The All-Star Superman movie comes out today: a 75-minute, PG-rated, direct-to-video animated feature, based on the celebrated Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely miniseries from a few years back, and starring James Denton as Superman and Clark Kent, and Christina Hendricks as Lois Lane. Douglas Wolk, Evan Narcisse and Graeme McMillan–the reviewers from Techland’s Comic Book Club–reviewed it, round-table style.
DOUGLAS: What a weird damn movie All-Star Superman is—maybe because, despite the “cinematic” credits in every issue of the original series, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s comic is not at all a movie at heart. There are things that work incredibly well on the page that fall apart on the screen. Take the famous opening sequence of the first issue, for instance: four wide panels, recapping Superman’s origin in two words apiece, followed by the massive wordless two-page spread of Superman surrounded by the sun. The filmed version loses its sense of scale, its boom-boom-boom-boom-BANG pace, its hilarious concision (there’s even audible dialogue behind the narration)—it just seems clumsy.
All-Star Superman, the comic, looks on its surface as if it breaks neatly into discrete, mostly non-overlapping episodes, and as if it just happens to be the length it is for no particular reason. So taking seven of its twelve issues and adapting each one, nearly verbatim in many cases, to ten minutes’ worth of movie sounds like it’d work.
But the comic is actually one big piece of clockwork construction, and if you take out any part of it, other pieces collapse. Take out the Jimmy-and-Doomsday sequence and it’s less clear why P.R.O.J.E.C.T. and Leo Quintum matter, or what the other Planet employees’ relationship to Clark is. Turn Quintum into a minor character who pops up briefly at the beginning and the end, and not only does Superman’s gift of his genetic code turn into an end-of-story deus ex machina, but some of the Lex Luthor routines that the movie reproduces verbatim are meaningless.
(More on TIME.com: The Secret of All-Star Superman)
Remove the “three future Supermen and the chronovore” business, and the glimpse of the future Superman in the Fortress doesn’t lead anywhere (the climax of that sequence, of course, is the already classic scene in the comic where Superman saves the jumper). Lose the Bizarro/Zibarro material, and the whole scheme of Superman meeting altered versions of himself becomes repetitious rather than thematic (and, for that matter, the “extra Kryptonians” sequence comes out of nowhere). Take out all of them and the “year in the life of the dying sun-god” subtext vanishes, and so does the “twelve labors of Superman” stuff. Ditch the contents of #10—the best single superhero comic in recent memory—and the core of the whole story, the idea that if Superman didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent him, is missing. Which it is, in this movie.
I suspect that it might have been possible to make a good All Star Superman movie—difficult, but possible. You’d have to be less faithful to the letter of the comics, and more true to their spirit: the thematic and philosophical material that’s really what the series is about, the way every character has his or her own bearing and way of moving through space. I liked the amount of empty space on screen, but more because it reminded me of the look of Frank Quitely’s artwork than because it seemed particularly effective in the context of a movie.
The real problem with the movie is that if someone asks me “what’s so special about that comic book,” the answer isn’t “Superman gets really powerful and makes a serum that turns Lois Lane super and fights a couple of extra Kryptonians who survived plus an evil sun monster.” It’s that the story has really straightforward classic Mort Weisinger-type plots on its surface—the sort of thing that’s always made Superman stories a pleasure to read—but that it’s also possible to drill down into on the level of its overall arc or individual issues or pages or even individual panels and find all kinds of beautiful little resonances and thematic stuff. “Oh, it’s like Bach,” as Quintum’s assistant says in the original (and not here).
(More on TIME.com: All-Star Superman To Become Movie, With TV Show Cast)
EVAN: The big question with these DCU animated movies is where they’ll diverge and what they’ll do with the material they do keep. Dwayne McDuffie’s script uses parts from various episodes from the twelve-issue arc to show us that Superman is not so much super-human as he is human to the Nth degree.
I really liked how philosophical All-Star Superman was. It very intentionally seemed to want to explore the idea of what Superman symbolizes, which again is in the source material. I was afraid that the action from the original Morrison/Quitely comics would have gotten amplified and overly choreographed in the transition to moving images. But the whole affair was quieter than most of the superhero movie fare and filled with resonant emotional beats. I, for one, choked up when Superman told Lois he was dying. The Samson and Atlas sequence give us Superman being jealous, testy and even a bit bragadocious. He’s playful and a bit penitent with Lois in the Fortress, too.
I interviewed McDuffie a while back elsewhere, and I know there’s a humanist streak that runs through his work. The sequence that best illustrates that in the movie is Luthor’s revelation at the end. “We’re all that there is.” There’s no god above us, and at that moment, Superman’s down and beaten. When he gets up, he’s visibly dying, discorporating into energy. But get up he does, and for that he’s an exemplar of humanity. Morrison says as much in the two featurettes included, too.
I didn’t refer back to the source material, but the coda at the end with Luthor and Quintum felt new. Can you guys back me up here?
(More on TIME.com: The Comic Book Club: Superman: Earth One and Beasts of Burden/Hellboy)
I was bummed that my favorite scene from the comics–where Superman talks a would-be suicide jumper from off the ledge–didn’t make it in, but it’d’ve been hard to fit that in a PG-rated movie. Really, the whole package is a celebration of the Morrisonian conception of Superman. Fans of the man always hear about the notebooks he keeps full of ideas, and the extra feature that walks viewers through his creative process opens them up to great effect. Morrison referenced the many eras and interpretations of Superman in writing All-Star, and the movie continues on in that spirit. The podium Luthor stands in during his sentencing calls back to the Richard Donner Superman movies, and the credits seemed to as well.
Yes, lots of great stuff didn’t make it in here, and I don’t know whose call that was. But, as a package on its own, I really like the All-Star Superman DVD movie.
GRAEME: See, I liked the movie, kind of, but almost everything I liked about it was lifted directly from the source material, and there’s a lot I thought was really lost in the translation.
McDuffie’s script really pares the story back to a clear throughline, centering around Luthor’s plan, with only a couple of diversions (the contest for Lois’ affections, the return of the Kryptonians) remaining from the original series. He loses pretty much 5 issues’ worth of material from the 12 issue series, which is both a good thing for me and a bad one. Yes, he gets a more coherent narrative out of the experience, but the amount of depth and detail that gets lost along the way is what made the original comic more than just a good Superman story, and into a great one, you know?
I also wonder about some of the changes made to the narrative: The Luthor/Quintum epilogue is new, but changes the idea of “Superman 2” from Superman trying to find a way to circumvent his inability to have kids with Lois to Lex trying to replace Superman, which is… I don’t know. Less tragic, and more on the nose, for one thing. It gives more meaning to Lex’s redemption when he gets super-awareness, but I’m not sure I needed/wanted that, if that makes sense. In general, though, the “more on the nose” thing is what this movie seems to be about, from the writing point of view: When it’s not lifting scenes verbatim from the book, it’s simplifying things and compressing them, for the most part (which does make me wonder why McDuffie chose to drop the punchline of the future telescope idea, which explains how Superman knows to prepare for Solaris; in the movie, he just seems to have coincidentally built a suit to prepare for the sun turning red).
(More on TIME.com: The Man of Steel Syllabus: Christopher Nolan’s Superman Movie Homework)
Other changes I didn’t really like:
– The entire loss of the Bizarro storyline.
– The compression of the Kandor story to one scene, which lost the wonderful, wonderful idea of miniature Supermen curing cancer in the sick kids that Superman can’t visit anymore because he, himself, is dying.
– The switch in the Superman Visits Jonathan Kent’s grave story to it happening without a time travel sequence and with a visit from his mom… I don’t know, I feel like it loses the sadness of Superman watching himself fail to save his dad’s life, as well as the (unspoken?) optimism of seeing a future Superman that’s survived the whole thing.
– The massive change in Superman’s showdown with Solaris: in the book, it’s made very clear that he does not kill him, but the opposite is true in the movie, with just one line change seemingly turning him into a killer. WTF?
The animation is another odd adaptation. At times, frames seem studied from Frank Quitely’s original art, but in general this looks very generic, and the animation lacks the… grace? poise? subtlety? of Quitely’s acting. It’s unfair, perhaps, to expect the cartoon to have the amazing sense of space and layout that Quitely brings to his work, but I really would’ve hoped for something that at less pushed more towards that than what’s on show here, which doesn’t even look as good as other DC animated movies.
I feel like I’m judging this movie way too harshly because I love the original series so much. For all its faults, it’s still got a stronger script than most superhero movies, and it’s enjoyable enough (probably moreso if you don’t know the original at all). But it’s not really got the heart of All-Star Superman for me, and that’s a really big problem.