Director: Sam Liu
Cast: Jason Isaacs, Roger Craig Smith, Diedrich Bader, Amy Acker
Have I Seen It Before?: No, but I did read the graphic novel upon which it was based, and man did it have one of the weirder endings of any of the Elseworlds DC tales, and that is saying something.
Did I like it?: In the past, I have been down on some of the DC animated films in their attempts to jam year-long comic events into movies often less than ninety minutes. The barest sketches of their complex plots tend to eschew the little moments that made the storylines special in the first place. Other entries, like Batman: The Killing Joke (2016) try to expand shorter stories in awkward ways.
Here, it seems like the four-issue miniseries is the ideal source for this format. We get all of the more interesting parts of the original, and they are able to trim just enough off the plotline (read: that ending I wrote about earlier) to make the story work even better than the comic. It’s far smarter than the average DTV movie, weaving Cold War hysteria and twentieth century history with just the right level of speculative fiction.
The conflict between Superman and Batman is both more understandable, and far trickier to resolve. These two will not become good friends all of a sudden based solely on shared trivia. I’m looking in your direction, film I won’t bother artificially inflating my word count by mentioning.
It’s a little passé to engage in the “What if Kal-El’s Kryptonian Pod landed somewhere other than the Kent Farm?” speculation. True Brit places him in the stilted neurotic place in the English countryside. Brightburn (2019) imagines if the devil himself was delivered upon the Kents instead of a gentle space Moses. Even I once wrote several more pages than I ought to of a story that imagined the Last Son of Krypton landing in the middle of a Reagan re-election rally, and quickly becomes the scion of Truth, Justice, and the Republican Party*. This was that first venture into that speculative territory, and given that the film sheds the more head-shaking aspects of the graphic novel, I dare say I might recommend this film more.
*Okay, the comic script was bogus, but now that I type it out again, it has a certain appeal in some other format.