept away from HQ while all of this was going on return home and say that they’re going to let in all of the wacky misfits, even Arms-Fall-Off Boy! The end. Is this the last we’ve seen of Brainiac? I sure hope so. Y’all can keep Sinestro, too.
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, Boomeris 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.
Of all of the films on this list, this was the one I was least looking forward to. The few clips that I saw prior to my screening did not endear me to its 3D animation style, and it seemed squarely aimed at a child audience based on the premise alone. What this ended up being was much better than I expected, even if its PG-13 rating is a little baffling.
Jonathan Kent (Jack Dylan Grazer) is about to turn twelve, and is old enough to start to resent the frequent absences of his journalist father, Clark (Travis Willingham), despite frequent lectures from his mother Lois (Laura Bailey) about the importance of the fourth estate. When dear old dad misses Jonathan’s baseball game on his birthday, the boy broods in his room and runs from his father when he does come home, taking off into a cornfield before his emotional stress gets the better of him and he manifests heat vision. Hiding in the barn afterward, his father reveals to him for the first time that he’s not always off chasing stories, but averting tsunamis and stopping falling space debris, because pops is Superman. Jonathan is delighted at this news (despite, like many children, having a preference for the “cooler” Batman). After a touching father-and-son flight around the world in the vein of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” musical sequence, the two go to Gotham, where Superman introduces his son to Batman (Troy Baker) and the latter’s own son, Damian/Robin (Jack Griffo). There’s immediate friction between the elitist Damian and “farm boy” Jonathan, and their conflict belies Damian’s own insecurities, specifically that the Teen Titans don’t want him because of his tendencies toward both violence and lone-wolfism, rejecting him from the team. When an interstellar invading force assimilates huge swathes of the earth’s population, including the Justice League and the Titans, it’s up to the boys to put aside their differences and save both their dads and the world.
Strangely, I had an easier time adjusting to the animation style here than I have in the “Tomorrowverse” movies, perhaps because these character models don’t constantly call to mind Adult Swim shows of a bygone era. It’s certainly not up to something like Pixar’s output, but it’s pretty decent, if occasionally wonky. I don’t think we ever see anyone close the front door of the Kent farmhouse, as characters often walk in and leave the door wide open while they have a conversation until the scene ends, so it really does seem like everyone here was raised in the proverbial barn. There are even scenes that were rather impressive, most notably the scene in which Green Arrow, bow cocked, searches the JL’s “Watchtower” satellite for a potential invader, as there’s a lot of fun rotation around the character and the movement of both model and lighting was effectively moody. There are also several scenes of characters walking out of dark shadows to reveal that they’ve been taken over by Starro spores that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comfort Halloween watches, The Faculty, and that always gets points with me.
Characterwise, I appreciated that this film had one of the most infuriatingly unlikeable versions of Damian Wayne to date, and that his character arc over the course of this one moves him to a more sympathetic place, which was impressive. When we first meet him, he’s snide and condescending while Bruce stands by embarrassed, apologizing for the fact that his spawn is a bratty little edgelord. He even kicks Jonathan over the edge of one of the many non-OSHA-compliant platforms in the Batcave as a “test” to see if he can get the other boy’s flight power to activate in a traumatic situation (it does not work, and Jonathan is almost smashed to death on stalacmites). His decision to head straight to Jonathan’s school and recruit him to his “save the dads” mission is pragmatic, but also speaks to his desire to prove that he can be a team player. For his part, Jonathan himself is in a meeting with the principal following an altercation with a bully named Melvin; the school administrator tells Jonathan that Melvin is troubled and that if Jonathan can extend the other boy a little grace and look past his harsh exterior, people like Melvin can be the most loyal friend one can ask for. This doesn’t really seem to be true in the case of Melvin (that kid’s a little asshole), but it does echo through his scenes with Damian, as Jonathan is able to win him over through his own clever thinking and spirit of determination. It’s not the most nuanced or original storytelling, but it’s not talking down to its audience.
Speaking of which, I’m not really sure who this film is supposed to be for. I mentioned that PG-13 rating above, and for most of the runtime, I was hard-pressed to think of why that might be the case. Not every movie that’s about children is for children, obviously. No child should see Come and See or Graveyard of the Fireflies before they’re old enough to process what they’re seeing. This, however, definitely has the air of being made for a younger audience than these movies are normally suited for. In fact, the moment that a character said “damn,” I was a little shocked, as Super Sons had theretofore been so … family-friendly? The plot point about young Jonathan feeling ignored by his father because he missed the kid’s baseball game is a cliche lifted straight out of Hook, and both Damian and Jonathan’s playground insults are feeble in a way that couldn’t possibly interest an adult audience but might, perhaps, pass muster with a child. I found myself surprisingly touched by all the time that Clark and Jonathan spend together in Act I, but it’s not sophisticated, adult stuff; it’s for kids. After the midpoint, however, things start to get a little more violent, as if the film was lulling you into a false sense of security before moving on to Starro’s little seastar-with-an-eye things horribly emerging from characters’ mouths and, in the finale, all of those eyes bursting bloodily when the hive mind is defeated. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly, since it takes what is clearly a PG family movie into something that’s more in line with what the standard audience of these movies would expect, but I find it hard to imagine them not being bored with the film’s more squeaky-clean daycare-safe first half. Ultimately, it’s pretty decent, if tonally uneven, and for someone who normally rolls his eyes at stories about fathers and sons, I found this story inoffensive and occasionally tender.
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, Boomeris 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.
We don’t talk about video games around here very often. Although our bread and butter is film talk, obviously, we occasionally diverge and talk about books, music, and Star Trek. I enjoy video games, although I wouldn’t consider myself much of a gamer. When I enjoy something, I usually do nothing but play that game to completion (or close enough to completion that I’m satisfied) and then might not pick up a controller again for months, and even over a year at certain points in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever even brought it up over on the podcast, although if you go back through the archives and are curious as to why I didn’t write a single review in September of last year, the solution to that mystery is that I had just gotten Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m the kind of person who thinks that the newest system is always too expensive, and normally wait until the next generation is out before I even consider purchasing one. The XBox 360 released for Christmas 2004, but I didn’t buy one until I used my tax return to do so in February of 2008. I used nothing but that as my entire entertainment center for over a decade. The PS4 was released in 2013 and the PS5 in 2020, and I upgraded to the PS4 on Black Friday 2019, when the prices were already starting to drop and there was additional savings. But what really prompted me to upgrade was the release of two games that had me salivating: Spider-Man and Injustice 2. The latter of these was a sequel to a game that I had played on my 360, and although I had little interest in the narrative (such as it was; this is a one-to-two player 1v1 fighter of the Mortal Kombat mold after all), but I was intrigued about getting to play as Supergirl, my love for whom is well documented in these reviews. The narrative of the first game is simple; a furious Superman, enraged at having been tricked into killing a pregnant Lois by Joker, forgoes due process and just straight up kills the murderous clown. This ends up splitting various heroes down ethical lines as Superman slides further and further down the slippery moral slope, ending with him setting up a regime. When you play the storyline (rather than just the arena), you mostly play as members of the rebellion against this despot.
It’s not the most original storyline. We’re up to our necks in “What if Superman, but evil?” at this point, and if you’re thinking that maybe this was before that was such a tired idea, then you’re sort of right. The game came out in 2013, while this film came out in 2021, at a point in time in which the world already had two seasons of The Boys. In 2013, this was fine — not just because it hadn’t been done to death yet, but also because it wasn’t supposed to be a movie, it was just supposed to be the bare skeleton upon which a fighting game was very thinly predicated. But piggies love slop (and I’m not excluding myself here) so of course the game got a prequel comic, and the prequel comic got an animated adaptation, and here we are. I never read that comic (and you can’t make me), but there were apparently enough changes that the film has a disputed reputation. For what its worth, this is one of the most fan-fictiony things that I have ever seen with a full animation budget, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. This movie is the equivalent of watching a child smash action figures into one another and weld together different half-remembered things that they know about characters into a messy narrative, except it’s also sadistic in a way that seems designed to appeal to someone who craves more adult media but can’t fathom going out of their DC comfort zone.
The film opens on Clark (Justin Hartley) and Lois (Laura Bailey) in bed together, when Clark is awakened because he hears an extra heartbeat, revealing that Lois is pregnant. She goes off to work while Clark gets his Superman on and meets with Batman (Anson Mount), who deduces the good news even before his friend can reveal it. Unfortunately, the Joker (Kevin Pollak) is in Metropolis, where he murders Jimmy Olsen and kidnaps Lois. The whole league is brought in to try and find her before something bad can happen, and they work together to find that Joker and Harley Quinn (Gillian Jacobs) have stolen a submarine and that one of the nuclear warheads is missing. Superman brings the sub back to shore and boards it, and inhales some Scarecrow gas that has been laced with kryptonite, then attacks what he believes to be Doomsday and takes the monster into space, only to discover upon exiting the atmosphere that he’s dragged his lover and their child into space, where they both die. Worse still, a timer has been surgically grafted onto Lois’s heart, so that when it stops, the missing nuke detonates in Metropolis, atomizing the city. While Green Arrow (Reid Scott) takes Harley into what amounts to protective custody, Superman tracks down Batman and the Joker to Arkham, where he—over Batman’s protests—extrajudicially murders Joker. This sets the two heroes at odds with one another, as Superman starts down the slippery slope with Wonder Woman (Janet Varney), Cyborg (Brandon Michael Hall), Bruce’s own son Damian/Robin (Zach Callison), and others joining his regime, while Batman, Arrow, Catwoman, Dick/Nightwing, and others form a “rebellion” against Superman’s overreach. This starts small, with enforced peacekeeping in the Middle East through invasion and deconstruction of the power structures of fictional countries like Bialya and Qurac, but gets out of hand when he murders an entire warehouse full of young ravers because of their idolization of Joker as a figurehead against Superman’s fascism. From here, it’s hero versus hero, yawn, etc.
You know that thing that people love to mock about MCU movies where a character says, “Well, that just happened,” even though no one has ever uttered that line in any of those? In this movie, someone actually says it, and I couldn’t believe just how creatively bankrupt the film already was at that point, a mere fifteen minutes in. It doesn’t bode well for the film overall, and is oddly also a part of the only thing in the movie that gave me any joy, which was the interaction between Arrow and Harley. He’s a very self-serious man, and their playful antipathy (complete with periodic gassings of one another) is some of the only levity that this gritty film musters. I’ve loved Jacobs since Community and she’s an inspired choice for Harley here, and she’s clearly having a lot of fun with it. Their rapport is fun, especially when she manages to crack through Arrow’s resistance on certain things (notably, she criticizes him for naming his secret HQ the “Arrowcave,” noting that “Batcave” makes sense as bats live in caves, she recommends the “Quiver,” which he adopts fairly quickly as he realizes that she has a point). That’s about all that there is to enjoy here, however, as the rest of the film alternates between being utterly dour, repetitive in its action sequences, and occasionally just straight up fanservice of the kind a child playing with toys would enjoy. What if Damian killed Nightwing? But, but what if when that happened Dick became, like, a version of Deadman called Deadwing (no, really)? It’s best enjoyed if you have the mind of a child, but isn’t really appropriate for children, which means it’s best suited exactly for the kind of manchildren that, to its credit, it’s clearly made for. That’s not a recipe for a good movie, though, and it shows in the final product.
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, Boomeris 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.
With this film, a new subfranchise was born, entitled the “Tomorrowverse,” inspired by the title Superman: Man of Tomorrow. It’s yet another origin story for our old pal Superman: raised by simple farmers, aware of his extraterrestrial origin but with no knowledge of his people or culture; starting out as a flying vigilante in street clothes before Ma Kent creates his iconic outfit out of the clothing in which he was swaddled as a baby; meeting Lois Lane as the newest member of the Daily Planet; debuting as a public figure by saving a launched vehicle from plummeting into Metropolis; believing that he may have found an ally in Lex Luthor coming to trust him before the inevitable betrayal. If that all sounds a little rote, it’s because it is. Sure, there are some novel elements. Here, the big blue Boy Scout learns about his origins from Martian Manhunter, and the creation of longtime Superman villain Parasite is because of an attack from the interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Even with that in mind, few of these films have plated it as safe as Man of Tomorrow. As a result, the end product is fine – 82 minutes of palatable, safe Superman stuff, but not something that you could call special or interesting.
After an opening sequence in which an elementary-aged Clark has to go home from a sleepover at another boy’s house; he’s disquieted by his peer’s reaction to an old horror movie in which the villainous alien invader reveals his true face. Flashing forward, the now adult Clark Kent (Darren Criss) is an intern at The Daily Planet, which mostly means that he’s fetching coffee for people with bylines. Delivering the staff’s orders to an event where Lex Luthor (Zachary Quinto, an inspired choice) is planning to launch his latest doohickey into space, Luthor is confronted by a grad student named Lois Lane (Alexandra Daddario), who exposes his unconcerned-to-the-point-of-malice negligence about the people living near the launch site. Clark, in the middle of a quick conversation with a janitor at the facility that serves to establish said janitor’s humanity before exposure to space technobabble turns him into one of the film’s antagonistic forces, leaps into action to stop everyone from being reduced to ashes by the falling debris. After this is done, he’s now a public figure. Ma Kent gives him the suit, he congratulates Lois on her scoop while learning that she’s got her sights on taking down the so-called “Superman” now, and he continues to find himself pursued by a shadowy figure. Said figure eventually reveals himself to be the shapeshifting J’onn J’onzz, aka Martian Manhunter (Ike Amadi), and establishes that they are both the last of their kind. When he first came to Earth, he sought out others like him and briefly touched the mind of the infant Kal-El, and in so doing was able to retain the baby’s earliest memories and can share the images of Clark’s birth parents with him, as well as learn the truth about his home planet’s destruction. This sets up the appearance of Lobo (Ryan Hurst), a bounty hunter from space who has been sent by parties unknown to “collect” the last Kryptonian. The initial conflict with Lobo results in one of the alien’s devices going off near that poor doomed janitor (Brett Dalton), interacting with the lab equipment around him to turn him into “Parasite,” a purple monster that absorbs energy, growing stronger with each encounter, becoming another threat to Metropolis that the freshman Superman must juggle.
Where there are highlights, they come mostly at the beginning and end of the film. The opening, in which a young Clark is disturbed by his friend’s innocent statements about scary aliens, sets up a story element that does return later, when a now-adult Superman tells a gathered mob that the monster attacking the power plant is human while he himself is extraterrestrial. It ends up a bit underdeveloped, and it’s a shame that the opening scene is the strongest one. When we first meet the man who will become Parasite, we learn about his home life (wife, elementary aged daughter, another one on the way), his past (two tours in Iraq), and that he has his suspicions about what’s going on at the laboratory that employs him. When he gets turned into a monster, I thought to myself, “Gee, this sure is a lot like Spider-Man 3’s Sandman plot,” and damned if the film didn’t follow through. We see him visit his daughter, he contemplates the monster he becomes, and he ultimately sacrifices himself when forced to consider his humanity. It’s a little cheap to go back to “the villain is defeated by love” as a climax after so recently (and more cynically and satisfactorily) going to that well in Constantine: City of Demons. Nothing is really new here, and everything that happens between the beginning and the end is such a mishmash that I had to go back and see if the satellite falling and Lobo encounter were part of the same set piece or not (they’re separate events, but I can’t separate them in my mind). Quinto’s Luthor is fresh; he’s really bringing back a lot of that old Sylar energy, and that’s fun. Lois and Clark have little in the way of chemistry at this point, but there is something that’s at least thoughtful in the way that she reveals to Clark that she plans to reschedule her Superman interview last minute as a power play, which allows him to pull a reverse Uno on her by doing the same as Superman.
As of this writing, this is the final Superman solo animated outing from this outfit, other than something called “Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons,” which looks like shit. That may end up saving this from being the worst of the Supes films, since it’s otherwise the most banal and flavorless of the bunch. Doomsday was pretty average but was elevated by a voice performance from Anne Heche that made it something more special than it really had the right to be. All-Star Superman has been one of the real highlights of this watch-through; Superman vs. The Elite was less than the sum of its parts, but the highs in did have were more than anything that was on display here; Unbound was characterized by more complex interpersonal dynamics. Even when these films have seemed immature or as if they were catering to an audience that it didn’t want to get “too cerebral” for, none of them have felt more like a Saturday morning cartoon than this one. The new artistic design is, to give it credit, very evocative of the thick ink lines that comic books are known for, and perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I was not won over. In truth, that makes this not only the least interesting Superman solo film, it’s also the ugliest (until Super Sons—shudder). It feels like a real slap to give a movie that’s as inoffensive and wispy as this one such a low star rating since there’s really nothing wrong with it; there’s just nothing really there.
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, Boomeris 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.
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, Boomeris 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.
Following on the heels of The Death of Superman, this film picks up six months later. Despite the appearance of four heirs apparent to the mantle of the Man of Steel, crime in Metropolis is on the rise. Who are these mystery men? There’s the youthful “Metropolis Kid” (who insists he is the new Superman but is nicknamed “Superboy”), a teen with Superman’s powers; there’s the more “energy projection” less “physical punching” Last Son of Krypton (who is later dubbed “The Eradicator” because of his catchphrase that “[X] must be eradicated”), who practices a less nuanced view of morality and justice than the Superman we knew and loved; there’s a new Man of Steel as embodied by super-scientist John Henry Irons in a mech suit (you know him as “Steel”); and finally, claiming to be the real Superman reanimated and undergoing ongoing repair by Kryptonian technology, there’s a half-mechanical Man of Tomorrow, a “Cyborg Superman,” if you will. In the midst of all of this, Lois and the Kents are forced to veil their grief, as “Clark” is simply “missing,” while they alone know that Superman and Clark were buried in the same coffin, although that resting place has been disturbed and the body of the late Kryptonian is missing . . .
I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying this one. The last film was little more than set-up for this one, and to be honest, there was more foreshadowing in that one that paid off here than even I realized. For instance, I did mention that there was a tour that Lois took of the lab where Kal-El’s ship was being stored and that there were holograms that were part of that ship’s records, but I didn’t imagine at the time that this was laying the groundwork for one of the false heirs, Eradicator, to actually be a hologram from the ship, one that we got to see in the first film. It had also been a while since we saw Kal-El and Diana dating, so the reminder in Death that they had a past not only contributed to the reality of their close friendship in that film, but also laid groundwork for some really nice interaction between Diana and Lois. That’s a level of detail I didn’t expect to see, and was pleasantly surprised by. These movies usually run half the length of their MCU “counterparts,” so there’s a lot less of the casual hanging out that characterizes those films and which were such an important component in that series becoming as popular as it did at its height. They run leaner and sparser, but the decision to split this overarching story into two films serves both but does this one a lot of good (that this one is 87 minutes, one of the longer of these animated features, also helps). There’s room to breathe, and there came a moment in the film where I thought to myself “Wow, a lot sure has happened in this one,” which is not something that often crosses my mind during these screenings.
There are a lot of touches here that I really like. Superboy is initially pretty obnoxious, but the revelation that he picks up his cringeworthy slang from nineties sitcoms makes it a little more tolerable, and there’s an unusually subtle animation choice that works as a nice piece of foreshadowing; the supposed clone of Superman does not share the hero’s blue eyes, and his eyes are instead grey, like Luthor’s, which makes sense when we later learn that Lex’s DNA was added to the mix. That’s an uncommon level of attention to detail for these movies, and it did not go unnoticed in this household. The misdirect regarding the Fortress of Solitude caretaker robots referring to “Kal-El” absorbing energy while the camera pans past Eradicator is a nice one too; although we in the audience know that he’s not the real Superman, it still creates an air of mystery as to why his robots would think that Eradicator was, until it’s revealed that this was the audience’s confusion, not theirs. The scenes between Lois and Irons are also a lot of fun as she, a woman infamous for not seeing through the thinnest of disguises, says that his civilian cover isn’t very good. As the most straightforwardly heroic of the potential new Supermen, he feels like a good addition to this universe, alongside Superboy, who is a lot more fun once the narrative stops making him such a horndog.
Within the narrative, there’s a really nice escalation of stakes when a visit from the president (who bears a marked resemblance to Hillary Clinton, which, um) to the site of the launch of the Justice League’s new Watchtower satellite. The Cyborg Superman, who has just spent some time trying to convince Lois that he’s the real Supes—just with really extensive prosthetics and some memory loss—mostly stands by when a boom tube portal opens and several of Darkseid’s minions, called “parademons,” exit and start to attack the site. Although the combined forces of the League and the Supermen are enough to fight off the parademons, the portal through which they arrived “falls” to the earth and appears to kill the League, leaving only a crater. From there, it’s revealed that the Cyborg Superman is none other than Hank Henshaw, the presumed dead astronaut from part one, who was “rescued” by Darkseid so that he could be an emissary. He begins to hand out devices that give normal people superpowers, although this is a feint intended to use the newly empowered individuals to help bring Darkseid’s forces to earth. And, of course, the real Superman, who has been slowly recovering inside of his pod, emerges just in time to resume the fight, although he’s initially too weak to do much fighting, until the Watchtower is launched and the sun rises, and … well, the rest is history.
Everyone gets a moment to shine here, which is nice. I was surprised by how emotionally invested I had become by the time of this film’s climax, and the moment when Steel and Superboy team up to distract the assimilated Darkseid army was surprisingly potent; I didn’t pump my fist in the air, but I did get a big smile on my face, despite the fact that the fight scenes in these movies are rarely that exciting to me. Lois gets to have her face-off with the man who claimed to be her dead lover, and even Lex gets a rare moment of heroism when he manages to activate a portal that allows the Justice League to return from the purgatory dimension they were stuck in and act as the cavalry in the final battle. The fight scenes themselves are some of the best that these movies have had to offer, too, with more fluid and dynamic motion than these films have mustered, giving a slightly anime-esque feel that I appreciated. I was ultimately pretty taken aback at just how well this one worked, both as a film unto itself and as a part of this subfranchise, and it really stands out. If I had to make a complaint, it’s that there’s an extratextual piece of information that makes this feel somewhat abortive. There are only three of these “DCAMU” films left, one of which is a Batman feature (of course), one of which is a Wonder Woman movie (the first since 2009’s Wonder Woman, ten years and thirty-three films prior), and a Justice League Dark sequel to serve as the finale. It doesn’t really feel like there’s going to be another chance to check in on Superboy and Steel, which is a bit of a bummer, as they really helped with the feeling that this franchise still had a lot of room to grow and expand, and they were fun characters with the potential for some really fascinating storytelling. Of course, if there’s anything about DC that’s proven to be true over the years, it’s that they will squeeze every last drop out of their IP and then grind the dust to make break if they can, so it’s possible that these last three won’t be the last three, but I won’t be holding my breath. This is a high note for one of the last few installments, and I’d give it a chance, especially if you can combine it as a double feature with its predecessor.
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, Boomeris 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.
When I first heard that DC animated had released a film titled The Death of Superman, I wasn’t that surprised. I had, at the time, only recently attempted to watch Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay and had, as I noted in the review of that film, found the opening to be rather tasteless. As a result, when hearing that a new adaptation of Superman’s death was about to be released, I thought, “Didn’t they already do that?” and then thought, “Oh, I guess they’re really just out of ideas.” Now that I’ve watched all of these (so far) in order, I have to say that it was more that this was where an adaptation of that story best slotted into this sub-franchise of the DCAMU, the eleventh of these films overall. It’s a little thin, all things considered, but that’s really because it’s more about setting up the next film than it is about the actual narrative that this adaptation covers. A little comic history: back in the nineties, DC was getting ready to marry Lois and Clark/Superman. However, at the time, the ABC series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was currently airing, and they wanted to marry the two characters to one another, but not for at least another season. So, ABC called in a favor and DC came up with a plan to delay the comic marriage of Clark and Lois until it was time for it to happen in the show as well, for synergy. As a result, they came up with the idea to “kill” Superman temporarily and then have a yearlong series of stories in which various characters attempt to fill the void that his death created, before the real deal triumphantly returns to reassume his place. That one little decision on behalf of a mostly forgotten Superman-adjacent primetime TV show is why we’re here today.
Despite their previous appearances together showing them enjoying one another’s company on a few dates, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) and Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson) are now merely good friends and colleagues, and Superman has taken up dating his beloved Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn) in his civilian identity as Clark Kent, although he has not yet come out to her as being Superman. Wonder Woman encourages him to do so, and his need to make a decision sooner than later is exacerbated when a meeting of the Justice League reveals that The Flash (Christopher Gorham) is getting married soon, and when Kal-El asks Barry if Iris “knows,” Barry tells him that he revealed his identity to her “ages ago.” Shortly after Superman gives Lois a tour of S.T.A.R. Labs, which houses the spacepod that brought him to earth and which contains holographic records that include an image of his parents, his other family, the Kents, arrive in town and want to meet Lois. Over the course of their dinner, Lois comes to realize that she actually knows almost nothing about her beau, for the first time recognizing how guarded he is around her and wondering what the cause is. She leaves him for the night, and he has a heart to heart with his mother wherein she admits that, at her age, it doesn’t seem like keeping secrets is really all that important anymore.
On the less domestic, more superheroic side of things, we learn that Lex Luthor (Rainn Wilson) has found a way to circumvent his house arrest and is still up to nefarious doings, including attempting to create a clone version of Superman which he can control as well as merging earth and Apokoliptian technology to sell to criminals. Seemingly coincidentally, a “boom tube” wormhole opens not far from the earth, spitting out a misshapen asteroid that starts to fall toward the planet, crashing into the ocean. Several of Aquaman (Matt Lanter)’s guards converge on the undersea crash site at the same time as a Lexcorp submersible. All are slain by a monster that emerges from the wreckage, who then makes his way to land and toward Metropolis, killing every living thing in his path. In the meantime, Clark reveals his secret to Lois, only to be called away to deal with the monster after it takes out the entire rest of the Justice League, although Wonder Woman goes down last and hardest. Clark leaves a note for Lois with his last secret (“I love you”) and then heads out to defeat the monster, while also having to deal with interference from Luthor, who gets involved both because of his ego and because he believes that the monster’s genetics will help him to stabilize the unstable makeup of all the deformed clones he’s hiding in the basement of Lexcorp.
While 2007’s Superman: Doomsday served to condense both the “Death of Superman” and the “Reign of the Supermen” comic arcs into a single movie, this one covers only the former and gives that original narrative some breathing room. I’m torn about the ongoing expansion of the Justice League as it seems to continue to happen largely offscreen and/or in the background. Justice League: Dark showed Hawkman and Martian Manhunter hanging around the League’s headquarters in non-speaking roles, and while Manhunter gets a line this film (voiced by Nyambi Nyambi), it’s strange that we don’t get a sense of camaraderie between the characters in the way that the earliest of these movies did. The relationship between Clark and Diana is strong, but the fact that Superman didn’t even know that the Flash was getting married makes it seem like, although this team is growing in number between movies when we’re not getting to see it, they’re not growing in friendship, and that’s the only reason that anyone would have to remain emotionally invested in this series as it advances. At least this one, since Batman is really and truly powerless against an unstoppable killing machine with no weak points, he gets out of the way and lets Superman take center stage here, although Wonder Woman is no slouch either. That inclusion of the whole League, however, allows for a consistent heightening of the stakes that appropriately ratchets the tension, even if we already know Superman is headed for his death because, you know, the title is at the beginning.
Of course, there are the seeds of the Supermen to come in this one. We see a young super clone being grown in a vat like a Venture brother; we meet Dr. John Henry Irons, who will eventually become Steel; we even get to see a hopeful astronaut named Hank Henshaw remain optimistic that Superman will save his crew even as their ship is pelted by debris from the asteroid’s incursion, killing his wife and their other companions, and even if you don’t know where that’s going, it’s successful as foreshadowing. Those are fun little seeds being planted. As for other things I really like, having O’Connell’s real life spouse voice Lois is a cute little treat, and their great natural chemistry comes through in the performance. Romijn is an underappreciated star, in my opinion, but she’s not given the same potency of material here that Anne Heche had on her plate in Doomsday. The best parts of that movie come after the fight with Doomsday that take up only Act I of that film (and which serves as the final climax of this one), wherein Lois grieves in secret because while the whole world mourns Superman she’s mourning Clark, struggles with her conflicting feelings about seeking comfort with the Kents, who are (as in this one) strangers to her, is initially delighted that Superman seems to have been resurrected only to be devastated by his reserved treatment of her. Romijn’s Lois isn’t given as much to do; the story focuses more on Clark’s internal struggle with whether to tell her his secret than it does on her learning the truth and puzzling out all the implications. When she thinks Clark is going to break up with her, she tells him that she’s absolutely not going to stop coming into the office, as if this eighties-ass Kate & Allie punchline is supposed to be empowering, when instead it besmirches the entire script. Hepburn and Tracy it ain’t. This one is fine. It’s not predictable that some fringe film critic is going to sit down and watch all of these movies week after week; it’s logical to assume that the decade plus between the release of Doomsday and this movie would mean that you probably forgot most of the story beats for this even before they changed up other plot elements, or that Doomsday came out when you were too young to notice these things and now you’re a sophomore or a junior and thus the primary audience for this. (We should never really be under any illusion about that, and recognize that these movies rise above mediocrity at any point is kind of a miracle, to be honest.) This one is above the average for this overall franchise, but it’s missing something special that would push it into a more memorable state. It’s a necessary step in this film series, and thus can’t really be skipped, but it’s one that there’s no real reason to recommend other than for that reason, so take from that what you will.
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, Boomeris 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.
Superman: Unbound is a breath of fresh air after what feels like way too many of these animated DC movies in a row that were centered around the morality of killing. Under the Red Hood had, as its central feature, that the Red Hood’s vendetta against Batman wasn’t because the latter let Jason Todd die, but because he let Jason’s killer, Joker, live. Superman vs. The Elite focused on the importance of Superman’s intractable moral code and how his rule that he never uses deadly force ensures that he is a benevolent force in contrast to the “modern” Elite. Dark Knight Returns has Batman’s refusal to break his no-killing rule in order to put Joker down for good also be a major plot point, as his almost doing so and then being framed for the Joker’s murder is the primary axis on which the second part turns. Although all of these movies were adaptations of source material that was spread out across decades of comics, having all of them adapted within such a short time was beginning to feel stale and uncreative. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the next film from this studio, Flashpoint Paradox, will also feature this as a plot point (in the form of an alternate timeline Batman who is willing to murder), it’s nice to get a break from that, if only for one movie.
That Unbound is a little different is a nice change of pace, even if it creates a bit of a snarl regarding which of these movies are related to each other, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given how often this is a problem in the originating medium. Remember when we talked about Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, and how that was an adaptation of the “Supergirl from Krypton” story arc in that book that led into the 2005 relaunch of the Supergirl comic, which was itself created to reintroduce the character after the most recent reboot of the company’s continuity with 2005-6’s Infinite Crisis (not to be confused with 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths)? Long-running Superman foe Brainiac hadn’t been seen since that crossover event, and was reintroduced in 2008 with a storyline in the “Brainiac” storyline from Superman’s main comic, Action Comics, upon which Unbound is based. That comic plot heavily featured the involvement of the new Kara Zor-El Supergirl that we all now know and love, and threads left over from both “Supergirl from Krypton” and her own ongoing series are part of the “Brainaic” arc. So, to recap, this film is an adaptation of a storyline that follows closely upon and directly tied to the storyline that was adapted into Apocalypse, but Unbound is, for some reason, not a sequel to Apocalypse in its film form. It’s okay if you need to take a break or a drink after that, I promise. It’s not really relevant, but has to be mentioned because, in case you’ve never noticed, comic book pedantry is the lifeblood of the internet, where you’re reading this right now.
Unbound opens in the middle of a hostage situation, as Lois Lane (Stana Katic) has been taken by armed men after volunteering to be their captive in lieu of other, less Superman-adjacent people who might otherwise be at higher risk, per her logic. It’s not him who comes to her assistance initially, however, as the first hero to arrive on scene is Supergirl (Molly Quinn), whose recent appearance in this fictional world is given some lip service based on the fact that Lane’s captors don’t recognize her. Superman (Matt Bomer) eventually arrives on the scene, and our unrelated-to-the-plot action cold open comes to a conclusion. Back at the offices of The Daily Planet, one of Lois’s co-workers hits on her piggishly while insinuating that he “knows” Clark and Lois aren’t together because there can be only one reason that Kent is forever disappearing without explanation and is ostensibly single despite being built like a brick house, and it starts with “in” and ends with “the closet.” Clark walks in while this is happening and uses his heat vision to cause the man to take a harmless but humiliating tumble out of his chair, which sets up our emotional conflict for this film: Clark and Lois are dating, she knows his secret identity, she does count on him to rescue her from terrorists but not the office misogynist, she thinks that there’s no reason to keep their relationship a secret while he keeps her at emotional arm’s length with that tired old canard about how their dating as civilians would somehow endanger her, and so on and so forth.
As a side note, for each of these movies that has focused on Superman as the primary character (rather than just as a member of the Justice League), whether as a result of what source material is chosen for adaptation or through deliberate choice, the most traditional Clark/Lois relationships (she adores Superman and either sees Clark as just a friend or is obsessed with proving that he’s secretly the big blue boy scout) has either been excised or used as part of the narrative and then dismissed. In Doomsday, Lois and Superman are openly dating but he refuses to “come out” to her as Clark until the end of the film, when his (temporary) death at the hands of the titular villain put things into perspective for him. In Public Enemies, she’s absent completely, other than an unvoiced cameo at the end of the film, and she’s likewise not present in the entirety of Apocalypse. All Star Superman featured their relationship as a major part of the plot, with Superman and Lois having been an item for some time and him again “coming out” to her as Clark as he nears the end of his life. Most recently, in Superman vs. The Elite, their relationship was as intimate as it could be, with her already being aware of both of his identities and the two of them at least cohabitating and possibly being married already. Here, the formula is a little different: she’s aware of both of his identities, the two are dating, but they’ve kept their relationship (as Clark and Lois) a secret; even still, based on the recurring story elements we’ve mentioned, it’s not exactly a surprise that the events of the film cause Clark to (sing along if you know the words) re-evaluate his position and decide to come around to Lois’s more open way of thinking.
Back to the narrative, Clark must dash out of a staff meeting when there’s news of a meteorite that’s headed toward Arizona. When he gets there, however, he learns that the meteorite is actually a probe that can transform into a humanoid robot that he puts down after some difficulty. Bringing the ‘bot back to his Fortress of Solitude, Kara joins him and identifies the probe as a herald of Brainiac (John Noble), a spacefaring cyborg who roams the galaxy in an effort to collect all knowledge in the universe. It’s not a bad goal, but his methods are genocidal: he finds planets with sentient life, “collects” one of said planet’s major cities and shrinks it down to bell jar size and keeps it in his menagerie, then destroys the planet. It’s the result of a flaw in his programming; once he’s “studied” a planet, he can’t let it grow and change from that point forward because then his knowledge would be incomplete, so he must ensure that his database remains inerrant by freezing the planet in time via total annihilation. Kara saw him in action when she was a child, as he came to Krypton and “collected” the planet’s Argo City; the only reason anyone lived to tell the tale was because Brainiac didn’t see the logic in wasting the energy to blow up a planet that was already on the precipice of destruction. Having learned this, Superman heads into space aboard a Kryptonian ship to face Brainiac head-on and, if possible, restore the shrunken cities that the cyborg has captured.
I like how straightforward this one is, and as these movies go, this is possibly one of the ones with the lowest barrier to entry. You don’t really need to know anything about Brainiac since it’s all explained over the course of the film. There are a lot of nifty setpieces, like Supes’s early desert battle with the Brainiac probe, Superman’s time spent shrunken down and placed into Argo City, and the final swampy battle between Superman and Brainiac proper. This film also approaches the series’ mandate for more adult storytelling from a different angle, as it doesn’t rely solely on more violence to hit a PG-13 rating, and instead uses more adult humor (Lois is surprised that Clark didn’t think of pretending to be gay years ago, as it’s “the perfect cover,” made more on-the-nose given that this is the first time that the character has been voiced by an out gay man). There’s also some horror on display here, too, of the overt body horror variety on display with all of the upgrades Brainiac has made to his body and the way that all of his weird prehensile tubes attach to him, as well as the terror of more subtle moments. This is best evidenced when Superman is horrified to learn that the people in Brainiac’s shrunken cities are alive but essentially in stasis, meaning that one of the children who is excited to see him has been a toddler for decades. It’s good stuff, and reminds me of the simplicity of the old Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s: straightforward, cleanly animated, and digestible. Not necessarily the best of the lot, but a perfect low-commitment animated movie for a rainy weekend afternoon.
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