Director: Sam Liu
Distributor: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Duration: 76 minutes
All-Star Superman (4K UHD) – Movie Review
Over the years we have reviewed quite a few animated DC movies. While not all of these are equally entertaining, we haven’t encountered a truly bad one so far, which is quite impressive. The DCU has a lot of stories to tell, and animated films often lean closer to the source material than their live-action counterparts. Thanks to this, we have seen a lot of standalone stories from the DC comic books come to life, and today we’ll be taking a closer look at such a movie. In this case, it’s the 4K UHD version of the 2011 movie, All-Star Superman. We were curious to see if this Superman film withstood the test of time.
Without delving into spoiler territory, the movie starts off with Superman (James Denton) saving a few scientists in their space shuttle. A disturbance was caused by Lex Luthor (Anthony LaPaglia), putting the astronauts in danger. Superman, of course, couldn’t let this happen, and because of this, he was lured into a trap. Luthor exposed Superman to too many particles of the sun, granting him even more power, but also causing him to soon die. The Man of Steel decides to come clean to Lois Lane (Christina Hendricks) and make sure their time together is amazing. In the meantime, Lex Luthor is convicted for his crimes and he is even sentenced to death. He is clearly not bothered about being on death row, as he probably still has an ace up his sleeve. As time progresses, Superman will still have to face increasingly hard challenges, while his nemesis is still coming up with evil ploys behind bars.
While the story being told is quite interesting in All-Star Superman, the movie really struggled with its story buildup, as well as the actual flow and pacing of the film. We found the introduction already to be a bit chaotic, and the movie does make a few time leaps here and there, making things somewhat incoherent at times. We feel like this film should have been padded out a bit with extra scenes or that it should have been a story that was told over the course of two short movies. That being said, All-Star Superman does not have any real dull moments, and the quality of the animations is great.
As a whole, the voice cast backing this project does a formidable job. James Denton has a charismatic voice that perfectly suits the Man of Steel. Christina Hendricks does an equally impressive job of portraying the fearless reporter Lois Lane. Even though their characters may just be animated, Denton and Hendricks have great chemistry, making the onscreen relationship between the two of them more realistic. Anthony LaPaglia plays a convincing villain in the form of Lex Luthor, and unlike many other supervillains, he does not feel like a one-dimensional character.
The 4K UHD version of the movie comes with quite a few extras on the disc. Most of the special features on the disc revolve around the creative process behind the film, as well as the comic book series this movie is based upon. We get to learn how the All-Star Superman comic books series was made, and how it differed from the comic books from prior generations. On top of that, you’ll also get some other bonus featurettes, such as an actual short comic book.
Conclusion
All-Star Superman is a rather entertaining film if you enjoy the other animated DC films. We did find that the flow and pacing were a bit awkward at times, as well as the way information was conveyed. Nonetheless, the movie itself still presented us with an interesting and original Superman story, and we would not mind seeing similar standalone movies such as this in the future as well.
All-Star Superman (4K UHD) – Movie Review,
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