Superman: Red Son

Imagine the most iconic silhouette in pop culture—the cape, the spit-curl, the triumphant hands-on-hips pose—but instead of the bold "S" of "Hope," there’s a heavy, industrial hammer and sickle etched onto his chest. It’s an image that has lived in the "What If?" corners of comic book shops since 2003, but seeing it move in Sam Liu’s Superman: Red Son (2020) feels different. I watched this during a rainy Tuesday afternoon while wearing a pair of incredibly itchy wool socks my aunt gave me for Christmas, and honestly, the slight discomfort of the fabric felt like the perfect sensory accompaniment to a movie about Soviet austerity and the cold chill of the Iron Curtain.

Released just as the world was beginning to tuck itself into a multi-year pandemic slumber, Red Son represents a specific moment in our current "peak superhero" era. We’ve reached a point where the standard origin story is so ingrained in our DNA that the only way to keep us awake is to break the toys we love. Here, the Kryptonian pod doesn’t land in a Kansas cornfield; it plows into a Ukrainian collective farm in the 1930s.

A Different Kind of Superpower

The film hits the ground running with a propaganda-heavy vibe that I found genuinely refreshing. Instead of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," we get a Jason Isaacs-voiced Superman who is the champion of the common worker and the personal guard of Joseph Stalin. Jason Isaacs (who played a much nastier brand of authoritarian in The Death of Stalin) brings a wonderful, weary gravity to the role. His Superman isn't a villain—and that’s the most interesting thing about the first act. He genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing, even as he’s being used as a nuclear deterrent that flies.

The action choreography follows the house style established by Sam Liu in his previous DC outings like Justice League vs. The Teen Titans. It’s clean, perhaps a bit stiff at times, but it prioritizes the sheer scale of Superman’s power. There’s a standout sequence where Superman dismantles a fleet of American bombers that feels less like a fight and more like a terrifying natural disaster. The animation doesn't have the experimental flair of something like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but it leans into a muted, mid-century palette that makes the sudden bursts of red heat vision pop with real menace.

The Capitalist Counterpunch

Across the ocean, we get the American perspective, which is where Diedrich Bader’s Lex Luthor comes in. Bader (who also voices the Caped Crusader in Harley Quinn) plays Luthor as the ultimate American ego. In this timeline, Luthor is the "hero" trying to save the world from a communist alien, and yet, he’s still a total jerk. Luthor is basically a billionaire podcaster with a budget for orbital strikes, obsessed with winning a game of chess against a god.

The dynamic between Luthor and Amy Acker’s Lois Lane-Luthor is the film's strongest tether to the human element. Amy Acker delivers a Lois who is sharp, cynical, and the only person capable of making Superman question his ideology with a single document. It’s a great example of how contemporary superhero films are finally giving female leads more to do than just fall off buildings and wait for a rescue.

The 84-Minute Problem

Where the film stumbles—and it stumbles like a man in a Siberian blizzard—is in its pacing. The original comic by Mark Millar is a sprawling epic that covers decades of alternate history. Attempting to cram that into an 84-minute runtime results in some serious narrative whiplash. We jump through time so fast that the geopolitical consequences of a Soviet-dominated world feel like footnotes rather than lived-in realities.

The adaptation, penned by J. M. DeMatteis (who wrote the legendary Kraven’s Last Hunt), makes some massive changes to the source material, particularly regarding Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall) and the ending. While I understand the need to modernize certain 2003 tropes for a 2020 audience, the finale feels like a safe, focus-tested retreat from the comic’s hauntingly circular philosophy. It trades a "mind-blowing" ending for a standard "big explosion" ending, which is a symptom of the franchise-friendly era we live in. We crave the status quo, even in our Elseworlds stories.

Despite its rush to the finish line, Red Son is a fascinating artifact of the direct-to-streaming pipeline. It’s the kind of mid-budget adult animation that used to fill the shelves of a Blockbuster but now serves as "content" to keep subscribers engaged between theatrical blockbusters. It’s better than it has any right to be, mostly thanks to the voice cast and the sheer novelty of seeing Batman (voiced here by Roger Craig Smith) as a Russian anarchist in a ushanka.

Superman: Red Son is a solid, punchy diversion that succeeds as a "what if" thought experiment even when it fails as a political thriller. It’s the perfect watch for a rainy afternoon when you want to see your childhood icons deconstructed but don't want to commit to a four-hour Snyder Cut. It doesn't quite stick the landing, but the flight there is full of enough "comrade" puns and Cold War tension to earn its keep on your watchlist. Just make sure your socks aren't as itchy as mine were.