Superman: Doomsday is the first of two animated movies telling this story, each produced by DC and Warner Brothers about a decade apart. It also shares significant plot elements from the 2016 live-action movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which makes one wonder if DC can't find other material to mine for movies, but that's another issue.

Let's look solely at Superman: Doomsday, the first of the bunch. This one presupposes that Superman (voiced by Adam Baldwin) and Lois Lane (Anne Heche) have an intimate relationship but she still doesn't know his secret identity.

The villain, obviously, is Doomsday, an alien killing machine unearthed by Lex Luthor (James Marsters) from a prison capsule deep underground. Doomsday quickly lives up to its name and slaughters a great many people in a grisly spree. (The most violent stuff occurs mostly off-screen, but be warned the movie earns its PG-13 rating.) For reasons unknown, Doomsday makes a beeline for Metropolis, where of course Superman stands ready to try and stop him.

Unlike the comic-book version of the story, Doomsday does not first plow through a Who's Who of DC superheroes before facing Superman.

Superman's death, after a long and cataclysmic battle across the Metropolis landscape, comes moments after the light fades from Doomsday's eyes. It also comes less than halfway through the 80-minute movie, leaving the rest of the time for the aftermath.

Here, the movie adaptation veers sharply away from the source material. In the comics, four replacement Supermen arose before the eventual return of the genuine article. Instead, the movie provides just one, a clone created by Luthor to be an exact duplicate of the original except, of course, under his control.

Soon, however, the clone Superman veers from his programming, murdering villains and quickly finding and removing Luthor's fail-safe kill switch. Meanwhile, Superman's Kryptonian robot (Tom Kenny) recovers Superman's body and begins a process to bring him back from the brink of death; it turns out Superman has gone into a form of super-hibernation to allow him to recuperate.

Eventually, of course, you know they're going to fight.

I didn't hate this movie, but I didn't love it, either. Possibly its greatest weakness is its brevity. The threat of Doomsday is over so quickly, it seems odd his name is even in the title. And the death of Superman has such a brief aftermath before his doppelganger appears, there's little time for the public to mourn before believing he's back. And Superman himself, who took I believe a full year in the comics to return, here is resurrected within a few weeks.

The animation is good, and the vocal casting is appropriate for the characters. (If pressed, I wouldn't have picked Baldwin and Heche for Superman and Lois Lane, but they do a good job with the roles.) I'm eager to see how The Death of Superman handles the story differently, but this one was pretty good.