Superman: Doomsday

⭐⭐ ½ based on 1 review.

tl;dr: A decent retread of Superman with just enough heart and thought to be entertaining, though at times inconsistent and never novel.

Collections

DC Heroes

Review

Spoilers Ahead: My reviews are not spoiler-free. You have been warned.

Ultimately, Doomsday did win me over, but it was a close call. The animation is off at times, particularly for Lex Luthor, and the story managed to be both a retread and require far too much fan knowledge to be accessible. There's nothing here that truly stands out, not the characters, the voices, music, animation or even the plot. Still, the heart of the film was in the right place and it remained entertaining throughout.

For a storyline named after one of the greatest enemies of the Man of Steel, the titular Doomsday was amazingly lacklustre, a villain whose only purpose was to incapacitate Superman and allow the actual plot to unfold. In reality, this was a closer retread to the Red Son storyline thematically, highlighting how it is not Clark Kent's powers that make him deserve the capitalised Super, but rather his grounded sense of morality. I haven't actually read the Death of Superman saga, so perhaps this film was true to the source, but the end product certainly felt a little rushed. Characters frequently had to use dialogue to advance the story, rather than presenting a logical chain of events, and certain subplots were entirely pointless (Jimmy Olsen as a paparazzi? Just why...). Plus, though the ending "reveal" to Lois did lend a certain amount of the warm fuzzies to events, I can't help but feel that the plot would have functioned a little better had Doomsday taken place in a world where it was Lois Kent, not Lois Lane.