Superman: The Last Son Of Krypton Review

DC fans if you know me you know that I like to take at least a weekend to do a full series review well I thought that for this weekend i'd try something a little bit different for you see not only am I going to be reviewing the animated series i'm also going to be reviewing the premier movie all in the same day. Since this is a huge task for any mortal being i'm not going to be watching every single episode or watching all the movies so here is my review of Superman: The Last Son Of Krypton.

The plot of the movie is it's basically the whole origin of Superman that's really it there's nothing that links these scenes together. To me that makes sense in this case since this movie was originally the first three episodes of the show edited together so while it does feel like the plot of the movie was an afterthought it makes perfect sense once we remember that small fact. I can say tho it would have been really cool if there was more of a flowing narrative.

Starring in this movie is Tim Daly as Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman , Jesse Batten as Baby Kal-El , Jason Marsden as Teenage Clark Kent/Kal-El , Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor , Christopher McDonald as Jor-EL , Malcolm McDowell as John Corben/Metallo , Corey Burton as Brainiac , Tony Jay as Sul-Van , Finola Hughes as Lara , Mike Farrell as Jonathan Kent , Shelley Fabares as Martha Kent , Dana Delnay as Lois Lane , Kelly Schmidt as Lana Lang , David Kaufman as Jimmy Olsen , George Dzundza as Perry White and Lauren Tom as Angela Chen.

Now since i'm also going to be listing alot of these actors in my review of the series i'm not going to mention how good they are here just because i'd be repeating myself. So i'll say that they are good in this movie the rest of the cast tho I think do deliver but alot of them don't have enough screen time so they can't really make much of an impression so i'm hoping that alot of them return in the series just because I want to get more of an impression on there characters.

I'm also not going to be naming which company did the animation for this film since it's obviously going to be the same company that did the animation for the series so there wouldn't be much of a point in me saying who did it twice in the same day. I will say tho that the animation is far better then what I was expecting it to be Superman has never had a good history when it comes to animated shows outside of the 1940's shorts so I was expecting the animation here to suck big time but no it was actually really good.

Like I said this movie is just the shows first three episodes but it's actually not the only set of episodes from this show to get the episode to movie treatment. The other one is The Batman Superman Movie: World's Finest which I do also plan on reviewing but at a later date and I mention this because it makes me wonder why a full length animated Superman movie set in this continuity was never made it would have been so freaking cool to see these characters in animated form on the big screen.

There is a lie on the poster for this movie because the poster states quite clearly that it's feature length. That is not even close to being true the movie is not even an hour long they couldn't even animate original footage to make it at least an hour and fifteen minuets long. I have no idea why they chose to add this lie to the poster since all you'd have to do is how long the film runs for and you'd know it's not even close to being feature length.

Another issue I have with the film is the fact that say set up Brainiac is the main antagonist of the film but he's only in like the first twenty minuets and he doesn't even show up again until the very end. If your going to spend that long setting someone up as the main villain then you better make that person the villain or at least have a more interesting character as the villain which this film doesn't do so I have to ask why didn't they just make Brainiac the villain.

Both this film and the series are set in the DCAU which for those that don't know stands for DC Animated Universe and was pretty much the only universe that alot of us nineties kids grew up even caring about. While later episodes would outright feature characters from the animated Batman show here tho the dark knight only gets a small reference and as a show set in a universe it really does work and since Batman was the most popular superhero show at the time it makes sense that they would reference the character

Action wise the film does have some really well put together action scenes and it's in those scenes that I feel the animation is at it's best. Helping to keep the animation for being repetitive is the fact that we get to see the big blue boy scout use his superpowers alot. Altho what would have been cool was if we had scenes early on showing how he found out about those powers since this is after all an origin story so it would have made sense and it would have helped get the run time close to feature length.

Overall this wasn't a bad movie to kick of the series but it's also one that I found to be very lacking it stays true to the Superman mythos. Yes I do know that Shirley Walker did the music but since she also did the score for the show i'm going to hold of until I write my review of the show to comment on the music and so this film gets a 5.5 out of 10 from me.