Monday, February 28, 2011

All-Star Superman? More Like...All-Star...Suck

It's been awhile since I've posted anything (how many blog entries of mine have started out that way?) and I promised a review for a certain DC movie, so here it is:
Last week marked the release of the latest DC animated film: All-Star Superman. If I didn't know the history of the line of comics it's based off of, I would make a joke about how ironic the name is. Hell, I still will. It's ironic that the name of the film is All-Star Superman when it is so very terrible.

Before I dive into everything that's wrong with ASS (huh, how weird is that), the All-Star moniker refers to the quality of talent on the book. For some reason, people think Grant Morrision can write (read my thoughts on that here) and that Frank Quitely can draw (all of his people look like wooden puppets wearing ill-fitting meat suits...and ill-fitting costumes).

Like Morrison's writing, the film is damn near incoherent. Some blame this on the fact that it does trim out some stuff and cut out other scenes altogether (like the suicide girl), but I found it to be pretty close to the source material.

The story is, well, crap. We get to see Supes casting out his bio-energy like a net. And arm-wrestle some gods. And fight the living sun computer (how does that even work?). And a potion that gives people abilities like Superman's. Awesome (that one is sarcastic). There are huge plot holes, ones present in the comic, too. The dialogue was pretty much like, we're going to spout gibberish, and then tell you our reasoning behind the gibberish, so then it makes sense, right?

This is by far my least favorite DC animated film (I've seen some people rank this above GL: First Flight, but I liked that one) and the only thing I can think of that would be worse is to make a film based on All-Star Batman and Robin: The Boy Wonder.

The animation, for what it is, isn't terrible. One thing I have noticed, and it isn't just isolated to ASS (heh), is that the characters lips seem to have grown in size since the launch of the current line of DC animated films (the ones not related canonically to the DCAU). It's kinda distracting.

The Bad
- Based on a Grant Morrison story
-Pretty close to that story

The Good
+The animation was pretty good
+The voice acting

Skip it, unless you're obsessed with either watching animated comic book films or pain. Or both.

I also want to mention that this was Dwayne McDuffie's last project before his unexpected death last week. The comic 'verse lost another good one. RIP.

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