All Star Superman - DCAU

I've previously mentioned my enjoyment of the DC cartoon movies, which seem to be content in adapting cartoons to the screen in spirit or faithfulness in ways the live-action stuff is just doesn't. That means you get fun, ridiculous stories that feel like comic adventures (or, in some cases, just outright are those stories verbatim). And so we get to All Star Superman. This is a huge amount of WTF-ery that is all over the place. It feels like they attempted to put absolutely that happened in its comic source material into the film, regardless of how weird it was or how strange the resulting film would end up.

This is a ‘Superman Dies’ story, like two other DCAU films, Superman: Doomsday and The Death of Superman. While those other two dealt with the death in an fast, violent way (Superman being beaten to death by a big dumb space monster), like a sudden, fatal accident, All-Star takes a different approach, more like Superman getting a terminal illness and having to sort his life out. Only this gets really, really weird and dumb. And since i'm all about weird and dumb stuff, let me tell you all about it.


So there’s a moon base where a super-intelligent scientist lives with people he made through genetic engineering. He’s investigating the sun using manned probes or something, but Lex Luthor sabotages things and Superman heads out to save the day. But Superman gets too close to the sun during the rescue and his body is poisoned by too much solar radiation. He’s five times stronger than he used to be, but the power is killing him from the inside, so he’s only got a few months before he dies. He’s pretty zen about the whole thing actually – he seems to skip four of the five stages of grief to end up directly at ‘acceptance’ immediately upon hearing the news.

Knowing he has limited time left, Superman decides to do everything he feels he needs to do before passing on. First thing on the agenda: reveal his identity to Lois Lane and profess his love for her. This is an animated movie, like Doomsday and Death of Superman, where Clark Kent reveals his identity as Superman to Lois Lane by just taking off his glasses, which I find astonishingly funny. It’s all it takes for her to instantly believe him.

Clark is a huge fucking nerd. After revealing that he/Clark Kent is Superman to Lois (on her birthday no less), he then takes her to his fortress of solitude in the North Pole immediately afterwards. But not in a romantic, holding her in his arms way. No, he lifts up her car with her in it and carries it there. Then he makes her have a shower while he stands just outside and provides her with a sexy dress to wear. A sexy dress he apparently just had lying around at the fortress of solitude.

Lois is, initially, extremely DTF. She’s ready for it. It’s clear she’s thirsty for Superman. But then Clark, that big fucking nerd, kills the mood and ruins it by being a huge creepy dork the entire evening.

First, he takes her around his fortress of solitude to show her all his weird nerd stuff, including his army of robot butlers (!?), his room full of deadly weapons, his big pet alien octopus thing that eats suns and his magical sun anvil. While he’s nerding out over his man cave she happens to see a room with a ‘do not enter’ sign on it, and inside she sees a creepy mannequin of herself and medical charts and biometric scans of her body. And then Clark shuts the door and is all ‘Hey, you can’t go in that room. It’s off limits’. Vibe killed.



He has dinner with her and tries to charm her, but she’s freaked out big time by the whole creepy room thing (and the fact that he apparently never takes off his Superman costume, even when he’s having a romantic dinner in his house). She’s also weirded out about how he’s still keeping obvious secrets from her. She also starts to realise how fucking creepy and messed up it is that he’d basically been stalking her at work as Clark Kent for years while simultaneously flirting with her as Superman.

That night she has a full-on panic attack about being trapped in the north pole with an alien who knows everything about her life and comes to the conclusion that A: Superman is crazy and B: she needs to kill him. So she goes to the weapon room to grab a weapon and tries to shoot Superman to death, but he just shrugs it off.

Then Clark reveals that he’s developed a super serum that will give Lois his superpowers for 24 hours so she can see how it feels to be Superman, and that he also made her a super-suit of her own as a birthday present, hence the secrets and the creepy medical charts and mannequin. Lois just sort of accepts it (isn’t that how abused women in toxic relationships act?) and her panic attack and attempt to kill him are never mentioned again.

The next day he takes super-powered Lois flying around the world to see what it’s like, but then lizard people attack Metropolis, so Superman and Lois head there. A pair of time-travelling superhero dudes named Samson and Atlas who show up, beat up the lizard people, then start hitting on Lois. Lois starts to flirt with the two dudes, which pisses Superman off, and for the next ten minutes I guess this is the new plot of the movie?

Atlas and Samson are dicks. Samson taunts Superman with a newspaper from the future where the headline is ‘Superman is Dead’, which is a dick move (and I guess he just carries that around with him?), and basically says ‘Lois is fair game now, bruh’. And then Atlas gives Lois a cursed necklace and an interdimensional Sphinx shows up to kill her unless Superman can answer a riddle. Which he does, because he’s Superman. Crisis averted, he tells Lois he’s going to take her dancing, but then Atlas and Samson challenge him to a fucking arm wrestling competition and Superman decides to do that instead and beats them both. Then he takes Lois to the moon and they make out.



So the next day Clark Kent heads to prison to interview Lex Luthor, who is on death row because of his constant villainy. Luthor whines about how he feels inferior to Superman, and how the world would like him if it wasn’t for Superman and how he’d be banging Lois Lane if Superman wasn’t around. He’s also pissed off that he’s getting older and Superman doesn’t seem to age. It’s a huge inferiority complex thing. This entire time, Clark keeps acting like a klutz, clumsily tripping over and having pratfalls every few seconds. I guess this is part of his ‘disguise’? He does it the entire movie whenever he’s acting as Clark Kent.

When they head through the supervillain wing of the prison they get too close to Parasite, a purple alien thing that feeds off of body heat and since Superman is full of solar energy he powers up from his close proximity, breaks out of his cell and goes on a murderous rampage where he outright kills dozens of people.

So apparently Superman values keeping his secret identity a secret over preventing people from getting killed, because he sort of just lets Parasite go on a murder spree. Clark actually ends up causing the deaths of a whole bunch of guards and prisoners. Some indirectly (keeping up the charade of being Clark Kent means he doesn’t save the people getting killed in front of him) but others directly (he covertly uses his ice breath to stop a group of rioting prisoners, who then get shattered into a billion pieces when Parasite comes barrelling through). He fakes an earthquake (which I guess you can do if you’re Superman) and defeats Parasite without revealing he’s Superman.

Then Luthor reveals to Clark that he’s got an entire secret tunnel in his cell that he could use to escape at any time, but he isn’t going to because he’s content to die with the knowledge that Superman is going to die of radiation poisoning. Which is weird, but whatever. In the underground tunnel Luthor introduces Clark to his evil 16 year-old niece who is dressed in sexy assassin clothes, which is creepy. She uses a small rowboat to take Clark out of the prison through an underground escape river, which is very strange but by this point in the movie you just stop asking questions.



Clark then tells Lois that he has to go into space to sort out some things and tells her that he’s dying and that he might not make it back, but she’s in denial that he’s going to die. She wants to have kids with him, which is weird because they’ve only been on one date and literally yesterday she was so freaked out by him that she tried to murder him. And Superman’s all ‘Well we can’t have kids because I’m an alien’, but Lois is all like ‘We’ll figure it out when you get back’.

Superman leaves to do space things and returns after like two months. The first thing he does is turn up to work as Clark Kent where everybody is all ‘Hey, we thought you died in that prison riot. We had a funeral and everything’ and he just says ‘Nah, I found an underground bomb shelter and lived there for two months’ and everybody is like ‘Whelp that’s a good enough explanation, no need to investigate or ask any follow-up questions’.

In his two month absence Lilo and Bar-El, two surviving scientists from Krypton, had shown up and started using Kryptonian technology to improve Metropolis. Lilo and Bar-El are dicks. They’ve moved into the Fortress of Solitude and destroyed all of Superman’s things (including a statue of his parents, which they just leave all broken on the floor because they’re assholes). They call Superman an idiot, make fun of his dead parents and then beat him up (damaging the moon in the process).

But Lilo and Bar-El start to die because they accidentally got too close to some kryptonite. And it happens like really quickly – one second they’re all ‘let’s beat up that dork Superman’ and then suddenly they’re on the floor blind and dying. They ask to be sent to the Phantom Zone for some reason, so Superman obliges. This entire side-plot is completely pointless and could have been cut with no issue.

Lex Luthor is sent to the electric chair, but he’d managed to get his hands on Superman’s 24-hour super serum so the electric chair doesn’t kill him and he uses his super powers to kill the guards and escape. But if he had superpowers, why did he let them use the electric chair on him? And why bother doing any of this if he already had the serum? Especially when he already had a secret tunnel and underground escape river? We’re deep into ‘don’t ask questions’ territory. He heads to his niece’s house (she’s sixteen, yet has a villain lair) and builds an army of robots to take over the city.



Meanwhile a big evil intergalactic supercomputer called Solaris shows up and turns the sun red to kill Superman. It turns out that Luthor had been teaming up with Solaris the entire time, which makes no sense because Luthor didn’t know he’d be arrested or sent to death row or that Superman would leave town for two months and it has no bearing on the plot or anything. Superman puts on a silly looking white costume and says ‘This is my final act as Superman’ and flies into space with his robot butlers to fight Solaris. Superman kills Solaris, causing a huge explosion to, essentially, fake Superman’s death.

So then Clark Kent heads back to the Daily Planet to write the ‘Superman is Dead’ story Samson had taunted him with, and then dies right there in front of everybody of a heart attack. Nobody has much of a reaction, especially Lois who doesn’t seem to care.

But then Luthor shows up with his robots and superpowers to attack the Daily Planet specifically and make fun of dead Clark Kent (keeping in mind that Luthor doesn’t know that Clark Kent is Superman, so he’s just being a dick at this point). But then Lois says ‘Hey, Solaris turned the sun blue and now everybody is going to die’. Which, how does she know that? And apparently everybody at the Daily Planet knows who Solaris, the evil intergalactic supercomputer, is?

Anyway Clark comes back to life from his heart attack (it’s unclear if he was faking or if Lois being in danger revived him) and shoots Luthor with a ‘gravity gun’ he just happened to have on him. Nobody questions why mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent has a gravity gun, or how he survived a heart attack. Then he secretly changes into his Superman clothes and beats up Luthor. Then he reveals that he’d known for ages that Luthor had stolen his super serum. Which, what the fuck? Why didn’t Superman do anything before now?



Luthor’s serum runs out and he suddenly sees the error of his ways, and Superman’s skin is falling off because he’s becoming pure energy and so he kisses Lois (wouldn’t that hurt her?) and leaves to go fix the sun and die. Later, Lois is still in denial about it, and tells people ‘Superman’s fixing the sun and then he’ll come back to me’, which suggests she’s going to become a crazy spinster.

Luthor, in prison (probably death row again I guess?), has changed his ways since Superman’s death and has, somehow, written out a bunch of reports on Superman’s biology (no idea how he would know anything about that) which he gives to the genetic scientist who lives on the moon (remember him, the character from the beginning of the movie who hasn’t been seen or mentioned the last seventy minutes?). So based on the dialogue, it seems like the genetic scientist might be planning on using Lois’ eggs to make a Super baby? And that’s how the film ends.

It’s a trip. The animated Superman movies tend to be weird in different ways, but this one is the most full-on bonkers.
I've looked into it and apparently it's absurdly faithful to its source material, which would explain a lot of the weirdness. You'd never see a Superman live-action movie with any of this nonsense.