SUPERMAN RETURNS REVIEW

Well, here we are. The day after.



I loved it. A lot. Bryan Singer loves Superman: The Movie more than I do and he was given zillions of dollars to prove it. Most of the time it's endearing. Sometimes it makes you cheer - if you have any fond memories of the opening of Superman: The Movie (hereafter referred to as S:TM, S1, Superman, or Lennie) then the opening of this one will just about make you explode. Sometimes it makes you wonder if you're playing Superman Bingo. "You really shouldn't smoke, Miss Lane." Ok. "You know what my father said to me?" Ok. "I hope this little incident hasn't put you off flying." BINGO!

I'll run down my own scorecard for the film before I make all you silly people that didn't see it last night go away (i.e. SPOILERS!).

Superman:

Well, wow. Brandon Routh is the new Man of Steel. He shines. Chicken Noodle (Supe) is going through a tough time in this film for so many reasons he's almost Parker-esque. It's tough to walk back into a life after five years. (I will ascribe no more intentional symbolism to the fact that Superman left in June of 2001 than I will to the fact that according to the animated series The Batman, Bruce Wayne put on the cape and cowl on September 11th, 2001.) So he's a little down for a lot of the film. But when things go right, he glories in it. And when it doesn't he seems sadly happy to be able to look inside to see the wonderful people of this terrific living world that he was sent to. Does he knock it out of the park with the "Clark can't possibly be Superman" bit that Christopher Reeves did? Close. But not quite. They try it once, but they didn't quite earn it. (On the other hand, you hurt for Routh's Clark in this scene a lot more than you did for Reeve's.) It's not nearly the stretch to connect the dots from CK to Supes in this that it was in S1.

Lois:

(Hang on, lots of comic book philosophy coming up.) I remember getting happily sloshy at a bar in Canton, OH with one of the bigger comic book geeks I know (the night before we saw X-Men, ironically enough) and we were getting very loudly, publicly passionate about our ideas for the Spider-Man movie, and how they should make the audience absolutely love Gwen Stacey in the first movie so they could kill her off in the second one and make everyone cry. (They didn't do this.) Ahhh, heady times. We didn't know that X-Men wasn't going to suck, how good Spider-Man was going to be, or that Fantastic Four wouldn't be worth making. Anyway, we got to talking about Superman. On the whole, I love Superman, John does not. (And Simon Cowell finds country music to be a bit irritating. This is an understatement.) Not only does John not like Superman, he really dislikes the 1978 Superman movie. And not only does he really dislike the 1978 Superman movie, he hates Margot Kidder. I know many people that were not crazy about her Lois. As time goes on, I think that she is pitch perfect. She's not the prettiest Lois. She's not the smartest. She's not even the spunkiest. (I think all three of those go to Dana Delany in the animated Superman.) But she's the one that Superman loves the most.

I think there's two ways to show Lois Lane (heh, and the stuck up B on wheels from Action Comics #1 is not it, thank you). 1) EVERYBODY loves Lois and the only man who could possibly win her heart would be a Superman. I've seen this work very well. Superman: Last Son of Krypton / Miracle Monday (Elliot S! Maggin) are good at this. Or 2) Lois is a great reporter but this makes her kind of tough to be around and Superman is the only one that actually "gets" her. That's Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder.

You know when you have a friend who just totally falls for a guy or gal and nobody really understands it, but gosh, your friend just seems happier than you've ever seen them? There's a moment in S1 where, after throwing away the whole world to save Lois, Lois goes off in her usual Lois-ness. And when she's not looking, Superman just slumps in total relief, because he's going to want to keep living, since she's ok. (It is a common "Elseworlds" theme that Superman falls apart and the world falls apart with him because something happens to Lois.)

Having slogged through that, Kate Bosworth is ok. She's a lot better than I expected her to be. They give her just enough flaws - mostly inherited from Kidder - she smokes, she can't spell - to keep her interesting, but she's very very balanced. Maybe that's the point (for plot reasons not mentioned here). And Superman's whole life is very much centered on her. She does actually seem to be a reporter (trying to track down a story, calling on sources), and she appears very very good at it. At least they didn't just settle for her being pretty. (Oh wait, that's a Batman movie.)

Yeah, that was a lot about Lois, but the movies don't work without her. Don't believe me? Watch Superman III.

Lex Luthor:


Greatest Criminal Mind of Our Time! (How did THAT line get left out?) Kevin Spacey, simultaneously not as goofy or quite as scary as Gene Hackman. (But Singer never just lets the camera roll because he's having too much fun watching Lex, either. More fun than we were having, Mr. Donner.) You never quite get that Spacey is as smart or as mean as Hackman was. Spacey is terrific, but he's just not given the same bite. He's a lot madder at Superman than Hackman was, but he never really gets to work that out. He's given more facets than Hackman, but each side is shown and discarded. He feels like a bit of a has-been. More in the spoilers.

I'll lump Parker Posey's Kitty Kowalski (you figure out which name is the character and which is the actress) in with this section and ask why they bothered to remake Miss Teschmacher and give her a different name? She was good but largely unnecessary. Teschmacher seemed interested in Lex. Kitty does not. And she doesn't seem to think he's smart enough to get her anywhere, so she's not even gold-digging. I think she was there because Teschmacher was there in the first one. Meh. (But no Ottis, so we're ok.)

Character Played By James Marsden:

Not telling you anything. Go see the movie. Marsden is exceptional and now we know what he was doing instead of making X3.




Jimmy Olsen:


Wow is this kid terrific. [Comic Guy Voice]Best Jimmy Ever[/CGV]. Jimmy is a big ol' nerd. For the last twenty years or so people keep trying to make Jimmy "cool". Jimmy's not cool. This Jimmy is so not cool he's just cool.




Perry White:


Everybody in this movie is going to be measured against whoever played their parts before. Frank Langella is going to be measured not just against every Perry White ("Great Ceaser's Ghost!") but more recently against J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson (Spider-Man) as the gruff talking hard bitten take no nonsense newspaper editor. So he dials it down. Quieter rather than louder. But there's not a lot of guys with more screen presence than Langella so he pulls it off very well.

Martha Kent:

So glad she's in this movie. Eva Marie Saint. "How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?" She's a nice mix of the 50's mom figure and the powerhouse that Martha has become in the last couple of decades. She's obviously doing just fine on her own but she thinks it would be so much better if Jonathan was still around. And they gave her her old truck back.

Story: The short of it? Very bitter-sweet. Lot of heart, lot of big derring-do. You WILL believe a man can fly. The message? You can't quite go home again, and that might not be a bad thing but it takes some getting used to. More nods to S1 than might be good for it. There are a handful of scenes that are as iconic as anything seen before (SPOILER: Superman landing in his fortress with all the shadow and light - Yowza!). There will be film makers twenty years from now talking about how this got them into movies.

Effects: I think that the artistry of this age is no longer can you do an effect, but why you do an effect. And boy does Singer know his whys. He never gets into Lord of the Rings "everything happening at the same time and aren't we just so cool?" territory. His biggest splashiest effects feel understated and purposeful. The little stuff that happens to big things when big things happen to them. Crunching, rippling metal. Or a building's worth of dust being shaken off. Amazing is common place now. This is AMAZING amazing.

Well, there's my spoiler-free Superman review. Those of you that are still with me, thanks.

Ok, now the specifics.

SPOILER alert. SPOILER alert. SPOILER alert.

If you haven't seen the movie, go do something else. Like go see the movie. (Mouse over the text to read.)

Watching S1 after this movie is like watching The Mark of Zorro after watching The Mask of Zorro. You know they all didn't live happily ever after. "But then again, who does?" (Sorry, random Blade Runner quote.)

Richard White: What a terrific character! You love him so much you want Superman to go back where he came from. Go save the world some more, we have a life! Who needs superpowers to save the girl? Not me! I have a pilot's license and a seaplane. I'm good! And I could get KILLED so I'm ESPECIALLY heroic!

In S1 the scene on the terrace is wonderful because they're both all flirty and cute. This time around you want to tell Kal "Dude, she's taken, buzz off!" It feels a little creepy.

Oddly I find the scenes where Superman follows Lois home to be sweet, not creepy. He's trying to find where he fits in in this new world. He finds out that the world doesn't NEED a Superman. It just wants one really bad. I think this makes him more part of the world than outside of it. (I read too much Maggin.)

Lois denounces just about the greatest force for good in the 20th century and gets a Pulitzer. How's that for true to life?

"Weren't there two of them?" Bwahahahahahahaha! (Sorry, honey.)

Cameos to watch for: Noel "Lois Lane" Neil is the old lady who leaves Lex everything. Jack "Jimmy Olsen" Larson is the bartender.

I'm sure Singer got a kick out of re-doing Superman 1 and 2 with the train set (Mount Rushmore was a particularly nice touch).

Lex starts out with a great angle: He's the good guy. He's helping the world, Superman is hindering it. This never really goes anywhere. Having just watched S1 again, I realized that even though they have like 5 minutes of screentime together, Hackman and Reeves really connected. Part of this is because Superman doesn't really take Luthor all that seriously. He figures he'll bundle him up and be back at the Planet to finish his meeting with Perry. Here, Superman knows he's a threat, and Lex has actually done something personal to Superman - taken his father, so to speak. There's a moment where they're both realy mad at each other, but for some reason it wasn't enough for me. You never get the idea that Superman knows what the stakes are. Dunno, maybe I'm just whiny. I did love that everything bad in the movie is Lex's fault (on purpose or by accident). And the moment when the lights go out (train set scene again) and he backs up to leave his lackeys is perfect.

"Does he knock it out of the park with the "Clark can't possibly be Superman" bit that Christopher Reeves did? Close. But not quite. They try it once, but they didn't quite earn it." - It would have been nice if when comparing vital statistics between Clark and Superman (and giving us another chit in Superman Bingo) they had changed Clark's height. Or maybe not. Chistopher Reeve's Superman was 6'4" but his Clark Kent was about 6'1". (Routh doesn't quite become another guy like Reeves did. But Reeves never got to recreate the cover of Action Comics #1 either.) But like I said, when Clark drops his glasses and then battles (again) whether to tell Lois or not, it's probably a lot more touching.

"But when things go right, he glories in it." - When he saves the 777 and the crowd goes wild. 2nd favorite scene of the movie. When the streets overflow as the world keeps vigil over Superman. 3rd favorite part. Especially when Martha shows up.

The Passion of Kal-El: I thought the Christ comparisons were a bit overblown (yes, there were intentional Biblical overtones in S1, this is old news). Then Superman saves the world with his arms outstretched and nurse Magdalene finds the tomb, er, hospital room empty on the third day. Heh. Awesome. Take that Tom Hanks.

I want to take this movie back in time to show DC in 1992, THIS is how you kill Superman! (Doomsday. Feh!)

The Boy: Well. Where are they going to go from here? Singer is going to have to be a genius to pull this one off. (Of course, I think he is kind of a genius...) I mean, do we really want this kid hanging around another movie? Especially now that he's super? This could be a big block of kryptonite hanging around the series' neck. I can't think of anywhere I would like to see this story go.

(If you remember S2, Lois does not remember that she and a de-supered Clark ever slept together. So this has to be a bit of a surprise to her. And why is the kid Super then?)

BUT: Singer is usually pretty careful about setting these things up (assuming he's not lured away by another franchise before they pay off). So we'll see. And when Kal-El tells Jason "My life will be seen through your eyes" I just didn't care how bad this could screw up the whole thing. It was one of my favorite movie scenes ever. The whole movie (even the previews) was built for that moment. And Routh nailed it. If this self-destructs any sequels, so be it. I'll just watch this one a lot.


Thanks for reading. "I'm always around."

(No spoilers in the comments, please. Wait at least until the weekend.)