Batman|Superman: Public Enemies review

DC Animated has outdone itself with these last 3 animated movies, first Wonder Woman, then Green Lantern: First Flight, and now Batman|Superman: Public Enemies.

Public Enemies follows the story of the comic book by the same name.

Synopsis: “A desperate solution for a troubled country: Lex Luthor for President with the Justice League in the service of the government. Only Batman and Superman stand against the new regime -and their disloyalty proves to be exactly what Luthor intended. Using their outcast status to instigate a scandal against Superman, Luthor finally tastes a victory in his vendetta against the Man of Steel.

Based on Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness’ popular graphic novel, this movie seethes with political intrigue and action-packed battles between heroes, all believing they’r on the right side of the law.”

The following contains spoilers, so watch out if you are planning to watch this movie.

The animation is beautiful and fluid (before somebody hits me we’re talking superhero here, not Disney comedy/drama D:<), and the designs are pretty much straight out of the comic book. The anatomy is fairly different from what we’ve seen on the last animated series and movies. There’s a lot more muscle definition, the women are voluptuous (Power Girl is the best example :)), something that they rarely do lately.

One of this movie’s strongest points is the use of the voice actors from the previous series, specially Kevin Conroy as Batman, Tim Daly as Superman, and Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor.

I really like the title sequence, the music and the animated sequence go along perfectly well, in fact I would say it’s so well done it looks more like the opening of a thriller live-action movie than an animated one.

The movie starts off with a falling economy, just like in the one we’re in right now, and shows Lex Luthor as a candidate for president of the United States.

The story goes like this, Luthor is elected president and to keep things “balanced” with the metahumans he recruits a handful to work with, or I should say for, the government. His aim is to employ every superhero under him to work for their country, but secretly, he wants these heroes under him so that they won’t go against him.

Later on they discover that a kryptonite asteroid the size of a “small country” is in collision course to Earth. While setting on destroying the asteroid on his own, Luthor cooks up a plan than leaves Superman and Batman as enemies of the country, and everyone, superheros and super/non-super villains are after them.

You will see a TON of villains, everyone wants a piece of Superman xD

The adaptation is great, however there are some major changes in the story, mainly to tie some loose ends in the story that would otherwise make no sense to the people who didn’t read the comic version.

Some major changes include:

[spoiler]

The “Superman from the future” part never happens
Metallo being the one who killed Bruce’s parents does not exist
Katana is not the one responsible for rupturing Major Force’s power core
Captain Atom’s time adventure never happens
That fight happens in Metropolis and not in Japan
Nobody from the “Batman family” and “Superman family(aside from Power Girl) appear on this film
The ending is different, the one piloting the ship is not Captain Atom[/spoiler]

Aside from that you will see a great variety in the villains department, oh and the fight with Metallo is great :D.

The studio really did a great job at keeping the designs while doing a beautiful animation, if you pay close enough attention you can almost see “comic poses,” like this one for example:

I really enjoyed this movie, even with the changes it’s hard not to enjoy it, so I really recommend it, there is nothing bad I can say about it.

I hope DC keeps up this level of animation in their movies, they’ve changed drastically with Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, the adaptations have been great (aside from some hiccups in the adaptations), for non-comic fans I don’t think there will be any complaints, as long as there are no comparisons with anime at least, I’ve read some reviews from people saying this movie is a sad attempt at copying anime, which is wrong as the comic art is the one to blame, again the studio did a great job at keeping the designs from the book.

Enjoy some more Power Girl shots >:3