Superman: Red Son Movie Review

Red Son is set in an alternate reality in which Superman has been raised in a Soviet Union where everyone speaks English. It’s 1955 and Superman (Jason Isaacs) is Stalin’s problem solver, which doesn’t stop the Man of Steel from saving Metropolis from a falling satellite. This results in an interview with Lois Lane (Amy Acker). She shows him a classified document that leads Superman to a Soviet forced labor camp. Superman confronts Stalin about this, and by ‘confront’ I mean he heat-rays him to a crisp. This de-facto coup d’etat leaves Superman as the new head of state. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor (Diedrich Bader) unveils the Superior Man, a Superman clone made with DNA harvested from the crashed satellite. Never mind that Superior Man is a fully grown adult, which is not how cloning works; the question is, since a mere satellite wouldn’t even tousle Superman’s hair, where exactly did this DNA come from? Luthor immediately sends Superior Man to fight Superman, which is a retarded fucking thing to do. Those two are, for all intents and purposes, anthropomorphic WMDs, and you don’t use a WMD; you have it just in case — otherwise, it’s mutually assured destruction. But then, maybe Luthor suspects how big of a spinless bitch commie Superman is, even getting the crap beaten out of him by fucking Batman (Roger Craig Smith). This Bats is a Russian domestic terrorist who rigs a bunch of lamps to mimic Krypton’s red sun. This is of course one of Superman’s few weaknesses, but how exactly would Batman know this? How would, for that matter, Superman himself even know it? Red Son is not unambitious, but it’s mostly archaic, retrograde, and jingoistic. The message seems to be that 1) communism is so evil that it can corrupt even Superman, 2) capitalism is so pure that it can redeem even Lex Luthor, and 3) imperialism is justified when done the American way.