Superman vs. The Elite (2012)

(On TV, August 2022) The way to get suspense from a Superman story is to give him a conflict that his superpowers can’t easily handle—and in the right hands, it turns out that there’s rather a lot that can’t be resolved by super-strength, speed and invulnerability. In Superman vs. The Elite, much of the plot is dedicated to classic debates amongst comic superhero commentators—the balance between kid-friendly action and realistic violence, the tension that emerges being unable to resolve problems permanently, and the ethics of using superpowers in a threat-filled world. Here, the goody-two-shoe viewpoint of Superman is confronted by the harder-edged ideals of The Elite, a group of superpowered characters who occasionally veer from heroes to villains. This is hardly unfamiliar stuff by comic-book standards (where this kind of rumination dates back to the grim 1980s) and I’m not sure that The Elite acts all that effectively as a thematic foil to Superman, but it’s still interesting to see a DC animated film effectively deal with issues that weren’t nearly so successfully tackled in various live-action films. Superman vs. The Elite may be a decade old by now, but it still makes the point that the DC animated films have regularly, quietly, unpretentiously bested most of the DC live-action takes on the same comics. This is one further piece of evidence confirming this theory: it feels slightly more viable as a standalone watch than many of the later, increasingly interrelated follow-up entries in the same series.