Superman – Red Son
Jason Isaacs stars as Superman opposite Amy Acker as Lois Lane, Diedrich Bader as Lex Luthor, and Paul Williams as Brainiac, with Roger Craig Smith as Batman and Vanessa Marshall as Wonder Woman. Also appearing are William Salyers as Joseph Stalin, Jim Meskimen as John F. Kennedy, Phil Morris as James Olsen, Sasha Roiz as Hal Jordan, Phil LaMarr as John Stewart, Travis Willingham as Superior Man, and Winter Zoli as Svetlana.
Produced by Warner Brothers and DC Comics, 2020.
I first encountered the original Mark Millar DC comic series back about 15 years ago, and struck by the audacity of the idea of Kal-El’s capsule landing in the Ukraine in the late 30s, rather than in Kansas. When I was into comic books, the cold war was at its peak, and it would have been unthinkable to even think about portraying the Man of Steel as a commie. The only thing in Superman comics in those days that was red was the type of kryptonite that gave Supes an insect head, or forced him to speak backwards, or any number of weird pre-psychedelic trips that always wore off after 24 hours.
I think it’s safe to assume that even if the idea of a Soviet Superman would see print, it would pretty much have to be a horror story, one in which Stalin enslaves the world and ends freedom forever. This was, after all, the era of the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crisis. USSR evil, USA not so much.
In both the comic and the animated movie, that’s pretty much what Stalin has in mind, only Superman is an idealist and a true believer who firmly believes the party line about creating a utopian workers’ paradise. In both, Supes stumbles across the vast network of work camps and gulags by accident. At which point, the two versions diverge sharply: in the comic, Superman remains loyal to Stalin, hoping to persuade him to take a gentler path. In the movie, he murders Stalin with his heat vision. From there, the storyline reconverges, but with Superman having committed deliberate murder (assassination, at that) the tone of the story is significantly darker in the movie. Supes is still a starry-eyed idealist, but it’s much less surprising when his idealism falters in the face of human cussedness and sabotage from a paranoid and increasingly reclusive United States. In either, his growing inner darkness infects the correlates of the DC pantheon that are around him: Wonder Woman, Batman, Lex Luther, Brainiac and others.
At one point Superman defeats Brainiac and converts him to a combination cell phone and rhoomba. It’s an approach he eventually applies to others under his domain, with chilling effects.
Superman is a very distinctly American icon, and his allegiance to America was above question until the 70s, when writers, tired of inventing red kryptonite stories for the big blue moron, started asking themselves why a foundling from another planet with the power to remake or destroy the world would want to wave any particular flag, or be subservient to a government whose virtue was a matter of marketing rather than good intent. People were asking how plausible that was even before Alan Moore stopped shaving.
The animation is cookie cutter, familiar ground to anyone who has seen any of the dozens of animated DC features. But the audacity and originality of the plotline, combined with solid voice acting talent, carry the day and make this iconclastic film a must-see.