BEASTMASTER: "TEARS OF THE SUN" (2000)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*


I don't plan to review other episodes of this 1999-2002 teleseries, which purportedly has nothing in common with the Andre Norton book from which the series took its title. However, though the show was uneven at its best, its writers did attempt to draw from a wealth of mythological motifs to flesh out Beastmaster Dar, the protagonist of a sword-and-sorcery cosmos. For instance, the hero derives his vaunted ability to commune with animals from Curupira, a goddess-like patron named after a Brazilian forest-entity.

"Tears of the Sea" transpires during the show's first season, not long after the hero loses his wife to savage raiders. Accompanied by his intellectual buddy Tao, Dar visits his wife's people, a tribe clearly patterned on the ethos of Polynesia in terms of their attire and their sea-based economy. Local woman Leilani was a best friend to the late mother of Kyra, and so Dar seeks out Leilani, her husband Mataffa and her teenaged son Tusi.

Tusi and Mataffa are actually seen by the viewer in an opening teaser, where Mataffa is manning a canoe while Tusi dives in the sea. Tusi is attacked by a shark but is saved by a helpful dolphin. Once the two men return to shore, another local asserts that dolphins are the reincarnations of the tribe's ancestors, though Mataffa regards the belief as an old wife's tale. Tusi, however, shows a fascination with the sea and later tells Dar that when he was diving, a part of him didn't want to leave.

Shortly before Tusi undergoes his test of manhood, Leilani makes a singular confession to Dar and Tao: Tusi is not her son by Mataffa, but of her late sister Sanu. No mention is made of Tusi's paternity, though one assumes he's dead too, but the narrative emphasis is all on the death of Sanu in the ocean, both the source of life and death to the tribe. Leilani also says that she and Mataffa have never revealed the truth to Tusi, but will do so after he officially becomes a man.

Tusi completes the test, but when told of his true parentage, he becomes disturbed and runs away from the tribe. However, this action spells his doom. He witnesses a local tribe-member, Gilan, club another tribesman in order to steal the latter's goods. Gilan sees Tusi, chases him, and then causes Tusi to fall into the sea from a height, killing him.

The tribe holds a funeral for Tusi without knowing that he was murdered. Dar becomes suspicious and attempts to gain information from one of the dolphins, implicitly the same one that saved Tusi earlier. The hero journeys into the depths, and apparently passes into a realm of death, where Tusi is a spirit and the dolphin is a comely woman who does not give her name. Dar uses the knowledge he gains to expose the killer. Gilan falls into the sea and is drowned by two dolphins, implicitly Tusi and his female companion.

The killer's death is not the pay-off, though, but the revelation that the dolphin-woman is Tusi's late mother Sanu. The two spirits briefly visit Leilani and Mataffa and then return to the sea, and the episode ends on an affirmation of spiritual survival.

One covert aspect of the story, though, causes me to rate this episode higher in mythicity than others. In a deeper myth-reading, Sanu is not just a deceased human being, but a personification of the live-and-death aspects of the sea. Tusi, though brought up by mortals, subconsciously yearns after the sea because it's a part of his own nature as well. The manhood ritual, which would normally lead to a young man finding a young wife, is upset by Tusi's encounter with the killer Gilan, which ironically leads Tusi to a communion with his dead mother, climaxed by Tusi joining his mother in the form of a dolphin.

Tusi's adoption by his mother's sister also reminded me of one of the stories about Adonis, the mortal lover of the love-goddess Aphrodite. Adonis's origin is much more fantastic than that of Tusi, but it's interesting that after Adonis perishes even as Tusi does-- by a male enemy-- he's "fought over" by both Aphrodite and Persephone:

Persephone greeted Adonis with arms wide open as he entered the underworld and her delight knew no bounds. At the same time, Aphrodite, knowing that her Adonis must be in the clutches of Persephone, rushed to the underworld to bring him back. Once again, Zeus had to intervene and stop the women from quarrelling over who would have rightful possession of Adonis. With great patience he told them that henceforth, Adonis would spend half the year with Aphrodite and the other half with Persephone. This last aspect may symbolize the life of a man, who spends half his life with his mother and half his life with his wife. Source: www.greeka.com

Neither goddess is technically related to Adonis, even though in a roundabout way Aphrodite is responsible for Adonis's birth. The show does not suggest that Tusi will become any sort of seasonal spirit, spending part of the year with his real mother and the other part with his aunt/adoptive mother. However, when he returns to the shore to speak with Leilani-- and he speaks only to her, not to his adoptive father-- he states that "I have two mothers. How lucky can a man be?" Yet in a sense, it seems that "Persephone" wins the argument. She doesn't do anything to cause Tusi's death-- indeed, at the opening, she preserves his mortal life-- but things work out so that she becomes joined with her son for eternity, rather than seeing him continue regarding Leilani as his mother, or, for that matter, seeing him married to a woman his own age. Naturally, even if the episode's writer was aware that myths like Adonis and Aphrodite have quasi-incestuous content, said writer naturally avoids suggesting anything of the kind for a mainstream television show.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


In contrast to Pierce GOLDENEYE, Brosnan's first outing as Bond, TOMORROW NEVER DIES shows no particular desire to re-interpret the famed superspy for a nineties audience.

While some Bond films have opened with short sequences that have nothing to do with the main story, this time the hero's first mission-- targeting an arms-dealers' bazaar-- relates tangentially to a plot to bring about nuclear war between China and the U.S. This trope has been around since the 1950s, and the only new twist contributed by primary screenwriter Bruce Fierstein (who had collaborated on GOLDENEYE) is that the mastermind is a media-mogul, Elliott Carver, more or less a de-politicized version of real-life publisher Robert Maxwell.

Presumably MI-6 chooses to investigate Carver simply to aid their American allies. It helps, though, James Bond is in a unique position to investigate Carver's dealings, because Carver is married to a woman named Paris (Teri Hatcher), formerly one of Bond's old flames. As is often the case in Bond films, the hero doesn't maintain the illusion of being just an ordinary fellow for very long, particularly since Bond's raison d'etre in getting acquainted with Carver is to steal a code-device from the publisher. Nor is it long before Bond wins the affections of Paris away from her husband, which eventuates in Paris's death. But the film sets up a second "Bond girl" in Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), an agent of the Chinese government who's also checking out Carver's plots.

TOMORROW never slacks its pace, dishing out big fights and fast chase-scenes, the standout being one in which Bond and Wai Lin, handcuffed together, have to use a motorcycle to escape an almost endless slew of pursuers. However, the humor's not as sharp as it was in GOLDENEYE, and neither Hatcher nor Yeoh has very good chemistry with Brosnan. At the time the film was made, Yeoh was a major action-star in Hong Kong film, but her balletic martial-arts grace doesn't fit in a James Bond film, and the attempt to make her an "independent woman" who doesn't fall for Bond until the very end is thoroughly predictable.

Perhaps TOMORROW's greatest flaw is a boring villain. True, one shouldn't expect the sort of freakish geniuses birthed by Ian Fleming. But Carver never has much of a reason for wanting to start WWIII and then cover the news in his multi-media empire, despite Fierstein's invocation of the journalistic sins of William Randolph Hearst. It's not that a good villain requires an extensive backstory: Fierstein's own Xenia Onatopp has no backstory, but her character is intense enough to distinguish her from any other Bond-villain. Carver has no emotional center, and even Stromberg, the minor-league Captain Nemo from THE SPY WHO LOVES ME, comes off better.

If the film's phenomenality were to be judged only by Carver's THUNDERBALL-like escapades, it would be uncanny, but this time out the filmmakers chose to emphasize the superspy's many gadgets. In addition to humble devices, like a cellphone that emits an electric shock, Bond drives a heavily armored car that puts his old Aston-Martin to shame. Not only can the car shrug off gunfire, it can fire missiles and drive itself when its occupant is otherwise occupied.

HULK (2003)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *COSMOLGICIAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL"

I made various disparaging remarks on Ang Lee's HULK during my review of the 2008 INCREDIBLE HULK, but I've never written a full review of Lee's film.

At the time of the film's premiere, I had high hopes for the adaptation. Lee was best known for intense dramatic movies like 1993's THE WEDDING BANQUET and 1997's THE ICE STORM, but he'd proved that he could handle intense action as well, in his adaptation of the martial-arts novel CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. Unfortunately, though Lee claimed that he paid a lot of attention to translating the language of comic books into film, he never quite gets a handle of translating the way superhero characters work.

To be fair, the original five issues of THE INCREDIBLE HULK are all over the place, and it seemed as if creators Lee and Kirby couldn't quite figure out what to do with their Green Goliath. That said, the origin does create an empathetic comics-character in Bruce Banner. He's Every-Wimp, a spindly little guy who, possibly like Kirby himself, always got picked on by bigger men. 

Yet he's also valuable to the American war effort, so his genius allows him great repute-- except that his own Gamma Bomb unleashes the "Mister Hyde" demons inside him. It's a simple, elegant origin, and despite a rocky beginning, the character's second outing in Marvel's TALES TO ASTONISH-- given greater dramatic treatment by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko-- caught fire, and so the Hulk's never been cancelled again in any meaningful way.

Lee was certainly justified in not reproducing the Cold War aspects of the Hulk's first origin, and the script's idea of using "nanomeks" to heal trauma is a more viable concept that the TV-show's "tapping into strengths we all possess" schtick. The problem, though, is that for the first half of HULK, Lee spends a lot of time providing a dual origin for the Hulk-- he's exposed to gamma radiation, but he already has nanomeks in his body thanks to a crazy evil father. Yet the script fails to make Banner an empathetic character. The overriding conceit is that Banner is a trauma survivor-- the crazy father also tried to murder him as a child, only to kill Banner's mother-- and this has made him repressed and emotionally distant. (It's suggested that his emotional remoteness is why ex-girlfriend Betty Ross was attracted to him, with an intimation that it's a response to her being raised by a hardcore Army officer, General Ross.) In addition, the script also inserts a secondary villain, Talbot, as an obsessed ex-soldier out to monetize Banner's discovery. Ross and Talbot follow the model of similar "blocking characters" as they are found in the man-into-monster films of the 1950s, such as THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, that influenced the original comic book.

Main villain David Banner (winsomely named for the TV character) is not much better developed, though actor Nick Nolte gives a bravura performance anyway. The persona of the comics-character The Absorbing Man is clumsily grafted onto that of the Heavy Father, but the climax, in which the Hulk battles his father to the death, is curiously underwhelming, partly due to the dodgy level of CGI effects. Even less appealing is an early scene in which the Hulk must save Betty from a pack of gamma-mutated dogs, one of which is a poodle. 

Though Lee fails to capture the Banner character, he does at times communicate the appeal of the Hulk. The film's best scenes are those when the monster escapes the Army's prison and flees into the desert. Though this Hulk has nothing in common with the atomic experiments in White Sands, seeing him vaulting across barren sands and rocky escarpments still creates an archetypal frisson-- not least in the scenes where the Hulk tears apart an attack-force of tanks--

Just like in the funnybooks. 

EEGAH (1962)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


I've termed EEGAH a comedy because, despite its KING KONG-like conclusion, the bulk of the film concerns the titular caveman's frustrated attempts to get busy with the lead female.

Actually, EEGAH probably wouldn't be that funny to older viewers, except when accompanied by MST3K dialogue or similar mockery. When I re-watched it recently, the funniest thing about it were the credits, written out in bold letters on various surfaces. I've only seen this credits-technique in grindhouse films of the 1960s, and I've always assumed that the raconteurs involved resorted to this technique in order to save bucks. The film's writer/producer/director was Arch Hall Senior, father to the film's male lead Arch Hall Jr, and though he wasn't active in grindhouse films, he did produce one nudie-cutie, THE MAGIC SPECTACLES, the year before he did EEGAH.

I'll give Hall some points for unveiling his lonely caveman (Richard Kiel) early in the film; lead female Roxy (Marilyn Manning) nearly runs him down with her car. He runs away, and she conveys her experience to her father Mister Miller. Miller, a writer of adventure novels, decides that he'll forge into the desert all by himself, to investigate the apparent survivor of prehistoric times. When Miller doesn't come back at the expected time, Roxy and her boyfriend Tom (Hall Jr.) follow him. Tom gets separated from Roxy, who is in turn abducted by Eegah (so named because this is the most frequent sound he makes-- "Eegah" equaling "ego," I guess). When Roxy is deposited in Eegah's cave, she finds that Eegah has also captured Miller as well. Miller has been attempting to establish a dialogue with the illiterate caveman, and he points out that the cave was apparently one Eegah formerly shared with his family, for the preserved skeletons of other cavepeople are still gathered against a nearby wall. Miller theorizes that the sulfur content of the cave somehow kept Eegah and his relatives alive over the centuries, but has no explanation as to how they avoided discovery for so long a time. Apparently the last of Eegah's relatives perishes within the past fifty years, which may have precipitated Eegah's venture into civilization.

At this point, while the virtuous Tom is searching for his girlfriend, Eegah tries to beat his time with Roxy. This section of the film is the only one that commands any viewer-attention, for during this sequence Roxy and Miller have to adopt various strategies to distract Roxy's powerful suitor from making mating overtures. These scenes also have a nodding likeness to some of the tamer grindhouse films, wherein characters are imperiled by the possibility of being violated, even though nothing actually happens. I can't exactly call any of the performances here good, but they are diverting, particularly in the scene where Eegah lets Roxy shave off his hairy beard.

Finally, however, the two moderns escape Eegah and rejoin Tom. The lovelorn caveman follows Roxy, breaks up a swimming-pool party, and gets shot dead by police.

Though EEGAH isn't well filmed or written, I don't think it quite deserves its reputation as one of the worst films of all time. It's at least interesting that Miller is a traditional protective father who's righteously shocked by rock-and-roll-- especially the rather innocent ditties warbled by Tom-- and perhaps one could view Eegah as a symbol of every father's fears about What Those Boys Really Want. Roxy isn't a total innocent, either: in an early scene she titillates Tom by showing him a very small package and telling him that it contains her new swimsuit. Some critics have opined that Roxy and her father sound a little too intimate in their cave-scenes, leading to the conclusion that there's an incestuous undercurrent in the film. I don't think any such undercurrent was intentional, but it might be seen as a logical outgrowth of Miller's protectiveness toward his daughter.

AMERICA 3000 (1986), SHE (1982)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

Post-apocalyptic stories are often more concerned with creating new weird worlds than with expressing regret about losing the old familiar world. Every once in a while, though, I've encountered a post-apoc story in which the creators seem almost desperate to bring back the old world, even to the extent of duplicating the same mistakes that created the catastrophe.

Not since 1956's WORLD WITHOUT END have I seen an after-disaster flick so cavalier about the  mistakes of the past. True, writer-director David Engelbach didn't try to create any radical new cultures. AMERICA 3000 focuses on a tribe of Amazons who have revolted against male authority, implicitly because of some nuclear disaster. The Amazons tyrannize men, using them either as slaves or as brood-stallions, and yet for some reason the women maintain some reverence for the lost leader of earlier ages, the "Prezzi-dent."

"Prezzi-dent" is one of Engelbach's more bearable verbal concoctions, while the most of the rest are pretty stupd. "Neggy" means "negative," "the regs" mean "regulations," and so on. One young Amazon Vena is scheduled to lay with a stud named Korvis, but he breaks away from the Amazon camp and heads for the hills with a comic-relief friend. They stumble upon an old military bunker and figure out how to use ancient weapons to re-establish the standing of men in a female-dominated world. The story is vacuous but the action is fairly well staged, and the lead females-- Laurene Landon, Victoria Barrett, and Camilla Sparv-- sport incredible bouffant hairdos and buff bods.

Contrary to the credits of 1984's SHE, nothing in it resembles anything about Rider Haggard's 1886 book SHE. If anything, it riffs on a legend of Cleopatra, in which she supposedly slept with lovers whom she had slain the next morning. (Oddly, Haggard did do a CLEOPATRA novel, though I doubt that writer-director Avi Nesher read a single word by Haggard.)

Nesher focuses initially on a hunky guy named Tom and his comic-relief friend Dick. They come to the city ruled by the Amazon "She" (Sandahl Bergman), supposedly looking for the tribe that kidnapped Tom's sister, though they don't seem that much in a hurry about it. A slaver drugs both guys, keeps Dick and sells Tom, who gets tortured by She in a weird gauntlet-ritual. Tom survives and liberates Dick from the slaver. In the course of doing so, Tom finds out that only She can guide him and Dick to the tribe that stole his sister. Naturally, Tom and Dick kidnap She and force her to be their guide.

Nesher's continuity, even for the opening scenes, is all over the place, and it never gets better. The two guys and their girl-guide are almost killed by a tribe of mutants (She led the guys into their hands, but didn't realize that the mutants hate her too). She's female guards come to the trio's rescue and rout the mutants. At this point, you might expect the Amazon queen to take some severe vengeance, given how she treated Tom when he hadn't even done anything to her. But instead, she not only lets the two guys loose, she and her gal-pal Shanda follow them to help them out as they continually encounter one stupid menace after another. All of the menaces are resounding unoriginal, with the slight exception of a big bearded guy dressed in a pink taffeta dress.

Sandahl Bergman is the only thing worth watching here, but she's a long way from the glories of CONAN THE BARBARIAN. In fact, even though AMERICA 3000 is pretty stupid, that movie at least devotes some time to depicting the process by which the male and female leads fall in love-- whereas in SHE, the mutual attractions just happens, and no one does anything about it. Quite a comedown for a film ostensibly based on one of European literature's most celebrated romance-stories.

THE PHANTOM PLANET (1961)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*


Fred Gebhardt had a very short career as a writer and producer in movies, with just four movies to his credit on IMDB. Prior to making this movie, he made the remembered-only-by-hardcore-fans TWELVE TO THE MOON. for which he functioned both as producer and writer of the original story, just as he does in PHANTOM PLANET.

I don't remember liking PHANTOM very much in earlier viewings, but I found it a bit more winsome this time around, despite recognizing the story's indebtedness to 1955's THIS ISLAND EARTH. No one will ever consider PHANTOM classic science fiction. However, I did find that Gebhardt, whatever his personal opinion of the genre, succeeded in putting forth some of its "gosh-wow" appeal, albeit on a small budget.

The "planet" of the title is actually an asteroid called "Rheton," inhabited by humanoids who were implicitly once as big as Earth-people, but who shrank down to tiny-size due to the combined effects of their special atmosphere and the gravitational controls that they use to steer their "ship." However, the Rhetonians aren't always able to avoid other space-craft.

For Earth, it's the year 1980, and there's a flourishing space-program based on Earth's moon, apparently just to give the sense of the advances made. (PHANTOM is one of the few movies of the period in which there are assorted Earthmen but no actual scenes on Earth itself.) In the film's opening scenes, one Earth-ship has already been destroyed by a mysterious "phantom planet," and another such ship, manned by two American astronauts, is annihilated in the first five minutes. Nothing daunted, the Lunar Agency sends out another ship for reconnaissance, whose two-man crew consists of Captain Frank Chapman and his navigator Lt, Makonnen.

The viewer doesn't have much time to get to know Makonnen. He has a few philosophical lines about how people should pay attention to "the good and the beautiful." Then the ship encounters, but does not crash into, the Phantom Planet. A meteor shower does hit the ship, though, and when the two astronauts do a space-walk to make repairs, Chapman's air-hose is holed by a mini-meteor and another such projectile wounds Makonnen. Makonnen managed to hustle the unconscious Chapman back into the ship and shut the door before he Makonnen drifts into space, praying to his deity as he perishes. Chapman returns to consciousness in time to realize that Makonnen must be dead and that his ship has now been caught by the gravity field of Rheton.

Chapman lands the ship and ventures out onto the asteroid's surface, finding that it possesses an atmosphere. Still weak from his experiences, Chapman collapses, and the native Rhetonians-- all male so far-- swarm around his Gulliver-sized body. Then the atmosphere gets into Chapman's suit and shrinks him down to mite-size. He revives just as the Rhetonians approach, and he fights back a little before they subdue him.

The leader of the Rhetonians, one Sessom (more or less "Moses" spelled backward), tells Chapman he's never going to see Earth again, and that he must become a productive citizen on Rheton. Presumably most of the men seen earlier were married guys, since Sessom informs Chapman that as a citizen he's free to court one of two women-- Sessom's daughter Liara and a mute girl named Zetha-- who are apparently the only marriageable ladies on Rheton. The women are not consulted, but they're both very interested in Chapman, with the talkative Liara taking the lead by giving Chapman the nickel tour. Over time Chapman finds out some interesting bits of history. The Rhetonians once depended too much on their advanced technology and "grew weak." However,  they reversed this tendency-- possibly as a result of taking off in their own gravity-driven asteroid-- and began to live lives of comparative simplicity. (This strategy also gives Gebhardt an excuse for keeping the settings and costumes simple as well.)

Chapman has another problem in addition to his enforced citizenship, for Liara does have another suitor, an irritable fellow named Herron, who accuses Chapman of being in league with Rheton's not-yet-seen enemies, "the Solarites." This ought to work to Chapman's advantage, since he's become smitten with the silent, "sensitive" Zetha as against the somewhat privileged Liara. However, Chapman doesn't like being insulted, so the two of them fight a duel according to Rhetonian law, in which the combatants try to force one another into "gravity planes" full of disintegrating energy. Chapman wins but spares Herron. The Rhetonian then rewards Chapman by trying to help him get back to Earth, though not without some self-interest, to get rid of competition. However, with that conflict out of the way, Rheton is tracked down by the Solarites. Sessom uses the planetoid's superior technology to repel the invasion, but the violence releases the one Solarite prisoner held by the Rhetonians, and he provides some last-minute menace before being killed. Chapman, though he wants to remain with Zetha, cleaves to his military duty and returns to Earth, after which he has only minimal proof that what he experienced was real.

The Rhetonian-Solarite quarrel is really the only element cadged from THIS ISLAND EARTH, but it's not entirely a rip-off. I thought it interesting that the Solarites are called "fire demons" and that they use "heat bombs" to attempt destroying the gravity-mechanisms of Rheton. One might say that these fiery associations give them the role of devils as against the "angelic" Rhetonians. Even the Solarites' motives for attack-- they want to steal the gravity-tech in order to keep their own planet from falling into its sun-- sounds a bit like the attempt of evil demons to escape their own hell.

That said, PHANTOM is more concerned with Chapman's problematic adoption by another culture, and his determination to get back to his own world, despite the temptations of Liara and Zetha. Liara, Herron and Sessom are not particularly well developed, though. There's an odd subplot in which it's revealed that Zetha became mute due to the same Solarite incursion that left one living Solarite prisoner on Rheton. Apparently Gebhardt wanted to give her a "trauma breakthrough" moment, since at the film's end she recovers his original speaking-voice as the result of being briefly abducted by the Solarite. However, Gebhardt isn't as good with the big dramatic moments as he is with small ones, as when Chapman and Zetha have to bid one another farewell. That said, Rheton, not Chapman, is the "main character" of PHANTOM PLANET.

SUPERMAN/BATMAN: PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009), APOCALYPSE (2010)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

These two direct-to-video cartoon-movies were the first two team-ups of Superman and Batman produced by the awkwardly titled production group, "DC Universe Animated Original Movies." Both are derived from DC comic books that I have not read.

The PUBLIC ENEMIES of the title are, in fact, the "World's Finest" team themselves. Whereas Silver Age comics showed Superman and Batman as clean-cut, well-adjusted types, later incarnations favor the idea that they're friends that constantly rag on each other. The script for ENEMIES does this passably well, though often the humorous byplay is lain on with a trowel. Just as intrusive-- as shown by the still above-- is director Sam Liu's visual trope of showing various characters with jagged shadows on their faces, regardless of light-sources. Perhaps this schtick was in the original comics-work.

In Superman comics, the hero's perpetual enemy Lex Luthor maneuvered himself into the role of the U.S. President, which became a long-running headache for the Man of Steel. ENEMIES starts with Luthor in the presidential office and ends with him leaving it, presumably because such long-term plotlines proved problematic in DTV productions. Luthor, despite running on a law-and-order platform that excoriates superhero vigilantism, has somehow improved the economy enough that even a few superheroes, such as Captain Atom and Power Girl, have pledged him their allegiance. However, Luthor's regime is marked by a catastrophe, in which a titanic kryptonite meteor is on a collision course with Earth. Yet, despite this danger, Luthor's priority is still all about getting rid of Superman. After framing the hero for murder, the pernicious president places a bounty on Superman's head, so that both real heroes and long-time villains are after him. Batman joins his buddy in a running battle with Luthor's forces, while trying to dope out a means of annihilating the killer asteroid.

The action-scenes are competently done, with the highlight being Batman's combat with a grotty looking Solomon Grundy. There are assorted re-designs, with a really bad one for Power Girl, and a total reworking of classic Superman villain Toyman, who becomes a precocious thirteen-year-old genius. (Definitely an improvement over the worthless version seen in Bruce Timm's SUPERMAN teleseries.)

SUPERMAN/BATMAN: APOCALYPSE is a comparative improvement, being directed by Lauren Montgomery with a greater emphasis on splashy, hard-hitting action-scenes. In this case the inciting storyline was DC Comics's introduction of its fourth major iteration of the "Supergirl" character, so in essence the friendship of Superman and Batman takes a back seat to the new heroine, though there's enough interplay that I would consider all three of them central characters, while others, like Wonder Woman and Big Barda, play supporting roles.

In this iteration, Superman's cousin Kara Zor-El comes to Earth in a rocket sent many years ago by her parents before the explosion of Krypton. Her parents apparently gave her no advice about how to keep a low profile and learn about Earth's customs quietly, for she panics in the unfamiliar environment and rips up big hunks of real estate before the World's Finest Team subdues her. It's not clear why Kara is such a handful. She is an adolescent with hormone problems, and she saw her parents die before she was rocketed from her homeworld, but the script doesn't quite succeed in making her a rounded character. Because she seems so fractious, Wonder Woman shows up and invites the Kryptonian heroine to come to Paradise Island and train herself. However, Supergirl isn't there very long before the forces of Superman's old foe Darkseid come looking for her. 

Lacking a viable way to reach the the hellish world of Apokolips-- which is how the comics spelled the name of Darkseid's homeworld-- Superman,  Batman, and Wonder Woman appeal to a former native of that world, Big Barda. In order to keep things simple, the DTV prunes away the more complicated aspects of the comics-character's backstory, so that she's just a super-tough denizen of Darkseid's world, who came to Earth to get away from her tyrannical master. However, she joins the rescue team without any real conflict.

Almost as soon as Supergirl arrives on Apokolips, Darkseid seems to bend her to his will with ridiculous ease. In the 2000s, it was almost de rigeur for every major comics-character to manifest a "dark side," and thus Supergirl turns evil, as signified by her donning an outfit worthy of an exotic dancer. (Darkseid's motivations might be more comprehensible if he wanted to seduce the super-nymphet, but he only seems to want her to be the leader of his shock troops, "the Female Furies," and doesn't even seem all that interested in messing with Superman's mind.) 

So Superman fights his cousin to restore her sanity, while the other heroes run around creating as much chaos as possible on an already chaotic world. The subtler aspects of Jack Kirby's NEW GODS opus are dropped in favor of showing the Apokolipians (?) as one-dimensional devils. The script does have one tantalizing myth-reference, when Darkseid tells his minions to fetch him "the girl who fell from the sky," which puts him in the ballpark of Satan, seeking to suborn one of God's angels. But that's as far as the DTV is willing to explore metaphysical myths. Even after the Girl of Steel is returned to Earth, Darkseid drops his Satanic deceptions and shows up on Earth to duke it out with both of the Kryptonian cousins, as if he were one of Jack Kirby's more muscle-bound menaces.

Still, there are a lot of fights, with dozens of Earth-Amazons and Female Furies, so there's that.