Plot summary: In the wake of Lex Luthor being elected US President, Batman & Superman find themselves hunted by heroes & villains during their efforts to save the world from an impending meteor.

1. Why This?!?
2. Notes and Trivia
3. Recap
4. Review
5. Best Performance
6. Rogues Roundup

Why This?!?

Something you couldn’t possibly have noticed or cared about is I don’t like to split seasons/shows across multiple weekends, and as the STAS Season 2 review dropped yesterday I had a gap in my schedule before we start Season 3. I considered doing The Penguin as I filled my last gap with The Batman but for as much as I enjoyed the show if I’m being honest I didn’t feel like rewatching it all so soon and wanted a slightly easier time.

Given STAS Season 2 featured a famous team-up with Batman & Superman against Lex Luthor, this felt appropriate for comparison if nothing else. Plus a whole bunch of DCAU actors reprised their roles so that’s neat too. In fact some people even try to consider this soft-canon to the DCAU for some reason.

Notes and Trivia

Release Date: September 29^th, 2009

Directed: Sam Liu

Written: Stan Berkowitz

Animation: Lotto Animation

Music: Christopher Drake

This is an adaptation of the first 6 issues of Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman comic, as illustrated by Ed McGuinness. There are a number of divergences, such as Lois’ role being dramatically reduced to a non-speaking appearance at the end.

You’d be forgiven for not being overly familiar with Major Force as he hasn’t racked up many appearances in comics or adaptations over the years, but he is best known for his role in the origins of the term ‘fridging’, as he murdered and stuffed Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner)’s girlfriend in a fridge.

The newspaper article at the beginning about Lex winning the presidency is actually fully readable with information about his opponent, his vice president, which states he won etc. Generally these things feature random text if they’re even legible at all.

Recap

Amidst economic depression Lex Luthor successfully wins the United States Presidency and appoints a sanctioned team of superheroes, while Batman and Superman remain distrustful of the new commander-in-chief.

Luthor arranges a meeting with Superman where Metallo attacks The Man of Steel, who barely survives thanks to Batman. Lex releases doctored footage to the public that makes it look like Superman murdered Metallo, placing an enormous bounty on his and Batman’s heads.

With a giant Kryptonian meteor looming, Batman & Superman evade a huge cavalcade of villains and heroes seeking the bounty and eventually obtain data on the meteor and proof Lex framed Superman.

Taking the data to Hiro ‘Toyman’ Okamura, he builds a colossal Batman/Superman inspired mech designed to destroy the meteor. Batman pilots it to save the world and Superman defeats Lex, who is ultimately impeached when his schemes are exposed to the world.

Review

(Big fat disclaimer that I know they’re adapting a comic so the creative choices sit with Loeb, not Berkowitz and the production staff… but plenty of adaptions make changes, including this one, so I’m treating the decisions as theirs.)

Boy, the whole Lex Luthor becoming president thing just feels extra icky these days, huh? It’s not a new concept, but seeing the whole thing portrayed in this way, with comedians mocking his chances on TV only for him to win anyway, and then commit various crimes while in office is just… yeah…

Opening the movie with this is a pretty solid set-up, and I actually think they could have taken it much further than they did. There are some half-hearted comments about how he’s stabilised the country and made life ‘boring’ again, with Major Force giving a little speech about serving your country, but for the most part we know Lex is full of shit and it just makes all the heroes that sign up to serve him look like idiots. I fully appreciate this story was the first time in the comics since Crisis on Infinite Earths that the public learned Lex is evil, but they’re not even remotely subtle about it. I think I’d much rather they delved deeper into how he’s able to trick the public and the consequences of Batman & Superman going up against their own country. You know, actually being the Public Enemies of the title! Make Luthor’s hero squad more compelling with a more storied history with their targets. Most of them barely speak for goodness sakes! Part of the point is their absolute closest allies are absent because they would never side with Lex – or any president – against their friends, but that’s interesting too! Work that in! Instead we have a group of mostly C-listers who are just there to get punched, which makes them no different to the score of villains that get stomped.

Instead of making the story more about that, we have this looming threat of the meteor that takes over the narrative. This is too big an idea to do in conjunction with the whole ‘Luthor Is President’ thing, which as I say above should have been an entire film in itself. That Lex’s first course of action when learning of the meteor is to try and murder Superman strains believability. Yes, that’s important even in stories about super-powered aliens and monsters. By the end Lex reveals he wants the meteor to strike so he can remake the world (more on that below), but he seems to legitimately be trying to stop it in the first half of the film, so his actions make minimal sense. Likewise the heroes who are on his side at first look twice as dumb when they devote time to preventing Batman & Superman from stopping the meteor. Even if you think Lex is on the level why would you actively try to impede them from saving the world??? This culminates in the Toyman and giant mech stuff and it’s just such a dramatic escalation in bombast so late in the game in my opinion. If you want this kind of tone you have to establish it early and often. You don’t get to just pivot to a Batman/Superman mech built by a teenage boy whose sexual harassment of Power Girl is played for laughs.

Some of this gets into the issues of adapting between two mediums; What works in one thing does not always work in another. That’s why slavish devotion to the source material can be a bad thing. Giving Batman & Superman thirty villains and a bunch of heroes to brawl with may look cool in big comic book splash pages, but boy do the big fight scenes in the middle portion of this film drag. The action is just cranked up way too high, which may sound like one of those ‘too much ice cream’ complaints, but fight scenes work better when you give a shit about who wins, and they’re deployed with anything remotely resembling consideration. For instance the encounter with Metallo works well and is plenty of fun. They talk first, their history is conveyed even if you aren’t familiar with it, and the stakes feel high. Conversely the promise of our heroes running the bad guy gauntlet is cool at first, but when you do ten consecutive minutes of the good guys just calmly winning over and over again, occasionally stopping to take a breath before resuming monotonous melees, barely taking any damage in the process while only a handful of their pursuers even speak… it just becomes incredibly boring.

That we transition from some sense of a murder mystery/conspiracy investigation into this ‘action figures smashing together’ nonsense is pretty depressing. The entire thing made me better appreciate the pacing and style of the DCAU which knows when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to fight, and delivers generally short but solid fights, dating all the way back to the slightly rough beginnings of BTAS. I would also say the DCAU has a deep commitment to their civilian lives, especially Clark’s, whereas you get zero appearances of either man fully out of costume here, and I really missed that. Lois not getting a single line is criminal to me.

What they do capture effectively from the comics is the friendship and banter of our titular heroes. Bruce and Clark taking turns to save each other while casually discussing whatever happened to Magpie is really cute. More on this in the performance section, and probably the overall highlight of the film. But it’s not enough to carry it.

The art style isn’t a patch on the DCAU despite coming out over a decade after STAS and even longer after BTAS. Not only is it just not as slick in motion for the most part, but I really dislike most of the art design, particularly the models for Superman and Powergirl. They simply do not look like human beings. Everybody is too blocky and muscular too. There’s some really neat stuff with Batman moving in shadows (as always), but yeah. Ugly may be a strong word here, but it sure ain’t pretty to look at, and while I don’t talk nearly enough about the music in the DCAU, it’s pretty clear their composers leave Christopher Drake in the dust. The opening and closing theme are solid but the rest is absolutely nothing.

So yeah, I did not care for this at all. Actively do not recommend. The ratio of ‘things happening’ versus ‘interesting ideas’ is way off. ‘Things’ are happening almost constantly. Almost none of it is worth thinking about or discussing. Sometimes I wonder if the sheer amount of hours I’ve invested in the DCAU colours my opinions on it… but then I see things like this and am reminded how large the quality gap can be in superhero animation.

Best Performance

Normally when Clancy Brown gets a substantial number of lines he takes this category pretty easily. Especially with no Dana Delany around to compete against. But he spent 80% of this film in first gear in my opinion. I can understand that you do that so that his mania in the closing stretch is more elevated. I can also understand that to maintain his presidential popularity he needs to maintain a facade of calm. But even when there are no cameras rolling and he’s in private it’s a more sedate performance than we’re used to. For me a core part of why he’s so good as Lex Luthor is his ability to execute the wild mood swings, with Lex’s temper on a hair trigger. He’s slimy when he thinks he’s winning and he becomes enraged at the drop of a hat. His performance isn’t totally devoid of that in this film, as I liked his response to learning his missiles had failed, and parts of his descent into madness… but it just wasn’t all I know it can be in my opinion.

So instead I’m going to give out a rare shared honours to both Tim Daly and Kevin Conroy as Superman and Batman. Obviously. Their chemistry was even greater here to my ear than it was in ‘World’s Finest‘ presumably due to a combination of recording in the same room and building a rapport over the years from doing conventions and whatnot. I mentioned it above but their constant little asides and casual conversation were the real highlight of the film for me. There’s a warmth to the relationship while maintaining that sense of difference in methodology. I believe these characters are friends who have been through a lot together. They’re just really in-sync and it’s lovely to hear.

Rogues Roundup

Lex Luthor (Clancy Brown)

I’m largely repeating myself here, but there’s some good, some bad and some blah here with Lex. Overall I think it’s a worse take on the character than in the DCAU.

Positives include the whole idea of him successfully becoming President and the ways he wields that power for his personal vendetta against Superman. But unfortunately that bleeds right into the negatives because I just cannot jive with his first move after learning about the meteor being to try and kill Superman and then frame him for Metallo’s murder as a backup. I get that this grudge is extremely petty and all-consuming, but to me Luthor is about himself first, humanity at large second, and THEN it’s his hatred for Superman. I just feel he would prioritise saving the planet – and more importantly getting all the credit for doing so – over trying to kill Superman. I suppose that’s what they were going for, that he wanted to make sure Superman couldn’t save the day before him, but that’s a generous reading on my part and is not within the text. Likewise their failure to clarify precisely when he starts going insane from Kryptonite-juicing means his motivations are all over the map.

Speaking of the Kryptonite-juicing, I wasn’t really into that. Why does he need to do that AND have the advanced powersuit? Wouldn’t the latter (from Apokalips in the comic but ostensibly built by Luthor here) fit his character better as evidence of human ingenuity triumphing over Superman’s ‘unearned gifts’? Again, if I do the legwork for them I can infer you need to be strong to operate the suit, but it just feels like a hat on a hat. They wanted him to be going insane from the dosage and they wanted the iconography of his powersuit – which had appeared here and there in the comics before but I think this run was the impetus for it being a perpetual part of his deal in the 2010s – and to me it should have been one or the other.

It’s just an altogether more campy and basic take on Luthor. He’s evil. That’s it. None of the nuance. None of the mood swings. None of the utilisation of him as more of a third party to spice up the villain dynamics against Superman. Just pure cartoon villain. Ironically I think that’s bad despite this being a cartoon and him being a villain.

Metallo (John C. McGinley)

I love John McGinley as an actor, but he’s obviously a big step down from Malcolm McDowell. Metallo does get a major boost in terms of combat output though, fully embodying The Terminator by being able to pull his broken body back together and reconfigure his limbs into weapons like chainsaws and a freaking gun to shoot a Kryptonite shard like a bullet. In this respect he’s pretty gnarly, and I personally enjoyed him hiding in plain sight as a member of Lex’s secret service detail, but there’s no real character here to write about. Fun first act henchman, no more.

The Gauntlet of DC Villains

If I listed out everybody that comes after our heroes during the middle portion of the film we’d be here all day. Dozens and dozens of characters come for them, many just to take a punch or stand there to make up the numbers, versus the larger roles given to Solomon Grundy, Gorilla Grodd, Nightshade and I guess Mongul. They make for a good visual, as Superman & Batman don’t back down an inch from their overwhelming numbers advantage and end up kicking all their asses. But it does become a bit of a slog and even I struggled to identify everyone, so it all feels like its for the sake of spectacle.

You can toss in Luthor’s personal hero security force (Captain Atom, Powergirl, Black Lightning, Major Force, Katana, Starfire, Hawkman, Captain Marvel) as well if you want, as they’re just there for our protagonists to get into bombastic battles with and somehow overcome despite their combined powers. This group are like 20% more interesting than the gauntlet, particularly Captain Atom and Major Force’s ideological differences, and Powergirl’s change of heart, but even those aren’t actually worth delving into. Batman wrecking Captain Marvel and thinking he’d murdered a child, only for Billy to speak his magic word and attack was fun, I guess. Ultimately you’re just making all these characters look like spineless chumps for signing up to help Luthor… but hey, many of the DC heroes we’ve seen in STAS seem to be designed to look much worse than Superman so maybe this is just a thing they’re into.