Superman: Hijo rojo

Superman Red Son Animated movie is entertaining and enjoyable; but the jaw dropping twist ending in the comic version is what made it so good.

Overall the movie was entertaining and it kept the most important plot points of the graphic novel as well as its essential meaning. In certain aspects it lacks the depth of the source material e.g. the rivalry between Superman and Luthor does not feel like the intense chess game it originally was and the way Superman's reign affects the citizens of the Soviet Union is depicted even less detailed. There were also some interesting differences in the movie that provided a bit of a surprise element and sometimes even more nuance.

However, Hollywood's tendency in recent years to shoehorn social justice messages into every kind of fiction has also marred my viewing experience with this movie. Most evidently Wonder Woman's character was totally changed and ultimately ruined to score some cheap PC points. She is not really a character in this movie but a mouthpiece for blatant, in your face feminist propaganda combined with shallow and superficial man-bashing. The men are mostly portrayed as warmongers, some of them crude, some of them insidious, who destroy the planet whereas the few women in this movie are basically flawless, stunning and brave human beings who care for mankind and Mother Earth. Oh yeah, and Wonder Woman is of course stronger than Superman and a lesbian. My eyes hurt from rolling them so many times throughout the movie.

When will Hollywood learn that this kind of clumsy and frankly insulting inclusion of "progressive" messages into a comic book adaptation undermines the very effect it was supposed to have? It does not open people's minds towards social justice, on the contrary, it turns people off and makes them weary. As a liberal myself, I often find myself more and more drawn to conservative points of view because of movies like this.

I'm not a DC fan, but I really enjoyed the whole premise of this story, much like Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. I've never read the elseworlds comics before, so I'm reviewing as a normal person watching a movie.

The story is simple yet powerful, examining the lives of many DC heroes when something changed, that is, Superman grew up in the Soviet Union and under Stalin's tutelage. The action scenes are somewhat mediocre. The dialogue and interaction between characters are interesting not too monotonic. There's not a lot of romance here, and it keeps the plot focused.

This may not be a DCAMU movie, but it still is a must-watch if you've enjoyed Batman:Gotham by Gaslight because the animation is similar. Overall, I enjoyed it.

Superman: Red Son had a few exciting passages, but they were few and far between. And despite some solid voice acting and a nice production design reminiscent of the Justice League/Unlimited TV-show the writers didn't do the story much justice.

Aside from capturing the conflict of Superman himself both in the performance by Jason Isaacs and the character's facial expressions when he encounters various upsetting moments, the writers managed to degenerate this version of Lex Luthor into the most generic bad guy.

To the newcomers, read the source material, it's a better story and better told. The delivery in this adaptation is clumsy and stripped down to barely make any sense in the most important aspects of the USA vs USSR setting.

The animation was emotionless, the story was forced into a mere 84 minutes. The source material was so rich, so brilliant, that I couldn't believe I was witnessing this dumpster fire. The motives and character didn't come through, simply due to lack of time, and just bad dialogues. The final punchline, for example, was ruined by the verbosity. A TV Series could have done the material justice, because novels are best approximated by series and movies follow the structure of short stories more closely. Brilliant story, ruined by bad adaptation, I recommend people to try the graphic novel instead, and not to think of the novel lowly due to this movie.

I could have been a little biased because I've read the source material. I'm sorry, if that has colored my judgement.