Superman Red Son (2020)

I love "what-if" stories, telling a familiar tale but switching out a detail to explore what would have happened with the change. In this case this is the story of Superman but instead of the baby Kal-El's ship landing in Kansas after the destruction of Krypton, the ship lands in the Ukraine during the era of the U.S.S.R. Superman becomes a hero of the Soviet Union and communism and the story explores what that world might have been like.

The story of this film is interesting, exploring global politics of the cold war era with the added superhero context. But I found that the film dumbs down a lot of the themes the comic it is based on explores. The story still gets into Superman's nature and the way he responds to the human world and all its problematic nature, and how, raised in a communist context, this nature leads him to try to perfect the collectivist goals of Marxism yet still falling into totalitarian traps. There is the promise at the beginning of the film that it would also be able to point out the failings of capitalism in delivering the American Dream but the film never quite delivers on that despite some early lip service. There is also an added element of feminist critique which is injected into the story but dropped too quickly. The film's failings are mostly in oversimplifying things and heading towards a more re-assuring ending.

The comic it is based on had a more complex story structure and added in some twists in the end this film decided to jettison. This story therefore is more straightforward which is fine but it also makes it a bit less interesting. Still, having said all that, the idea that so much of how we understand the concept of Superman is built on his Americaness, and what would a Superman from another earth culture be like, is a fascinating idea and Red Son still manages to get into that. This Superman remains a hero, although overly flawed, and there is something to that idea, of us imbuing a sense of righteousness into him no matter what his circumstances are.

So from that point of view Superman Red Son remains an interesting watch, I just wish it had gone deeper into this rabbit hole.

Superman Red Son
Starring: Jason Isaacs, Amy Acker, Diedrich Bader, Vanessa Marshall, Phil Morris, Paul Williams, Phil LaMarr, Roger Craig Smith, Tara Strong
Director: Sam Liu
Writer: J.M. DeMatteis