All-Star Superman

All-Star Superman came out this week, and while the trailers didn't exactly fill with me confidence about the project, I still rushed out to grab a copy based solely on how much I loved the books. And so I'm a little surprised to say I ended up far happier with the movie than I expected. Telling the story of Superman's last acts before his death, I loved it but have a hard time separating it from the original source material, hopefully managed to look at it both as an adaptation and its own merits.

This movie exists to me as an adaptation of the comic first and a movie second. In that regard, it was excellent. Not perfect, and I'm pretty sure it left out as much as it put in, but considering how sure I was going into it that it couldn't be pared down to a 90-minute movie it did an amazing job of picking out the core moments it needed. The main story was keep intact and still managed to hit all the right emotional points. If you haven't read the comic, pick it up; you can pick up both trades for about the same price as the BluRay (or for the price of a BluRay player, if you wanted to splurge on the Absolute edition) and it's essential to any comic collection, Grant Morrison at his best. I've never been a huge fan of Superman the character, but I can see why people do. This story is basically everything that is great about the character, almost 70 years of storied adventures boiled down into one 12-issue mini-series. Occasionally mired down by Morrison's devotion to Silver Age tropes and references to its detriment, but just as much these insane and outlandish sequences can add to the grand scale and adventure of the series. This is what the movie pulls back on most of all, losing scenes and entire concepts that make up the world of All-Star Superman, not necessarily for the worse. While I would have gladly watched a three-hour version of this with all storylines intact, I'm sure this makes the film more approachable to the more casual audience who will be picking up the DVDs.

Purely as a movie, it is probably the best of the DC animated titles to date. Even for someone not too familiar with the characters, if such a person exists, you should be able to pick up what you need pretty quickly from the origin story told in four still images spliced between throwing the viewer right into the action of the story's present. You immediately know who Superman and Lex Luthor are, and what they represent, and the different people in their lives. And character is the most important part of this. We are following Superman, and I think even more importantly Lex (whose story is something I'd go so far to say that the movie actually does better than the book) on concurrent arcs of life-changing events and self-realization. It's a story of life and death and the effect one person can have on the world and would not work if we did not care about these two, which the movie capably presents. The only thing I think somewhat hurts the movie is, in adapting the separate issues, a lot of the segments feel episodic and jump around a lot. This works well when going from issue to issue, but in the movie the flow in the middle becomes a bit choppy, especially around where the majority of the cut-out storylines fall. Additionally, much of the first half of the movie is devoted to Superman and Lois Lane, whereas the focus in the latter half shifts more to Luthor than anything else. On a technical level, the film also succeeded. The animation was excellent, bolstered by some (most of the time) solid voice acting. The action sequences, of which there two major ones and a couple of minor ones were amazing. The Parasite/break-out sequence especially had some beautiful moments and design, which I thought superficially reminded me of some of Miyazaki's work, specifically the No-Face rampage in the bath-house of Spirited Away or the demon-god in the beginning of Princess Mononoke, but done through the filter of the superhero style.

And just one thing I wanted to talk about that really had nothing to do with the movie, specifically. I went out in the morning to grab this, came home and found out Dwayne McDuffie, who had written this film, had passed away. I don't think I could say McDuffie may have ever written my favorite comics, or my favorite shows, but he was always on my radar as a creator who was putting consistently great work. All-Star Superman, however, is easily one of my favorites, and while you can put a lot of that on Morrison for doing the original work, McDuffie did a wonderful job adapting it, knowing what to cut and what to leave in and adding a beautiful epilogue that drove home the point of legacy in this story. That one man could leave the world better than when he found it. And while the passing of McDuffie is a tragedy, if something must have been his last work this was not only one of his best but also one that becomes a beautiful and fittingly poignant testament to the creator. Rest in peace, Dwayne.