Superman: Doomsday... WTF?

OK, I just watched the first of what is apparently going to be many direct-to-DVD animated movies from DC. If this one, Superman: Doomsday, is any indicator of what's to come, they've already lost one viewer. Based on perhaps the most read comic book in history about the death of Superman, appropriately titled The Death of Superman (DC didn't mince words when it came to titles back then), this movie was flat out painful to sit through. You know your in for a rough ride when the first twenty minutes feel like an hour.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this movie is that it completely drops the ball on delivering the one thing everyone has been dying to see: the death of Superman. In the comic book, the whole story focused on the last son of Krypton finally meeting his match and was then put in to enough peril for readers to actually be scared for his well-being. Because by this point in the 90's the Man of Steel lost a lot of his readers when they realized that there was never a jam Supes couldn't find his way out of. So when he was going Mano-a-Mano against the embodiment of destruction and devastation in Doomsday, the playing field was even between the two combatant.

Here, that entire story is over and finished by the end of act one. The real kicker being that there isn't even a mention of what transpired during that time for the rest of the damn movie. Instead, the creators felt compelled, or forced, to tell the resurrection story. Not knowing that part of the Superman mythos myself, I can only hope this isn't what actually happened in the books.

The movie is stuck in that unpleasant limbo of being too violent for children while being too adolescent for adult audiences. Only here can you find Superman feeling guilty for not being able to rid the world of Cancer and seeing Lex Luthor shoot a woman in the face. Point blank. And what was up with the unneeded post-sex scene between Superman and Lois? I honestly have no clue who they're marketing this movie towards, and I get the feeling neither do they.

Admittedly, I did kind of like some of the little winks and nods placed throughout the movie. Like the reference to a moment in Kevin Smith's (who has a brief cameo here) unmade Superman screenplay.