I cringed at some of the design work... I could not help but think that thanks to his "armor" (shoulder pad) Green Arrow was "well protected" :).... but other then that .... it was a fun little story that was well told and pretty well animated.
As for the main feature...
It was not bad.... but it was not good either. It was very.... "meh" in my book.
There was a really cool sequence with Wonder Woman, Big Barda and the Female Furies. The best action sequence... heck the best sequence in the whole film. But the sequence with Darkseid in the end was dragged on for too long.
Not only did it make it seem like Darkseid's Omega Beams are week/useless... but also it paled comparing to some of the awesome work that was done in their previous JLU tv series. Especially the last episode of the JLU tv series and the showdown between Superman and Darkseid in that last episode. Damn that was good.
But the sequence in Superman Batman??? Not even close to being as good. It felt like seeing a very lesser version of a very awesome sequence that we had already seen before. And the design work in general was iffy at best.... it was a strange mixture of JLU... Crisis on 2 Earths... with a pinch pf Michael Turner thrown in to tie the project to the comic that is being adapted. You could tell that the artists had a tought time... especially with Superman.
He was pretty inconsistent through the whole thing. He sometimes was Turner-esque... and sometimes more like the design they used for the Crisis on 2 Earths project. And sometimes an odd mixture between the two. And take a close look at the "S" shield.... it was very funky in some scenes.
And the same is true with most of the design work. It's as if there was a tug of war on the production... half the people wanting to make the designs like Turner's artwork... and the other half wanting the designs like the ones from the Crisis on 2 Earths movie. And it fell somewhere in between.
(Editor's Note: I thought they did a nice job with Big Barda. )
For the story... not having read the comic... I don't know if the weak parts in the story come from the comic or from the movie itself. Batman and Wonder Woman trying to kidnap Supergirl?? Really?? Could they not simply ask to take her to Paradise Island for training?? And what if they had been successful kidnapping her?? How would they have kept her there???... by force??? How would they have kept Superman from looking for her or from getting her back?? Made no bit of sense.
I was also dissapointed with the extras. As I mentioned... I bought the Blu-Ray version... and some Superman episodes were included in the extras of the Blu-Ray... but of very piss poor quality. The line work is so pixelated that it makes the episodes pretty much unwatchable on my HD TV.
So is Superman/Batman: Apocalypse worth it??
In one word....
No.
You can have the Green Arrow short in the DC Showcase Superman/Shazam Blu-Ray. Get that instead.
Until next time.
-Pierre
2 comments:
I agree with what you said in the end... Get the Superman/Shazam one. It collects all the shorts, which are far superior animation-wise to the feature-length ones. My favorite among the "films" that I've seen was, surprisingly to me, Batman: under the Red Hood. I didn't like how Winnick brought back Jason Todd in the comics, but in the movie it was okay.
Looking forward to Batman: Year One. :)
The thing with the \S/ bugged me to. I think it was a really bad choice of material to adapt in the first place. The art-style simply does not translate from page to screen well at all.
There's also the fact that the "story" feels like little more than a series of fights and character appearances morbidly strung together.
One of my major issues with it is having Batman and the rest of the DCU involved in Supergirl's origin. That's a Superman story. Not something for a team-up book or a crossover event.
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