All-Star Superman (Film) – Review

By: Dwayne McDuffie (writer), Sam Liu (director), Bruce Timm (producer), James Denton, Christina Hendricks, & Anthony LaPaglia (voice actors)

The Story: How does Superman spend his last days?  Shuffleboard probably isn’t on the bucket list.

The Review: Anyone who has ever tried to adapt anything into film will come across a lot of challenges: how to fit all the story elements into the span of a watchable movie; how to bring alive the characters and details that make the work so appealing; and how to possibly inject some new ideas to make what you see on the screen respectful to the original while still giving you a sense of freshness.

The animated adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman clears these hurdles very convincingly.  Written, produced, and directed by veterans of animated comics, the movie lifts its script (even, delightfully enough, much of the dialogue) straight from Morrison’s words, and the animation is clearly trying its hardest to mimic Quitely’s distinctive lines.  For fans of the original, rest assured there’s plenty of love involved in the making of this movie.

It’d be unfair to compare it to its comic predecessor; it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time to tell its story and include every clever detail the originators put in.  McDuffie (God rest his soul, as I sadly heard in the midst of writing this that he has passed) wisely chose those stories that linked together with the most thematic sense to create kind of a thesis on why Superman, as a character and symbol, is so important, beloved, and inspirational.