Starring James Denton, Christina Hendricks, Anthony Lapaglia, Edward Asner, Alexis Denisof, Steve Blum, John DiMaggio, Robin Atkin Downes, Michael Gough, Matthew Gray Gubler
Directed by Sam Liu
Another comic book adaptation, All Star Superman also carries over the visual style of its original artists, this time Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant. The look isn’t as striking as Public Enemies, but it’s still noticeable. They improved the animation a bit, but not so much the CG. This give and take makes it balance out about the same.
The film is a throwback to the olden days of comic books. All the crazy plot devices from comic’s Golden Age are brought back without shame, and that’s exactly how you’ll need to take this film. It’s full of harebrained events like an army of reptile monsters from the center of the Earth, Superman’s house key which was carved from a dwarf star and weighs half a million tons, or the audio book reader that Lex Luthor uses to dig a tunnel out of prison by reciting literature at incredibly high-pitched frequencies. Anyone who loves the good ol’ days of comic books will find tons to love about this film.
If this kind of implausible campy fun makes your eyes roll, however, then you aren’t going to enjoy this much. But I say to those people: Superman is an alien who conveniently looks exactly like a human and gains incredible superpowers from sunbathing. How can you whine about having a serious storyline when his entire concept is absurd? This film imagines the wild excesses of the Golden Age as half homage, half modernization, half philosophical musing, and a hefty dollop of parody. Nowhere outside of an anthology of old comic books will you find so many improbable plot devices in one spot than here.