“Why don’t you just put the whole WORLD in a BOTTLE, Superman?”
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As good as the story is, and personally I wasn't a fan of the twist at the end, the main issue Superman faces throughout the whole thing is Lex just being a dick, and at times because of things barely related to what Superman is trying to do.
The chess game for example doesn't actually involve Superman, it's the Bizarro stand-in, but Lex takes this as yet another slight against him by Superman who more or less doesn't actually give a shit about Lex.
The whole "What if?" fails at times because Millar paints Superman as bad simply as an extension of "Russia = bad" stemming from lingering Cold War resentment on both sides, accurate or not. If the same character had been trying to reach the same goal but from a different home location the comic would have both likely not as sold as much or caused anywhere near as much discourse except to bring up the point that these are all things any Superman can do but as with most characters set in a near approximation of the real world the status quo shackles them to not making any great changes, because if that actually happened the stories would resolve very quickly and the comic would run out of things to explore.
I didn’t read it so much as “Russia Bad, therefore Superman bad” but as “what if you attempted to execute Communism with a good king?” Of course, the ultimate “good king” is someone like Superman—he can’t be bullied, threatened, subverted, or mislead, and he doesn’t really age so you don’t have to worry about the quality of his successors. Superman, if you accept that he’s still fundamentally a good person but you raise him with all the lofty slogans and promises of Communism, actually does have the ability to construct and enforce a mostly-fair system, although not without its flaws.
I do agree that the epilogue seemed to come out of nowhere, and didn’t really add anything.