02.06
Months after the previous film, with opening dialogue alluding to Luthor being impeached, a ship crashes through Gotham City and is revealed to contain a Kryptonian named Kara Zor-El. Because the bonds of family bind both ways, Superman decides to trust her. Unfortunately, Batman and Wonder Woman don’t. Through a series of scuffles and character exaggerations, Kara gets captured on Darkseid’s orders. With help from Big Barda, the Big Three are off on a rescue mission to face the legion of Apokolips and rescue Supes’s cousin. However, Kara has a different say on this…
For those expecting an improvement from Public Enemies, don’t. Like its predecessor, Apocalypse is filled with overblown fight scenes and barren with plot. Whatever little story elements are done via idiotic and out-of-character moves from the cast, with even Batman’s paranoia becoming grating. Also, we get fanservice. Lots of fanservice. The production staff seems hell bent on trying to get Kara either naked or in something revealing any chance they can. It’s akin to Code Geass in shoehorned cleavage shots. Hell, the last part of the title sequence is a goddamn tit shot.
As for the fight scenes, this movie would probably be barely an hour if they were gone. I know a fight between an army of Doomsday clones and Amazons might look awesome, but what’s the actual point? The build-up to most of them is fairly thin, and the end result isn’t really rewarding to say the least. The last one was particularly gratuitous, since most of the plot had already been resolved before that point and really only seemed to be there to fill up more time. Where a good movie would have fight scenes complement the plot, it gets inverted here.
The characters, Supes and his cousin aside, just don’t make much of a mark. Batman has little part to play in the grand scheme of things, and Wonder Woman doesn’t fare much better in plot relevance. Darkseid and his particular plan to take in Supergirl as one of his champions doesn’t exactly have any grounding, and just seems like a contrived way to give this movie any conflict. And like I said in the previous paragraph, Doomsday doesn’t have much reason to be here other than “Hey, we need a really strong DC character and we already used AMAZO last time.” Like the fight scenes, the characters don’t so much carry the plot so much as the plot carries them. For example, Wonder Woman shouldn’t normally assault Superman and kidnap his cousin in order to exile her to Themyscira (after all, we haven’t seen her do that to many other superpowered female characters), but since the plot demands this action to stretch whatever story this film has, this apparently must come to pass.
And this might be nitpicking, but Darkseid’s voice is awful. The voice actor, Andre Braugher, just doesn’t have that intimidating tone to him. Instead, it just feels dull. You don’t feel like you’re hearing the scourge of the New Gods from him, just some guy reading the script with a somewhat low tenor. On the contrary, the rest of the cast do fine. Daly and Conroy are as good as usual. Eisenberg hasn’t changed since the days of JLU. And while age has limited his range a bit, Asner is still menacing as Granny Goodness. After gathering up a good chunk of the previous actors to reprise their roles, having Darkseid played by someone other than Ironside just feels weird. It’s like the Brady Bunch Variety Hour in how jarring it feels.
Then we get to Summer Glau, who does a fairly well done job as Supergirl. What’s interesting is that the writers aren’t particularly subtle about who’s playing the role. We have a girl who is found at a mysterious container, naked and confused. She has mental lapses as well as a relation to one of the main cast, who is also the only one she’s on good terms with. This girl has powers she barely knows about as well as a strangely high intellect, given that the film shows her learning English in under a week. And suddenly, a mysterious organization is out to hunt her down and use her as a super-soldier. It’s like the writer listened to the Fruity Oaty Bars song way too many times while typing this up.
And like all of the other DC films, the animation’s still consistent as always. The art looks quite wooden though, with Batman looking more like a carved marionette than an actual human. Other than that, it’s just as unremarkable as Under The Red Hood. Nothing that makes you amazed or cringe, it’s just not something that needs that much discussion.
So in short, unless you’re the kind of person that can only watch a movie if it had random fight scenes and fanservice (if you are, then you probably didn’t have the attention span to read this review), stay away from this and go watch something worthwhile. And since the film seems so adamant on mirroring one of its characters, go watch Firefly instead.
Rating: 4/10
But on the contrary, the Green Arrow short accompanying it is very good, having fights that actually flow with the plot, characters that actually have reasons to be there, and no reliance on Loeb source material. It definitely has a short but sweet feeling going for it, kind of like how Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars managed to be a hundred times better than the prequels. It’s still not worth buying the entire DVD for, but it still manages to be ten times better than the main course while being one-eighth of the length.
Originally posted on Sunday, October 3, 2010.