By 2006, Bryan Singer was a hot property. He put himself on the map with The Usual Suspects, a movie that had some of the best word-of-mouth of the 1990s, one that made “Keyser Söze” a household name. Then he added to his own legend by providing the first Marvel movie to be a mainstream success. It’s easy to forget now, eighteen years later when “Marvel Cinematic Universe” is synonymous with “the most popular movies on the planet,” how impossible that sounded at the turn of the century (though I think this rewatch has illuminated the wasteland that had been Marvel’s movie oeuvre of the 20th century).
Prior to X-Men, the only superheroes that were true mainstream successes starred either Superman or Batman—but it had also been two decades since there was a Superman movie. Warner Bros. wanted to change that, and they turned to the man who had done the impossible to do so.
Warner had been trying to do a new Superman film ever since the immensely successful “Death of Superman” storyline in 1992, but the only actual movie to come out of that was Steel. Several scripts were commissioned over the course of the next decade, including two that would riff on the death of Superman, one by Jonathan Lemkin, the other by Kevin Smith. Tim Burton was brought on to direct Smith’s script, entitled Superman Lives, though Burton brought in Wesley Strick to rewrite it, and Nicolas Cage was cast in the title role. Warner hired another writer, Dan Gilroy, to rewrite the script into something cheaper, and then Burton quit, and the project died. (The entire sordid tale of that film can be found in the documentary The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?)
A Batman/Superman team-up film was started and stalled, and then there was to be Superman: Flyby, written by J.J. Abrams and directed by McG, which also fell apart.
Into this wasteland, Singer stepped. While never really a superhero fan prior to taking on the X-Men, he’d always listed the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films as major influences on him, and he and writers Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris sat down to do a story that would be a sequel to those two films. To that end, Brandon Routh was cast primarily on the basis of his resemblance to a young Christopher Reeve, and Kevin Spacey’s performance as Lex Luthor was specifically done as a riff on Gene Hackman’s portrayal in those first two films.
Frank Langella was cast as Perry White after Hugh Laurie was forced to turn down the role due to his shooting schedule on the TV show House (also a Bryan Singer production). Kate Bosworth was cast as Lois Lane on Spacey’s recommendation. As an homage to the past, Adventures of Superman co-stars Noel Neill and Jack Larson were cast as, respectively, the old woman Luthor marries and a bartender.
While the film made almost $400 million worldwide, it also cost almost that much to make, between movie budget and marketing. As a result, the planned sequel never got off the ground, and the Superman franchise was restarted again in 2013 with Man of Steel. Routh would go on to play another DC character, this time on the small screen: Ray Palmer a.k.a. the Atom in Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow.
“Three things sell this newspaper: tragedy, sex, and Superman”
Superman Returns
Written by Bryan Singer & Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
Directed by Bryan Singer
Produced by Bryan Singer and Gilbert Adler and Jon Peters
Original release date: June 28, 2006
A title card reveals that astronomers found evidence that Krypton was still intact. Superman leaves Earth in the ship that took him away from Krypton to investigate this, only to discover that, no, it’s still destroyed. This trip takes five years, and he returns to the same Kansas farm he landed in the first time, rescued once again by Martha Kent, who is very glad to see her son back.
Lex Luthor’s fifth appeal succeeded in getting him out of jail, especially since Superman wasn’t there to testify. He’s married an elderly rich woman who leaves him everything right before she dies. (Well, actually, she dies before she can sign the will, but Luthor fakes it.) He uses her yacht to head up to the Arctic so he can mine the Fortress of Solitude for all its secrets.
Clark Kent was gone on sabbatical for the exact time that Superman was gone. Nobody comments on this. Perry White gives him his job back as a reporter for the Daily Planet only because a reporter died recently. He learns that Lois Lane is in a relationship with White’s nephew Richard, and they have a son named Jason. Lane is also about to receive the Pulitzer Prize for her article “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Kent appears to be visibly disturbed by the fact that Lane didn’t just sit around for five years pining for him, never mind that Superman never actually said goodbye to her.
Lane herself isn’t in the office—she’s on a 777 that has a space shuttle attached to it. The notion is to launch the shuttle from 40,000 feet in the air from the plane.
Luthor, after getting a crash course from the interactive recording of Jor-El about how Kryptonian crystal tech works, brings a crystal back to his mansion and activates it. Doing so results in an electromagnetic pulse that stops all electronics for several seconds on the entire eastern seaboard. The temporary blackout glitches the shuttle, and it winds up firing its rockets despite still being clamped to the 777.
Superman flies into action, using his heat vision to detach the shuttle and let it fly safely into space. However, the damage has been done to the plane, which was not designed to fly at those speeds. The wings are sheared off, the plane is on fire, and is spinning out of control. Superman manages to slow the plane’s descent enough so that he can place it gently down in the middle of a crowded baseball stadium, thus announcing his return on the jumbotron. Superman gives the same speech about how safe flying is that he gave in Superman, and just like then, Lane faints.
Superman foils assorted bits of crime and saves folks, including Kitty, Luthor’s henchwoman, who’s driving a car with no brakes that has gone out of control. While Kitty is careening down the streets of Metropolis, Luthor and his gang steal a shard of Kryptonite from the Metropolis Museum, secure in the knowledge that Superman is too busy rescuing Kitty. (Kitty later complains that Luthor actually cut the brakes instead of her faking it like they planned. Luthor points out that Superman would notice if they faked it, and given his X-ray vision, he would.)
In addition, Superman spies on the Lane/White household, which is totally creepy, and sees that they’re all nice and happy together.
Luthor’s plan is to raise a continent in the Atlantic using Kryptonian technology. This will wipe out most of the eastern seaboard, and also make Luthor the richest man in the world. Sure, why not?
White wants Lane to run with the Superman story, but she’s sick of being “the Superman reporter,” and would rather cover the blackout. White instead puts Kent on the blackout story and orders Lane to interview Superman. Kent helps her out by changing into Superman and talking to her when she goes to the roof for a cigarette break.
Lane tracks down where the blackout started—the mansion Luthor now owns—and checks it out with Jason while en route to the Pulitzer ceremony. She stumbles across Luthor brushing his teeth and she and her son become his prisoner. Everyone is surprised when Luthor’s shard of Kryptonite reacts to Jason’s presence, leading Luthor (and the audience) to question the boy’s parentage.
Lane tries to get a message via FAX to the Planet while Jason distracts the guard with his excellent piano playing. When she’s discovered, Jason throws the piano at the guard. The pair are then locked in a room.
The FAX, however, did make it through to the Planet. Richard goes out on his seaplane to rescue them.
Superman would rescue them, but he’s too busy saving the city, as Luthor has started raising his continent and the shockwave is causing tremendous damage all over Metropolis.
The shockwave also damages the yacht, and Richard, Jason, and Lane wind up trapped in a room that is filling with water, with Lane unconscious. Superman rescues them and puts them on Richard’s plane, then goes to confront Luthor. Lane wakes up and insists they go back, as Superman doesn’t know that Luthor has Kryptonite.
Superman finds this out the hard way, as Luthor and his thugs beat the holy crap out of him and dump him in the water. Lane manages to pull his corpus from the water and get him away from the Kryptonite, and he flies into space to recharge from the sun. He then goes deep underwater and picks up the new continent and flies it into space, thus saving the east coast from a tidal wave. However, the Kryptonite that Luthor has laced the continent with takes its toll, and Superman plummets to Earth, unconscious. Luthor and Kitty, meanwhile, are stranded on a desert island with a helicopter that is out of gas.
Superman is taken to a hospital, and Lane visits him there, whispering to his comatose self that he has a son. When he wakes up, he immediately flies to the Lane/White house and tells Jason the same thing that the recording of Jor-El told him. Lane sees him as he’s about to fly away and asks if he’ll be around. He allows as how he isn’t going anywhere.
“Superman will never—”
“Wrong!“
The decision Bryan Singer made to abandon the X-franchise in favor of a new Superman movie is one that did lasting damage to both the X-Men and Superman movies. We examined the former last week, and now we see what he did to the latter. What should have started a new era of Superman films (the way Christopher Nolan started a new era of Batman films a year previously with Batman Begins) instead has become the red-headed stepchild of Superman films, neither fish nor fowl. It isn’t iconic the way the Christopher Reeve films are, and it isn’t the vanguard of a new series of connected DC films the way Henry Cavill’s films will be in the next decade.
And that’s because we didn’t get what we were promised. We were told we’d be getting a Bryan Singer Superman film, but instead we got Richard Donner fanfic.
The entirety of Superman Returns is paying homage to what Richard Donner did on the first two Reeve films. Despite being filmed twenty-five years later (and with the concomitant advances in technology like cell phones and personal computers), this is put forward as a direct sequel to 1980’s Superman II. We even (sigh) get footage of Marlon Brando’s somnabulent performance as Jor-El from 1978’s Superman.
Except, of course, it starts out by disregarding the very last line of the film in particular and Superman’s character in general. Supposedly, Singer was not just ignoring Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (which, frankly, is fine), he was also ignoring what Richard Lester did when he took over Superman II, focusing instead on the film Donner wanted to make (which can be found on the infamous “Donner cut” of Superman II). This gets rid of the super-amnesia (which explains why Lane doesn’t ask Superman how, exactly, he got her pregnant) and the final scene where Superman says he’ll never go away again.
But even if you discount that final scene, the notion that Superman would just hare off into deep space for five years and abandon the planet he has sworn to protect is nuts, and 100% out of character. It’s even more so when he’s already abandoned his post, as it were, only to let Zod, Ursa, and Non wreak havoc in his absence. And he had to have left right after Superman II, because the timeline of Lane being pregnant with Jason doesn’t work otherwise. (Of course, in the Donner cut, Superman’s reversal of time happened in the second movie, not the first, which means he undoes everything that happened, which should include the de-powered Superman and Lane sleeping together, so how did she become pregnant by him, exactly?)
Just in general, Superman spends way too much time moping over how his life has changed—which might have some resonance if it wasn’t entirely his own stupid fault for going off-planet for five years on a fruitless quest. It’s hard to feel sorry for Superman when he made this bed himself, and then goes and spies on Lane and her family in as creepy a manner as possible thanks to X-ray vision and super-hearing. There’s something wrong with your Superman movie when the most heroic character in it isn’t Superman (it’s Richard White, who is magnificently selfless and dives right into danger more than once to save people, despite having no super-powers).
The spectre of Donner hovers over the entire production, unfortunately. Having watched Routh for several years as Ray Palmer on Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow, I really wish we had gotten his interpretation of Superman, but instead, Singer has him impersonate Christopher Reeve. It’s a really good Reeve impersonation, mind you—Routh nails his delivery, his vocal intonations, his Superman body language—but it diminishes his acting work. He also doesn’t do enough to differentiate Superman from Kent, the one manner in which he fails to impersonate Reeve.
Frank Langella and Sam Huntington similarly channel Jackie Cooper and Marc McClure as White and Jimmy Olsen, respectively, while Parker Posey’s Kitty is pretty much a rerun of Valerie Perrine’s Eve Tesmacher. The only ones who don’t just impersonate their late 1970s counterparts are Kate Bosworth and Kevin Spacey.
It actually would’ve been nice if Bosworth had channeled Margot Kidder, as it would’ve been better than what we got. As it stands, Bosworth has the unfortunate distinction of being the least interesting Lane in the 75 years of dramatizations of Superman comics. To exacerbate the problem, one of those other actors is in the movie, and Noel Neill manages to create more of an impression in one scene laying in a bed dying than Bosworth can scrape together over the entire rest of the movie.
Spacey, on the other hand, starts out doing a letter-perfect Gene Hackman, but as the movie progresses, he makes it more and more his own, and it’s a fun performance, if a bit too over-the-top. Then again, so is his plan, which is rooted in Luthor’s visit to the Fortress of Solitude in Superman II, and is—well, not thought out. Sure, he’ll have his own continent, and he’ll have Kryptonian technology, but he’ll have just destroyed a large chunk of North America. Does he really think the world’s militaries won’t respond? And will his alien tech be enough to defend himself? Then again, it’s no crazier than buying up desert property and knocking California into the ocean to make it valuable, or wanting to rule Australia, I guess…
The only actors who get to make the parts their own are the ones playing characters who weren’t in the previous films: James Marsden and Tristan Lake Leabu as Richard and Jason. The former is, as I said above, the most heroic character in the film, and is played with calm and patience by Marsden, who seems to be Singer’s go-to guy for second-banana love interest, having been the same in the X-films as Cyclops. Leabu doesn’t get much to do, but he pretty much acts just like a happy five-year-old—albeit one who happens to have super strength at unexpected times.
The script is remarkably pedestrian. Aside from a few exchanges between Luthor and Kitty, and one or two of White’s lines, none of the dialogue stands out. In any Superman production, Lane’s acidity is usually a nice balance to Superman/Kent’s earnestness, but Bosworth isn’t really up to that. Also the script just ignores the fact that Kent and Superman were both gone from Metropolis for the exact same amount of time and yet nobody seems to notice this amazing coinky-dink!
At the very least, Singer has improved his chops as an action director. After failing his saving throw versus fight scenes in X-Men, he upped his game in X2, and in Superman Returns he gives us one of the most amazingly shot Superman rescue scenes in cinematic history when he rescues the plane and shuttle. It’s magnificently done, and the only part of the movie that’s actually exciting. In fact, Singer might have been better off leading with that scene, as we would’ve been spared the endless and unnecessarily drawn-out scenes of Kent crash landing again, Kent staring into space, the utterly pointless flashback to Kent’s youth, Kent walking into the Planet and seeing that Lane has moved on, Kent having a drink with Olsen, and Lane’s lifeless exchanges with Peta Wilson’s shuttle spokesperson about the shuttle-plane trick, and I just want to gnaw my leg off at the knee waiting for something interesting to happen. The movie drags like a big giant dragging thing, and doesn’t even give us a decent Superman-Luthor confrontation. (They’re only in one scene together, and it’s far too short, and mostly consists of Superman being beaten up.)
Oh, and then there’s the Christ imagery. Gah. Yes, let’s make sure this creation of two Jews from Cleveland is splayed in a crucifixion pose after he falls into a coma in space following his rescue of the Earth from the effects of the Kryptonian continent. This after making sure we get Jor-El’s father-son speech from Superman, which is repeated by Supes to Jason at the end (“The son becomes the father and the father becomes the son”). Very subtle, Bryan, very subtle.
Even though the movie was a box-office success, it wasn’t as big a one as they were hoping, and while critical response was good, word of mouth was mediocre, and twelve years later, Routh’s role as Superman has been reduced to a trivia question, that one other guy who played Superman who’s on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t quite remember…
Now that we’ve entered the 21st-century renaissance in superhero films, we’ll only be looking at one movie per week rather than doubling (or tripling or quadrupling) up. Next week, we’ll look at another high-end director taking a shot at superheroes, Ang Lee’s Hulk.
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support his Patreon, which has his reviews of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Black Panther, and (coming this weekend) Jessica Jones season two, as well as more movie and TV reviews, excerpts of his works in progress, new vignettes featuring his original characters, and more.
The Keith DeCandido Rewatch: AKA: Keith Doesn’t Like Movies.
Regarding Brandon Routh in the Arrowverse, I laughed out loud when he met Supergirl in last year’s crossover and mentioned that she looks just like his cousin :)
This movie? Yeah, its not good.
Poor Brandon Routh. He’s great in Legends of Tomorrow, but pretty much wasted here. My favorite thing about this movie is the live-action re-creation the cover of Action Comics #1. Other than that, it’s pretty forgettable.
After having seen this and his performance in Legends, I’ve come to the conclusion that Routh would have been perfect as Captain Marvel/Shazam. Imagine all of Ray Palmers goofy charm strapped to the Superman powerset.
THIS.
The only good thing about this film was Routh as Clark, and the airplane scene (which is straight from John Byrne’s Man Of Steel). The worst was Lex Luthor; after X-Men, even as a homage to Hackman’s Lex, I don’t understand how Singer could do a campy villain.
Oh, and “Superboy” killing a fella with a piano.
Because of course, Perry White’s son has a seaplane.
Quoted for truth.
Mark: That’s totally unfair. I’ve liked plenty of movies in this rewatch, from ones I expected to like, such as The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, to ones I was surprised I enjoyed, like the 1974 Wonder Woman. And I will like plenty more, starting in two weeks with the 2002 Spider-Man. And I do like parts of Ang Lee’s Hulk, but we’ll cover that next week……………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
That right there was the first sign that things would be going terribly, terribly wrong. Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration — from what I recall (having only ever seen it the one time in the theater) this wasn’t a total trainwreck like X-3; it just wasn’t very good.
When this film came out, I actually kind of liked it from a story and filmmaking perspective, but I had problems with other aspects, and my opinion of the film has fallen a great deal on subsequent viewings.
At the time, I couldn’t buy Brandon Routh as Superman at all. I didn’t understand the talk about how strong a resemblance he bore to Christopher Reeve; I just couldn’t see it, and I didn’t think he was right for the role. Of course, now that I’ve seen him as Ray Palmer in the Arrowverse, I realize he could’ve been a fantastic Superman if he’d gotten to play the role that way. The problem was that every single actor in the film was apparently directed to give as understated and lethargic performance as possible, out of some sort of attempt to make the film seem serious and grounded. It was like the whole cast was on Valium.
I also felt Kate Bosworth was totally wrong for Lois. She was one of the most sublimely beautiful women I’d ever seen, but had nothing of Lois’s personality, her toughness, her fire, her brashness. Like everything else in the film, she was far too subdued and sedate.
I found Kevin Spacey adequate as Luthor but not remarkable. I know how this sounds in the wake of what we now know about him, but I’ve never really understood how he got a reputation as a great actor. He never struck me as anything special. But my real problem was with the revival of the Donner version of Luthor, who was one of the worst versions ever (at least until Jesse Eisenberg came along). The Lex Luthor of the movies was never as well-defined as a villain as his comic-book counterparts, whether the brilliant but malevolent scientific genius of the pre-80s comics or the ruthless billionaire executive of the modern comics and most modern TV adaptations. Donner/Singer Lex was just a guy with a homicidal approach to land swindles, a fondness for ditzy molls, and apparently very poor recruiting skills for henchmen (although this time he managed to wrangle more than one, which is progress, I suppose). The only thing that made Lex work in the Reeve movies was Hackman’s charm, and Spacey didn’t have that, not for me.
I didn’t much care for the ending. Superman should never have been able to retain his powers in such proximity to such a huge mass of kryptonite, and I didn’t like it that the movie relied on him just performing a feat of strength rather than thinking of a cleverer solution. Part of the appeal of Superman in the comics is that he’s not just brute force, that he’s a genius who can find creative, lateral ways to solve problems that are immune to his strength. I also didn’t like it that Luthor’s henchmen were killed by falling debris from the continent, since that means they were essentially killed as a result of Superman’s actions, and that shouldn’t happen.
Still, the sequence of the weakened, dying Superman being rushed to the hospital and tended to was very moving and made me teary-eyed. That sort of thing always gets to me — when the ordinary folks save the heroes, showing that heroism can be found in all of us, not just in a powerful few. I love stories about Superman (or Supergirl) inspiring others to be heroic. I also love a good Superman rescue sequence, and this movie gave us a nice long one when the earthquakes were tearing up Metropolis. That’s the part of the film that I still enjoy the best.
John Ottman’s music was pretty good, but I didn’t like the way the John Williams Superman ostinato and fanfare just slammed into being every time he started to do something heroic, with little variation. It got to feel very repetitive and lazy after a while. I also didn’t like what Ottman did with the love theme, doing the first five notes and then abruptly modulating into something else (this was particularly noticeable in the latter portion of the end titles). It was rather awkward rhythmically, not just because of the jarring of expectations. Still, it was nice that Lex Luthor finally got a menacing theme of his own rather than having to share that goofy music with Otis.
Overall, I agree with Keith. Seeing Bryan Singer reinvent Superman his own way could’ve been really impressive, in the same way the X-Men movies were. But just getting Bryan Singer’s really expensive Richard Donner fan film was a disappointment.
I loved Routh in Scott Pilgrim as Evil Ex #3. Being vegan gives you psychic powers, who knew?
@4/irejectthislogic: “After having seen this and his performance in Legends, I’ve come to the conclusion that Routh would have been perfect as Captain Marvel/Shazam.”
Holy moly, that’s an inspired thought.
@@.-@ so much this! And in press interviews it comes across pretty clear that Routh was a legit nerd in his youth. He could have brought an amazing sense of earnestness and integrity to Supes and geeky not-quite-fitting-in-ness to Kent, if he had been directed that way. Just goes to show that sometimes when directors have too much reverence for the sources, instead of telling their own story, it can be just as bad as directors who ignore the source.
The comments around the office I remember about this movie were “deadbeat dad” and “why wouldn’t you build real estate in the Pacific? Plenty of room.” Yeah, Luthor’s plan is plain moronic. No one would want to live on a bunch of jagged rocks ruled by a dictator.
Btw, the DVD extras hinted at some of Singer’s later legal problems. There’s a creepy section where he fondles his mic as he talks about Routh shirtless. Or power tripping about threatening to fire someone for displeasing him. Bit like Luthor actually, but I’ll leave the Spacey real life troubles alone… Lack of boundaries those two.
One other thing that always bugged me about this movie was its Superman costume design with that raised, textured S shield on the chest. How the heck does Clark hide that under his street clothes??
The serious, cranky, mopey Superman never works for me. For me, he’s best when he’s optimistic, hopeful, determined that the world can be a better place and that it is his job to make it so. My favorite modern incarnation of Supes is actually Tyler Hoechlin on “Supergirl.” I mean, the first thing he does when arriving at the DEO is shake the hands of nameless “background” characters. How can you not love him?
@13 / ChristopherLBennett: I remember at the time this came out there was a minor stink about how dark the red of the costume is, and the S-shield being much smaller than Reeve’s. My kid was in the target market for the toys at the time, but we couldn’t get over the dark red cape. We got some Dini-style animated action figures instead.
14. Dani T I agree 100%, and I actually really like Henry Cavill.
I’m taking this one at time.
A) In Superman 2, he just retook his powers and the mantle of Superman to save the world. Something that knowingly lost him his love. And he leaves the world to check out a possible survival of Krypton? Gone for 5 years? Lamer. Without saying good bye? Lamest.
B) He crash lands on the farm? What – he can pilot a ship for 5 years in outer space and hadn’t learned to land it successfully on a planet? Really?
C) So Lex gets out because Supe is not there to appear during his appeal? Court of Appeals rulings are based on the facts in evidence of the previous trial. There would be no witnesses, no new evidence, no new testimony. It’s not allowed.
D) No safeguards on the Fortress of Solitude? really?
E) Launching a space shuttle from a 777 loaded with people??? Who wrote that liability insurance waiver?
F) Cars Cars Cars. 1966 Ford Mustang careening down the streets of Metropolis. Superman movies have a thing for Fords. There were plenty used and reused in the first two Superman movies. Most interesting is that if you look closely, you’ll see three 70s era mustangs, an LTD and a Javelin, used in both the small town Idaho scene, and in Metropolis street scenes in Superman 2.
There’s also the car geek in me. She presses the center of the steering wheel, for the horn. It’s not there on a 66. The button for the horn is on the edge, left, right, and bottom.
G) Supe never questioning the age of Jason. Never asking how long it took her to bet involved with Richard White. If Richard thinks he’s the father, it would have had to been a very quick major rebound relationship thing after Supe left.
H) The henchman left to watch over Lois and Jason. He catches Lois sending for help, and instead of reporting it to Lex, he menaces and goes about abusing Lois?? There’s no reason for it, except to have him squished by a piano, leaving the audience in no doubt of Jason’s parentage.
I) It’s Lois, concussed (she lost consciousness on the yacht) who dives in to rescue Superman from the water. Not Richard, who has been very heroic up until this point. I guess they couldn’t let him be THAT heroic – in saving Superman.
J) And yeah, I agree with Christopher above (#8) Supe should never have retained his powers pushing that much Kryptonite. He was beaten up standing on it, but can fly and do super strength when he’s below it? C’mon.
Others have addressed the idiocy of building a new continent in the Atlantic. the idea he’d be able to ‘fight off’ the military of two continents he’d damage in doing so with a handful of henchmen, no matter what level of otherworld tech he could access.
Lost another night to Keith’s movie rewatch/ :)
14/16: Me too. I like Cavill and the DCEU Superman, but Supergirl’s Hoechlin wins.
@17/Wrenn: “He crash lands on the farm? What – he can pilot a ship for 5 years in outer space and hadn’t learned to land it successfully on a planet? Really?”
To be fair, the former is much, much easier to do than the latter, since you just have to point in the right direction and basically coast until you get there. Takeoffs and landings are by far the most dangerous parts of any spaceflight. I mean, in deep space, you’ve got maybe a fraction of a percent of a chance of getting hit by something, but if you’re trying to land on a planet, then you’ve basically got a 100% chance of hitting it and it’s just a matter of how fast.
(Sci-fi movies give a really distorted picture of how dangerous space is. I’ve been watching a lot of old ’50s and ’60s B-movies these past few years, and it’s weird how virtually every movie about a pioneering rocket flight to another planet includes an obligatory “asteroid swarm” sequence.)
“Superman movies have a thing for Fords.”
Including Glenn Ford! (rimshot)
Oh, and my problem with the whole sequence on Luthor’s boat is that Lois just blithely takes her 5-year-old kid into a situation that she knows could be dangerous. I mean, we know Lois Lane has never let concern for her own safety stop her from pursuing a story, but surely she wouldn’t extend the same carelessness to her son, or to any child.
At the time, I was overjoyed just to get a full-blown live-action Superman theatrical release. I wasn’t old enough to be able to watch the Reeve films on the big screen. Seeing those flashing big credits along with the classic John Williams theme was a big hook for me.
At the time, I couldn’t fully appreciate just how much Singer’s film borrowed from the Reeve/Donner films. Now, it’s painfully noticeable to me. And it’s too bad, because I adore the Donner films, especially the first one. It’s a throwback to old-fashioned heroism at a time in which antiheros were on the rise, whether on TV through Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey, or on the big screen thanks to Christopher Nolan’s Batman films.
I actually appreciated Routh quite a bit on the role. Then again, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like had he attempted to do something new instead of appropriating the old. I also wonder what would the movie would have been, had Singer gone with Henry Cavill instead (we do know he was a front-runner for the role, even back then).
In a way, I still appreciate parts of this film because it does address an important issue: just how much of an impact Superman has had on mankind. And seeing them do their best to revive him at the end just about kills me every time. He did bring out the best out of mankind. A very Trekkian theme at a time every other film is shifting towards darker themes. It’s one of the reasons I adored last year’s Wonder Woman. It remembered that aspect and ran with it.
It’s too bad the film didn’t generate enough cash for Warner (though I don’t consider 400 million a loss, by any definition; nowadays they decry a superhero blockbuster if it can’t crack a billion; Hollywood accounting and stock market expectations are getting increasingly out of hand). Had the sequel been greenlit, I’d assume Singer would have tried to take it into a new direction. Sadly, we were left with a studio who decided it had to compete with Marvel, trying to replicate its model in detriment of what made Superman work to begin with. I still like Returns more than any of the DCEU Superman entries (aside from the brilliant Wonder Woman, that is).
Like many I was largely disappointed by the film. I actually didn’t think Routh was that bad in the part, though Bosworth never struck me as right for Lois even before I saw the film. It did have some nice homages to previous Superman Comics and films, but that wasn’t enough to salvage its dull pace, and agreed the Donner homages/stylings were abit to much. If anything, I was largely disapointed…A number of people I know refused to see it because they felt no Superman movie could live up to the Reeve/Donner versions, and this seemed to be a public attitude as well, and I was hoping Singer/Routh could prove them wrong. Same things were said about Man Of Steel and the current DCU Superman. Funny, I’m too young to remember if there were those of a certain age who felt no one could be a better Superman than George Reeves. I am old enough to remember a generation who believed that no one could live up to the Adam West Batman, but we’ve already seen a few newer bat interpretations to prove those critics wrong. It’s too bad that no new Superman film interpretation has yet to move on from the Reeve/Donner spectre..
I actually saw this one in the theater – my dad was a big Superman fan and I believe we went and saw it while on vacation. I hadn’t seen any of the other Superman movies, and I remember I enjoyed it but found it too long. I also remember feeling kind of bad for James Marsden since he seems to keep playing love interests who are slightly overshadowed by the more flashy guy in the movie, lol. Frankly, I agree with Keith’s assessment that Superman is being kind of a jerk here!
But obviously the movie made little impression on me, because the only things I remembered were the son, and being trapped on a boat. None of the other plot details remained in my memory.
@19 – “Oh, and my problem with the whole sequence on Luthor’s boat is that Lois just blithely takes her 5-year-old kid into a situation that she knows could be dangerous” – yes, this! My first thought when I was reading this summary was, “Wait, so she’s going to investigate a supervillain and she just brings her kid along?” Although the summary isn’t quite clear on if she knew Luthor owned the mansion yet, so perhaps I can give her a pass, but on the other hand, as an investigative reporter, you’d think she’d have a general sense that these types of situations often can be dangerous.
Like Chris, I really liked this movie when it came out. I went to see it a bunch of times, and gave it a 4-star review (out of five) in Orlando Weekly. Over time, though… well, let’s just say that I now agree with nearly every word of krad’s rewatch.
The only point I would disagree with — and it really has me scratching my head – – is that the Christ symbolism is somehow inappropriate because Siegel and Shuster were Jewish. If we feel it’s ill-advised to inject such symbolism into a character that happens to have been created by Jews, how do we feel, say, about the crucifixion imagery that runs throughout the train sequence in Spider-Man 2? Do we believe Stan Lee has a right as a Jewish-American to consider himself somehow diminished by that association? Wouldn’t that assume that allusions to Jesus — who, religion aside, remains one of the most significant characters in the history of literature — are either off-limits, or not of interest to, writers of other faiths and backgrounds? Unless I’m seriously misunderstanding the point as presented here, it strikes me as silly and a little insulting.
And anyway, my problem with the Christ symbolism in movies like these is that it’s usually so blunt and overdone, not that it’s off-base due to the real-world beliefs of the creators. That shot of Supes falling to Earth is indeed something of a 2-by-4 to the noggin … although it seems positively subtle compared to the sequence in Man of Steel in which Clark is posed against a stained-glass representation of Jesus in a bright red robe, an image the camera lingers on for what seems like an eternity. Good old Zack Snyder: Whenever he gets something that qualifies as half a thought, he’s so worried the rest of us thickies will miss it that he belabors it to the point of ridiculousness.
Oh, and let me add a criticism of Superman Returns that I know isn’t original to me, but which hasn’t yet been mentioned here: The story is supposed to take place five years after the events of Superman II, yet both Lois and Clark look years younger than they did in that film. Just another casualty of the modern-day moviemaking edict that the leads in any commercial picture cannot appear to be older than 25.
Everyone else has covered most of the dopey bullshit this movie pulls, so let me focus my ire on one of the most truly inexplicable decisions in the history of screenwriting: Jason Lane killing the goon with the piano. Even leaving the part where a five-year-old just committed murder aside, it torpedoes everything the movie has been doing with him and will continue to do for the rest of the movie.
Jason’s whole thing is “whose son is that?”. It’s the question everyone can’t help but wonder about. And if you look at his scenes without the piano bit, there’s a very deliberate progression: Jason is introduced, his age is pointedly emphasized, we’re reminded that Lois “spent the night with Superman”, the kryptonite reacts to him… whose son is that? Then the sinking yacht scene, where Lois and Jason are trapped and rescue is terribly slow in coming. With no options left, in a panic, Lois begins begging Jason to save them, as though there’s a way that the meek, asthmatic child that could somehow get them out from a locked, metal room, something he can do that she cannot. Yet just before Jason steps up to try it, they’re rescued externally. Whose son is that? And then in the very last scene of the movie, we’re finally given the answer — yeah, he’s Superman’s kid. That’s clean plotting.
Except for the goddamn piano goon scene, wherein Jason displays unambiguous super-strength. As soon as that piano gets shoved across the room, we’re done here. Jason is Superman’s kid, we know because he has super-strength. The yacht scene isn’t tense, it’s maddening, because we already saw the kid use his superpowers, why the fuck is the movie playing coy, we know he’s got strength, fucking use it Jesus God almighty this scene is dragging on for no reason. And then characters spend the rest of the movie bumblefucking around and playing coy with the reveal that Jason is Superman’s son, like yes, we know, idiots, we got there an hour ago. So nice of you to catch up.
Why is that scene even in the movie at all? I’m honestly asking. It shoots the whole movie in the foot and accomplishes nothing.
Superman lifts increasingly heavy things.
@24/Stephen Schneider: The issue with the Christ symbolism, I think, is not that it’s religiously wrong or anything, just that it’s weird that everyone since Donner has tried to attach it to Superman. I mean, if you think about it, Superman’s story is based on Moses, not Christ. And Superman has never been the guy who sacrificed his life to save us; he’s been the guy who punched evil in the face to save us. It’s just not a parallel that existed in the Superman mythos before the makers of the ’78 film put it in there. So it’s strange that it’s been so pervasive ever since.
It’s like that damn crystal architecture for Krypton and the Fortress — something the Donner movies did and almost everyone since has felt obligated to copy. Those two movies have had a disproportionate influence on how Superman has been portrayed onscreen (and even in comics, to a degree) ever since.
Indeed, that was my biggest disappointment with Returns. I didn’t want to see a rehash of a decades-old interpretation of Superman; I wanted to see a new, fresh take on Superman, just as the Donner take had been new and fresh in its day, and just as Singer’s X-Men films had been fresh, even revolutionary, when they came out. At least Man of Steel did give us a new take, though it was a take that misunderstood Superman on a fundamental level.
“Just another casualty of the modern-day moviemaking edict that the leads in any commercial picture cannot appear to be older than 25.”
Tell that to Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Ruffalo, Benedict Cumberbatch, etc. Or Ben Affleck, for that matter.
@13CLB: Super compression material. It’s canon!
Nothing is crazier than wanting to rule Australia though. It is like wanting to be king of the castle…..’s dungeon. Australia isn’t a reward, it is a punishment; possibly even a death sentence. Lex ought to have picked New Zealand as his downunder getaway, like his (sadly)non-fictional real life supervillain the gay wannabe-vampire Peter Thiel has.
Man, I wanted to like this movie. Until the titles ended I loved it. The plane rescue scene brought the love back briefly, but then it got all creepy-mopey again. Yeah, like @11 said, this movie showed too much reverence and the Cavill SuperGalt movies show too little. And the less said about the skinny unshaven, often incompetent, mess on Supergirl the better. Sad to say, but the best Superman since Reeves was actually Tom Welling on Smallville. Mind you, that also had the best Lex Luthor too. So…
#27 ChristopherLBennett:
“The issue with the Christ symbolism, I think, is not that it’s religiously wrong or anything, just that it’s weird that everyone since Donner has tried to attach it to Superman. I mean, if you think about it, Superman’s story is based on Moses, not Christ.”
It’s not. Siegel and Shuster based Superman on Philip Wylie’s Hugo Danner in GLADIATOR. And the refugee- from-a-doomed-planet stuff was adapted from another Wylie novel, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (plus a little bit of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter). And the only Bible stories that might have been on Wylie’s mind would have been Samson (for the super-strong Hugo Danner) and Noah (for the rocket ship full of people escaping destruction).
@27/Christopher & @24/Stephen: When Scarlett first did Iron 2, she was already past 25. Unless I’m wrong, I believe the only major actor under 25 in the current crop of superhero stories is Tom Holland. Even Andrew Garfield was quite a bit older when he did the two ill-fated Spider-Man entries.
Could it be the Christ symbolism is rooted in where Clark grew up and who raised him? I mean, even if Ma and Pa Kent have never been depicted going to church every Sunday, the influence is definitely there. Somehow, despite the background of its creators, I doubt there are many synagogues in Smallville.
His backstory is Moses, but his behavior (in most depictions anyway) is very cleancut, Midwestern, Christian boy does good. I can see why they would go for the sacrificial Christ imagery so often. It’s right there in the character.
P.S. – The X-Men films get a free pass on that regard since they deal with an actual school with actual kids who are gifted.
This is the movie where Superman suffered from ennui, and by the end of the movie, so did I…
@31/Miles: Like I said, regardless of Clark’s upbringing, it just doesn’t make much sense to parallel Superman with Christ. He’s not a character who’s defined by nonviolence or by dying to save us. He saves people by fighting, and by not dying, since he’s indestructible. Sure, he’s an inspiring figure of endless compassion and goodness, so I can see a parallel there, but it can be taken too far and too literally. And it’s just become a cliche at this point.
My complaints for this movie need some added historical context; Superman’s comics history could (at the time) be generally divided into two eras: Pre-Crisis (everything before 1985), and Post-Crisis (everything after 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths). Later (after 2011’s Flashpoint) would come the New 52, but obviously we didn’t know that at the time.
Donner’s take on Superman dates from 1978, making it solidly Pre-Crisis, even if you ignore the (equally Pre-Crisis) influences of previous serials. Every subsequent Superman movie has been descended from that 1978 original.
Meanwhile, an entire generation of fans (including myself) had grown up with a very different Superman –one where dorky, awkward, fool-in-love Clark Kent was the “real” person, and Superman was the public facade; where both Clark’s parents were alive and well; where Metropolis itself was as much a character as anyone in Superman’s already-large supporting community; where Lex Luthor was complex, brilliant, and compelling (and raised a few legitimate points). Based on his X-Men work, Singer would’ve been perfect to bring this Superman to the screen, but instead we just got more Donnerverse.
A few years later, DC would stage the Flashpoint “Event,” ending the Post-Crisis Era and ushering in the “darker, grittier” New 52 –which clearly influenced Snyder’s “deconstruction,” meaning that the Post-Crisis is the only era to not have its own Superman movie.
@27/Chris:
Well, the reason the Donner movie has been so aped is that its artistic choices were embraced as canon by a large portion of the public, simply because it was the first “A” picture starring Superman, and thus reached more people than most of his appearances in other media. But I would also argue that an ancillary reason is that most of the movie’s innovations were at least as good as anything they replaced, if not better. In fact, it only hit me a few years ago how ironic it is that Superman, having all but created the superhero comic book, has so often been better served in other media — to the point that much of what we know of him and his world was introduced on the radio, on television, in films, etc. I mean, try to name more than a small handful of Superman stories from the comics that are beloved and which warrant being adapted on the big screen; it’s very tough. Certainly harder than it is for Batman or many of the Marvel heroes.
And as Christ allegories go, I will take Jor-el’s tasteful “my only son” monologue in the Donner picture over the efforts of Singer and Snyder any day.
As for the age issue, yes there are exceptions. But it’s still true that overall, post Twilight, Hollywood has been imagining and reimagining properties with leads that don’t look any older than undergraduates. It’s kind of a running joke within the industry that the shortest way to get teenagers’ money is to give them stars that don’t (God forbid) remind them of their parents, even if their parents are only in their 30s.
And note that Affleck was cast as a riff on Frank Miller’s semi-retired Batman, when in any other era, he could easily have been portraying good old Batman in his prime. (And the idiocy of pairing a seriously aged Batman with a newly-arrived Superman is something I hope krad addresses in his eventual BvS rewatch.)
@34 — Sure, but a man in a cape saving the day has become a cliche too, hehe. If Superman weren’t cliched, I wouldn’t recognize him.
And at the risk of contradicting what I said above, I do find it frustrating that the feature films have failed to show us so many of the important characters Supes has met in other media, like Brainiac, Bizarro, the Kandorians and even Krypto. Over and over, they keep acting as if his only antagonists of note are Luthor and Zod. (Snyder did give us Doomsday, but I honestly couldn’t care less about that character. The Death of Superman was a really lousy story in the comics, and I can’t believe they keep revisiting it on the big screen.)
@35/Cybersnark: In fact, I’d say the sensibilities of the Reeve movies are closer to the Silver Age of the late ’50s and ’60s than to the somewhat more serious Bronze Age of the contemporaneous comics. The first two movies have elements of both, giving them a certain inconsistency of tone, but Superman III wholly embraces the goofiness of the Silver Age.
And I agree — part of the problem with Returns was that it clung to that nostalgic version of the character that was already behind the times when the Reeve movies were made. It was stuck in the past, and that kept it from being something that could carry Superman into the future.
As for post-Crisis Superman, we never had a feature version of it, but I’d say the Lois & Clark TV series came the closest, at least in its first season or two before it got really dumbed down. It borrowed a lot of elements from the Byrne reboot — Clark as the real person and the love interest for Lois, Lex Luthor as a business mastermind with a thing for Lois, the Kents being alive and well and helping Clark create his Superman persona, etc.
One of my favorite bits of probably-apocrypha is that they had to digitally reduce the size of Routh’s package in the superman costume. Tee-hee.
Thank you for mentioning Lois and Clark, Christopher. This is my preferred Superman portrayal.. Yes, it had some rather mediocre episodes after Deborah Joy Levine left the show, but there are plenty of good ones mixed in with the bad. Dean Cain is the best Clark ever (his Superman is good too) and Teri Hatcher a wonderfully ditsy, intelligent Lois. I much prefer her to any other Lois. I was not thrilled with Margot Kidder at all. I’d love to see a rewatch of Lois and Clark.
not just this movie but ANY story where Superman goes off and sulks is wrong.
@42/rob: I dunno about that. I mean, a guy who builds a secret clubhouse in the Arctic and calls it the “Fortress of Solitude” strikes me as a guy who needs to go off and sulk from time to time.
My first thought is always of the Lois-in-elevator shot and some of the other visuals that have a very lovley classicist aesthetic to them. But from a story standpoint I’ve always found Returns to be perplexingly redundant. Just because you’re making a spiritual sequel to Superman: The Movie doesn’t mean that you have to have the same villainous plot. It’s just neither compelling nor interesting to me. Wasted opportunity.
I also consider Returns to be one of the worst-cast superhero films out there. I can certainly buy that the actors were hampered by the directive to ape Donner’s characters, but Bosworth and Spacey are completely off the mark for me, and and Routh just doesn’t work as a supposedly older version of Christopher Reeve. Routh’s version seems like a big kid and can’t bring to screen the gravity that this story needs, although to be fair, the story has plenty of its own problems.
Ah, Superman Returns. Never quite know how I feel about this one. Don’t dislike it, don’t love it, it’s just kind of there. Brandon Routh is decent but Superman is a character that’s hard to make interesting, which is why in Smallville everyone was handing out plaudits to Michael Rosenberg for the complex second male lead while ignoring the guy with top billing: He’s the Luke Skywalker of superheroes. I think the differences between Clark and Superman possibly weren’t helped by the fact they tried to emphasise that Clark was a different person, not quite Superman but closer, around his mother (who we never saw him with as an adult in the Donner/Reeve films) than he was around Lois and co. I always remember the trivia that Kate Bosworth is actually younger than Erica Durance who was playing a young Lois in Smallville at the time. Too young to play an adult Lois? Maybe, but I didn’t notice it at the time. The film feels rather Superman-by-numbers: There’s a big rescue scene near the start, there’s Lex Luthor with a crazy plan involving gaining real estate by mass murder, there’s a female accomplice who helps out Superman a bit, and there’s some old footage of Marlon Brando shoehorned in as if we’re expected to be excited by it.
Possibly sounding like an idiot talking about a movie I haven’t seen in a decade, but my memory is that Richard does bring up the fact that Clark and Superman left at the same time and came back at the same time, then he and Lois look over at Clark being goofy and laugh as if to say “As if.” And it does seem a genuine moment, and frankly there’s no indication that Lois knows Clark is Superman so I’m saying the amnesia is still in force. So for the paternity storyline to work, assuming there even is one and Lois doesn’t actually believe (or assume?) Richard is the father, that suggests she must have slept with him as Superman.
To be honest, I feel it’s a bit ambiguous. I don’t recall the kryptonite reacting to Jason. It seemed like Luthor just did the maths when asking whose son he was, then he waves the kryptonite at him, Jason isn’t affected by it and he shrugs it off. We never actually see Jason throw a piano at anyone: It’s just implied, although I admit I can’t think of another way for it to suddenly fly across the room and flatten someone. (Convenient turbulence?) There’s a moment where we and Lois think he’s broken the lock on their compartment, then it turns out Richard opened it from the outside. Lois whispers something to Superman but we don’t hear what, then he makes a big speech at the end that implies he thinks Jason is his father. Maybe Lois lied to him to give him a reason to live? Kind of felt like they were hedging their bets.
@45/cap-mjb: Regarding Smallville, it certainly is possible to make Clark Kent interesting; it just isn’t possible to make Tom Welling interesting. Have you seen him on Lucifer this season? He’s somehow gotten even duller over the years.
“the notion that Superman would just hare off into deep space for five years and abandon the planet he has sworn to protect is nuts, and 100% out of character”
I agree with this sentiment, but it’s interesting to note that there was originally a more detailed explanation as to why Superman abandoned Earth. As the opening card states, evidence was supposedly found that Krypton still existed, but this was ultimately supposed to be revealed as having been faked by Luthor, with the specific help of Kal Penn’s Stanford. This is why, despite being billed between Parker Posey and Sam Huntington, Penn’s character was largely removed in the final edit. Other than, I believe, one line of exclamation near the end, he has no lines in the finished film.
Even at the time, and certainly now with the benefit of hindsight, I had speculated that Singer may have lost some editorial control of the film towards the end of production. Aside from the almost total deletion of Penn’s character and the removal of the fully completed original opening scene of Superman visiting Krypton’s ruins (which many might have preferred to opening on Lex’s swindling of Noel Neill’s character), the regular updates Singer was giving online stopped abruptly with no explanation.
“Oh, and then there’s the Christ imagery. Gah. Yes, let’s make sure this creation of two Jews from Cleveland is splayed in a crucifixion pose after he falls into a coma in space following his rescue of the Earth from the effects of the Kryptonian continent. “
Also, he was in a coma for three days. Subtle, right? There is no reason to turn Superman into Jesus – its a total subversion of the character.
Also, its clear that Richard is far more of a hero than Superman in this movie and that Lois has clearly picked the better man. Was that intentional?
When it comes to Superman on screen and TV, I’ll take the cartoon versions over the live ones any day of the week. First those Fleischer cartoons from the ’40s, and then Superman: The Animated Series with that Bruce Timm inspired art. Those captured the essence of the character quite nicely.
@49/Alan: I felt the Timm Superman made Supes too much of a tough guy at the expense of his more compassionate, inspiring side. It had the best Lois ever, though.
And the best metallo & Lex AND brainiac.
But you’re right that he is a rather Macho interpretation. I like MAWS supes better and it’s Lois
I would say something, but wow, the nail has been hit right on the head.
Hey, Keith,
You wrote: “…the most heroic character in it isn’t Superman (it’s Richard White, who is magnificently selfless and dives right into danger more than once to save people, despite having no super-powers)…”
Amen, bro!!!
P.S.: I do have to admit to loving Clark having a brewski with Jimmy…I always liked “normalizing” Clark, and not just playing him as a super-dork.
#45: That would be Michael Rosenbaum, not Rosenberg, on Smallville. I’d agree that he’s one of the two best screen Lex Luthors we’ve had, the other being pre-wedding John Shea on Lois & Clark, before the writers threw his characterization under the bus. (Hands down the worst Lex is Jesse Eisenberg from the new-DCEU movies, although a strong case can be made that that’s not the actor’s fault — he’s just horrifically miscast, mis-written, and misdirected as a whiny teenager.)
@53/John C. Bunnell: Well, the best screen Luthor overall is Clancy Brown from the DC Animated Universe. Limiting it to live-action Luthors, I’d put Rosenbaum at the top, followed by Sherman Howard from the syndicated Superboy. I believe Howard was a runner-up for Luthor in Superman: TAS, and he was given the similar role of Derek Powers in Batman Beyond as compensation.
The previous Luthor in Superboy, Scott Wells in the first season (who was replaced with Howard through a plot involving a brain transplant or something), was almost as bad as Eisenberg.
@47: Remember, Superman Returns was released in June 2006. Subtract five years from that. My strong impression is, and I believe it’s hinted at in the film, that Superman had to be away for five years to explain why he didn’t do anything to prevent the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.
@45: Here’s a riddle. Whose poster is on the wall of a supermodel’s bedroom? According to a profile I read, Tom Welling’s. Which is to say, he’s a very handsome man and has just the right look to play Clark Kent, but he was not quite up to the (very high) acting standard of the rest of the Smallville cast.
I was never a fan of Superman, so I didn’t take notice of Smallville until its eighth season, though I’ve since watched all ten seasons, and have picked up the DVDs for two or three.
I actually loved Superman Returns for being a sequel to the old optimistic movies.
And I find Man Of Steel a crime against humanity (and Krypotonians). All optimism was squashed in favor of bland destruction and negativity.
@24 – Stephen: The difference is that Superman, on its own, already has enough Jesus paralelisms attached to him (like Chris said), which Spider-Man doesn’t have at all.
@25 – CapnAndy: I brought up Jason (White, not Lane) killing the goon. But the kryptonite (wasn’t it the crystal, though?) reacting to him makes it obvious he’s Superman’s kid. That’s already a dead giveaway, the rest isn’t clean plotting, is the most blatant kind of foreshadowing.
I kind of liked the attempt to essentially treat the Superman movies like the James Bond series in that there was a loose continuity even if the actors were different. Of course, that really does make Brandon Routh the George Lazenby of Superman …
Then again, just as Lazenby was told to essentially emulate Sean Connery, it’s obvious that Routh was doing more of an impersonation of Reeve than a genuine performance in much of this film.
@57 – I know, but I think there’s a real difference between foreshadowing and straight up answering the question, and the movie’s real crime is that it straight up answers the question and then goes right back to asking the question, even attempting to mine dramatic tension from it, in the sinking yacht scene. It’s so momentously, inexplicably boneheaded that I’ve never seen its like.
From a purely meta standpoint, let’s be real; we all knew that was Superman’s kid literally the second he walks on screen, because if he wasn’t they wouldn’t have put him in the movie. But dramatic irony is a thing, and I’m willing to let the movie play games with doling out increasingly unsubtle hints about Jason’s parentage. But in return I expect something to come of it.
And it’s not even a hard fix! You cut the scene with Piano Goon so that the Jason question is still hanging unanswered when we come to the yacht scene, and then instead of panicking, you just have Lois take a deep breath, like she’s making a decision she really would prefer to not do, but there’s no help for it now (which is an odd reaction to being trapped in a sinking ship and would make the audience perk their ears up). Then she turns to Jason and says “honey, you know those things you can do, and how Mommy always taught you that you shouldn’t do them unless I said it was okay first? …Now is an okay time.” And then Jason drops his entire fearful affect, revealing it was an act, walks up, and calmly punches the door right off its hinges.
Tell me that wouldn’t be a crowd-pleasing moment.
I was disappointed they changed the “Truth, justice, and the America way” line to “that other stuff.” I would’ve preferred they poked fun at it directly.
“Truth, justice, and the American way!”
“What if he’s not American, Chief? He could be Canadian—“
“Shut up, Olsen!”
“Yes, Chief.”
@@@@@#6 / krad Hi Keith, you’re right it isn’t fair. Sorry..it was mostly meant to be humorous. I will be interested to see how you enjoy some of the more recent films. In reading your reviews I’ve noticed that the majority of films get fairly critical reviews. Even the good ones (critically and at the box office) usually get around a 6 or 7. That may be just my impression. I could be wrong. I confess I haven’t read all of your reviews. My friends and I constantly are arguing the merits of certain Hero films. What I’ve noticed is that as adults we can be overly critical. We often compare the feelings we had as kids watching films in our formative years to the experiences we have as adults and find our expectations wanting. The adult experience hardly ever matches the childhood nostalgia. When I’m watching a sci-fi, fantasy, or a super hero movie I ask myself would my 8 year old self love this movie. And the answer is usually yes. For example as a kid my favorite Superman film hands down was Superman 3. Watching it now – yes in a lot of ways its a terrible movie – but as a kid, that movie was amazing. I do apologize if I caused offense.
@59: The piano scene probably previewed through the roof, so they had to leave it in, even if it messed up the storyline. Almost invariably, filmmakers will go for emotional impact over making sense.
My recollection is, while there was a strong suspicion this was Clark’s child, there was no hint that he took after his father, as it were. It took absolute desperation to release his powers.
@58: George Lazenby is the name I couldn’t remember. To Brandon Routh’s credit, he didn’t actually turn down the opportunity to play the character again, as Lazenby did.
When Lazenby was asked why he did something so stupid, he could only lamely reply, “It was the Sixties!” He ended up playing cheapo imitations of James Bond.
His Bond film, On Her Majesty‘s Secret Service, was in many ways the most interesting of the classic Bonds. It’s not told in straight chronological order and, instead of a meaningless fling with a bimbo, he falls in love with and marries — Diana Rigg.
BTW, fifty years (!!!) later, she’s terrific in Victoria, as a tough old aristocrat who has seen it all.
@57: What’s the problem? Jesus is just a Jewish boy who made it big. REALLY big.
@60: I’m sorry, too, that they cut “truth, justice, and the American way“. The kind of patriotism that represents is not common in Hollywood any more.
If you think about it, an immigrant like Clark will make a point of emphasizing his patriotism, precisely because it will naturally be questioned. (From my own experience as a child of immigrants, indeed refugees, I suspect most immigrants’ primary loyalty remains with the old country.) If he’s smart, he will also establish a reputation as a do-gooder.
In an alternate history storyline on Smallville, we get to meet Clark Luthor: who barely dares go outside because everywhere there are people laying for him with kryptonite-edged weapons. If you’re a weird, powerful alien from another world, playing the superhero is enlightened self-interest.
@62/taras: It’s worth pointing out that the catchphrase in the Superman radio series was originally just “a neverending battle for truth and justice.” The “American way” bit wasn’t added until the US became a combatant in World War II, and was dropped when the war ended. It wasn’t restored until the TV series in the Cold-War ’50s.
@64/ChristopherLBennett: The full quote from the 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman is:
“I’m here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”
It was nominated to AFI’s 100 best movie quotes.
It didn’t win.
@62 I blame Lazenby for ruining Bond. He played Bond in a Bond movie for people who were ashamed to like Bond movies. Fortunately there were not enough self-hating Bond fans around at the time and they went back to Bond that was like Bond movies ought to be, but when a new generation of people who were ashamed to like Bond came along, they tried to copy that with a shit blondie and some shitty *everyone needs an origin story* reboots because they hated the franchise so much they had to wipe it away so nobody could enjoy anything except their non-Bond Bond and they cited OHMSS as precedent. Assholes.
To Brandon Routh and Superman Return’s credit, at least they didn’t do that to the Superman franchise. We had to wait for Snyder and his army of angry Randians to hate being Superman fans so much they wanted to ruin it for everyone.
@64/taras: Well, yes, obviously by the 1970s, that version of the line had become so well-known from the TV series that it was assumed to be the way it always went. My point is that it wasn’t there from the start. Superman always stood for the best of America’s values and ideals, but it was only during WWII and then the Cold War that it was felt he needed to come out and self-consciously say it instead of just showing it through his actions.
The issue I have with the “American way” line isn’t so much about patriotism. It’s their missing an opportunity to make a joke about it. “Other stuff” is a lame sidestep.
@19: “…if you’re trying to land on a planet, then you’ve basically got a 100% chance of hitting it and it’s just a matter of how fast.”
LOL. That’s going in my quotes file.
@28: I enjoyed Smallville at the time (although I like Supergirl much better), but even then I didn’t think much of Tom Welling’s acting skills (or Erica Durance’s or Justin Hartley’s, for that matter). The guy has about five facial expressions. Plus, his Clark Kent is a terrible liar; I got so sick of seeing variations on the following:
Lana/Lois/Chloe: Clark, is there something you’re not telling me?
[very long pause]
Clark: [poker face] No.
I agree with you 100% on Michael Rosenbaum as the best on-screen portrayal of Lex Luthor, though.
Physically, I think Henry Cavill is probably the best Superman ever, and he is a good actor, he’s just written all wrong (though not as much as Jonathan Kent). I was also impressed with Tyler Hoechlin. Routh isn’t a bad choice for Superman, either; none of the problems with Superman Returns are his fault. Incidentally, I’ve only seen one or two episodes of Legends of Tomorrow, but long before he was in that, he played a very different sort of character on Chuck.
@68/Matthew: I didn’t realize Routh was on Chuck. That starred Zachary Levi, didn’t it? As it happens, he’s now playing the title character in the Shazam! movie. So that’s two members of that show’s cast who’ve played DC superheroes (two of them in Routh’s case).
(Checks IMDb) No, make that three, because Adam Baldwin has played several DC heroes (or antiheroes) in animation — Jonah Hex, Hal Jordan (briefly), and Rick Flag in Justice League Unlimited, Superman in Superman/Doomsday, and Metamorpho in Beware the Batman. Oh, and Matt Bomer, another Superman voice actor (and a onetime candidate for a live-action movie Superman), had a recurring role on that show too. So that’s at least three Superman portrayers in that show. And one Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), and a Batman (Anthony Ruivivar from Beware the Batman).
@59: I always assumed that the piano push was the first use of Jason’s powers and that they may come and go due to his human half. There is nothing prior to that in the movie that would suggest that he was faking the asthma and allergies. For all we know, the exposure to Kryptonite could’ve actually been what activated his Kryptonian abilities.
@55/Taras:
“Remember, Superman Returns was released in June 2006. Subtract five years from that. My strong impression is, and I believe it’s hinted at in the film, that Superman had to be away for five years to explain why he didn’t do anything to prevent the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.”
You are correct. In fact, an early version of the script actually had Superman visiting Ground Zero to witness the aftermath of the attack he had failed to prevent. It was wisely judged too on the nose and removed from the story (at least as a concrete reference).
Although I don’t know if everyone would think it’s necessary to view the Superman universe as close enough to ours that the September 11th attacks had to have happened there too. I guess the filmmakers just felt the zeitgeist demanded an explanation for why a superior, loving being (metaphorically, God) could have allowed such an event to transpire. Kind of the same way DC Comics felt they had to come up with a reason why Superman didn’t end World War II the minute it began.
@62/Taras:
“His Bond film, On Her Majesty‘s Secret Service, was in many ways the most interesting of the classic Bonds. It’s not told in straight chronological order …”
Are you sure you weren’t thinking of the way in which the film was edited when it was shown on ABC TV? They spread it out over two nights, and in the process chopped it up into a modified flashback, with some unidentified actor doing a voice-over as Bond. As far as I can recall, the theatrical version was entirely linear.
@57/MaGnUs:
“The difference is that Superman, on its own, already has enough Jesus paralelisms attached to him (like Chris said), which Spider-Man doesn’t have at all.”
Yet Chris is arguing that those parallels didn’t exist until Donner imposed them, in his view inappropriately. And I still maintain that the metaphor isn’t entirely ill-advised, just that Singer and Snyder handled it with such little finesse.
@67/NashRambler:
“The issue I have with the ‘American way’ line isn’t so much about patriotism. It’s their missing an opportunity to make a joke about it. ‘Other stuff’ is a lame sidestep.”
Absolutely. It’s such an obvious sop to the international audience, which the studios feared would reject any pro-America language in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. The best joke about that catchphrase is in the original Donner film, though, and I doubt Singer and co. could have come up with anything to even rival it.
Oh, and it’s moot to argue that the “American way” part was a later adddition, because that’s the version everybody knows. Walk up to anyone on the street and say “Truth, justice…” and he’ll answer “…and the American way.” It’s the definitive version. Thus, any deviation from it will seem curious and suspicious in the public’s mind.
@71/Stephen Schneider: “Kind of the same way DC Comics felt they had to come up with a reason why Superman didn’t end World War II the minute it began.”
Well, at the time, Superman wasn’t as overpowered as he became in later comics. He didn’t even explicitly gain the power of flight until the war was already underway, I think. There was one “what if” story published in Life magazine or something about Superman ending the war by snatching up the enemy leaders and bringing them in for trial or something, but for the purposes of the comics and the radio and cartoon series, it was presumed that the war was simply too big for one superhero to handle alone, so that he needed the help of the “greatest military in the world” and all that. Although there were several radio and comics storylines in which Superman went up against imaginary enemy nations, lost civilizations, etc. who were allied with the Axis and preparing exotic new superweapons or war fleets that Superman destroyed, so the premise was that he did help in the war effort by keeping it from becoming far worse than it actually was.
Also, most of the fictional superheroes and crimefighters during WWII were shown to focus primarily on defending the home front against a relentless barrage of enemy spies and saboteurs, keeping the nation safe while the Army and Navy liberated the rest of the world. You can see this in the very racist 1943 Batman film serial, but it was also a plot point in the early wartime episodes of the Superman radio series, in which Clark Kent was recruited as an agent of a government security agency tasked with rooting out fifth columnists in the US (although this was dropped after the series went on hiatus and got relaunched some months later). See also the early Wonder Woman comics, or the first season of the Lynda Carter TV series based on those wartime comics. And while Marvel stories written in the ’60s and afterward showed Captain America fighting on the front lines in WWII, the original ’40s comics showed Cap and Bucky operating out of a stateside Army base and fighting saboteurs and fifth columnists, like most of their contemporary adventure heroes.
@73: “Yet Chris is arguing that those parallels didn’t exist until Donner imposed them, in his view inappropriately.”
I’m not saying “inappropriately.” That was the metaphor they chose to use in that particular story, and they had their reasons. I’m just saying it’s strange that so many people since then have assumed those parallels are an integral or inseparable part of the character. There’s too much of a tendency in subsequent productions to copy the Donner films rather than doing what they did, which was to innovate and offer a new take on Superman.
@76/Chris:
I was referring to the story in which Clark Kent tried to enlist in the Army, but got so nervous that he inadvertently used his x-ray vision to read the eye chart in the wrong room, and was so declared 4-F. That was commonly construed as DC’s explanation for Superman not being on the front lines — although as you point out, he did fight in the war to a certain degree. So it works more as an excuse for Clark himself to continue to be based in America. And that “How Superman Would Win the War” story you mentioned just muddied the waters further, because its very premise acknowledged that Superman as depicted in the comics of the time could have done a lot more to end the conflict than he was allowed to do in the pages of his actual books.
@77/Stephen: I think it’s easy enough to read the “Win the War” piece as a wish-fulfillment exercise that simplified the situation a great deal. So I don’t find it too implausible that the “real” in-continuity version of Superman had to focus on more manageable challenges. I mean, in the fiction of the era, America itself was riddled with enemy agents and under constant attack from saboteurs. In that context, where the threat on the home front was so much more pronounced than in reality, it makes sense that superheroes would’ve had to stay in the US in order to protect it. Don’t think of it as superheroes sitting out the war abroad — think of it as an alternate history where the war was hotter on US soil and so a robust home defense was needed.
@71/@72/Stephen Schneider: “I don’t know if everyone would think it’s necessary to view the Superman universe as close enough to ours that the September 11th attacks had to have happened there too.”
The filmmakers try to appeal to a mass audience, part of which doesn’t understand the concept of alternate history. (And part of which, probably, thinks Superman is real.) Indeed, one might even say that the comic book norm is to place superheroes in a world otherwise like our own, without regard for how the existence of superheroes would change the world (one of the themes of Watchmen).
I think Stephen is right. I must have seen On Her Majesty’s Secret Service on broadcast TV, in a version so extensively reworked as to constitute a new (and probably superior) work.
Keith: “Superman … goes and spies on Lane and her family in as creepy a manner as possible thanks to X-ray vision and super-hearing.” Even Superman, eating his heart out with jealousy, is subject to human frailty. It enriches the character, I think.
@76/ChristopherLBennett: The original “superman”, Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (1930), fights on the Western Front in World War I. Whether he has any significant impact on the course of the war is left unclear: the book’s dubious theme is that the superior individual — symbolizing the 28-year-old Wylie himself? — can’t find anything worth doing.
I’ll just throw in two cents about adding Christ imagery to Superman. The reason I don’t think it really works is that it isn’t necessary — Superman is already such an incredible iconic figure! To my mind, you don’t need to liken him to another figure to make him more meaningful as a character. It’s one thing to include religious imagery in a story about a new character if you’re trying to tell a story with religious overtones or allegorical elements. But to include it in a story about Superman, to me, means that you lack confidence in the character’s inherent ability to inspire an audience as well as the entertainment value or appeal of the character’s own roots.
–Andy
@81/AndyHolman: Filmmakers might add Christian imagery for the same reason they cast Marlon Brando as Jor-El; that is, to say “this isn’t just trash for children!“
For Christians at least, it also brings in the idea of a superior being who loves us and is willing to sacrifice himself for us.
Down the road, no doubt, movies about Superman will no longer include Christian imagery, but movies about Christ will include Superman imagery!
RANDOM22 said – Sad to say, but the best Superman since Reeves was actually Tom Welling on Smallville. Mind you, that also had the best Lex Luthor too. So…
I mostly agree, so regarding the legit critic about Welling’s acting that he’s dull… Well sorry to say so, but Kent and even Superman are as dull as they come. Positive one sided Boy scouts usually are. This description should fit for the ones who loved Reeves performance. Another dull one. So for Welling to be a former model and have an innocent look is truly truly enough (sadly) to stay true to that sort of Superman. Boy scout Superman… never liked it. It was too much in your face to work for me. So for Reeve’s movies – I never liked those. Even Hackman didn’t pull that one of in my book
@83/michaelleachim: There’s a difference between a dull character and a dull actor. Plenty of actors have played the “dull” Clark Kent and Superman with enormous charisma, from Bud Collyer to George Reeves to Christopher Reeve to Dean Cain to Tyler Hoechlin, and even Henry Cavill when he’s actually given something to work with. (Brandon Routh has enormous, Reeve-like charisma too, as we’ve seen on Legends of Tomorrow, but he wasn’t really allowed to show it.) But Tom Welling is a dull, plodding performer regardless of the role he’s playing. On Lucifer last season, he played a character with a lot of complexity and hidden secrets and moral ambiguity, but he was even more deathly dull and unexpressive in the role than he was as Clark Kent. I mean, there were times in Smallville where he did manage to rise to the occasion and juuust barely convince me that he had it in him to grow up to be a marginally passable Superman someday. But he was so, so much worse on Lucifer. (Sometimes I wonder if he was cast strictly as a Superman in-joke, because he was playing a character whose real name was Cain, as in the previous guy to play Clark Kent on live-action TV.)
I actually think Welling was better in Smallville than he was on Lucifer. I think he spent more time in the gym on set at Lucifer than he did reading scripts.
Tom Welling is the answer to the trivia question, “Whose poster is on the wall of a supermodel’s bedroom?” (Though which supermodel, I’ve forgotten!)
Smallville was a very well-acted show, but Welling was the weakest member of the ensemble, even after 10 seasons. Admittedly, Superman is a difficult role play, as others have pointed out above.
@86/taras: “Admittedly, Superman is a difficult role play, as others have pointed out above. “
Although for me, the problem with Smallville under its original showrunners (i.e. the first 7 seasons) is that they didn’t want Welling to play Superman, they wanted him to play a sulking farmboy who resisted the call to heroism and preferred to stay in his rut forever. Once new showrunners took over with season 8 and had him actually develop the ambition to move forward both as a reporter and a superhero, Welling did relatively better because he had more to work with. So the challenge of playing Superman was not the problem there.
By the same token, Henry Cavill showed he could be a terrific Superman in Man of Steel and Justice League, but he was awful in Batman v Superman, because there was no Superman in that movie, there was just a passive plot device who stood around being reacted to and had fewer than 50 lines in the whole movie. So I disagree entirely that it’s hard to be interesting when playing Superman. It’s not getting to play Superman properly that makes actors less interesting.
Smallville’s big problem was that it didn’t have a clear end goal (apart from “and then Superman!”) when they started it. So they didn’t know if they were writing a show that would write ten years or ten episodes, and thus kept defaulting to a status quo which was antithetical to character growth. If they’d at least had some sort of plan (same problem NuBSG had, ironically) and a rough idea of how to work towards that Suddenly Superman. I did like the Justice League later seasons though.
Shame about what happened to Allison Mack though, that is weird even by Hollywood standards.
@88/random22: Nobody at the time would’ve imagined that the show could run 10 years; at the time, no American SF/fantasy show had ever run that long, with the record-holder being The X-Files at 8 years and counting when Smallville began (it made it to 9 in its original run), followed by Bewitched at 8 seasons and the various Star Trek series and Buffy at 7. As a rule, the longest run a genre show on a smaller network like UPN or The WB could’ve expected was around 5 years, and many shows were designed with 5-year plans.
So there was a definite plan with a clear end goal, but it was a plan built around a 5- or 6-year run. The premise was only meant to carry Clark through 4 years of high school and then a year or two of transition to becoming Superman. The problem was that they became victims of their own success and kept getting renewed for far more seasons than they originally intended, so they had to drag it out unnaturally, beyond what the original premise was designed for. A lot of people said around season 6-7, and I agreed, that they should’ve just renamed the show Metropolis or something and turned it into a proper Superman show. But Gough & Millar were still committed to their “keep Clark down on the farm” formula and so the storytelling got labored and stagnant, until they finally left and the new showrunners for seasons 8-10 were able to revitalize the show by turning it into a Superman show in all but name.
@87/ChristopherLBennett — Actors will generally tell you it’s easier to play villains than good guys. It’s more difficult to make good guys interesting.
Can’t say Superman finally donning his cloak (as it were) on Smallville meant anything to me. I was a Spiderman fan as a kid. In fact, my lack of interest in Superman is why it took me seven or eight years to discover the show
And I like the idea of a super-powered character who rejects the superhero game: because he has a life, like the Congressman on Heroes who is terrified his constituents will learn he can fly.
@90/taras: I’ve never believed the canard that villains are more interesting than heroes. Who’s more interesting, Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny?
Villains are people who just give into their base desires and greed. That’s very straightforward and linear. Heroes are people who feel those same base and selfish urges but choose to resist them, to strive to do good for others despite all the trouble and sacrifice it causes themselves, and that strikes me as a far more complicated inner life, more interesting to write and to play. Villains can be more fun to play (as my father would’ve been the first to agree) because they let you cut loose and indulge yourself, but I don’t see them as deeper or richer than heroes.
As for Smallville, it was originally made specifically for people who weren’t fans of Superman. It started before superheroes became hot, and so it basically tried to strip away everything comic-booky about the premise and reinvent it as a supernatural teen drama in the vein of Roswell. And indeed, there actually were fans of the show who had no idea it had anything to do with Superman. They were broadly aware of a character named Superman through pop culture, but not familiar enough with the character to recognize names like Clark Kent and Lex Luthor. So the intent was to transform the basic Superman origin story into something aimed at an entirely different audience for whom the story would be new.
But as the show ran on for years and years past its original 5-year plan, they ran out of stuff to do within their original premise, and so they had to bring in more and more ideas and characters from the comics to keep the show going. Plus, superhero movies had become more successful and respectable over the course of its run. So it eventually ended up embracing the DC Universe elements it had done its best to avoid or downplay early on.
“I like the idea of a super-powered character who rejects the superhero game”
Sure, that’s a valid approach to a super-powered character, but for Clark Kent? No. He’s supposed to be the archetype of the whole breed. He’s supposed to be someone who instinctively puts others’ interests above his own. Even Zack Snyder got that much right.
That’s one of the things that always bothers me when people discuss heroes and villians. People say a hero is only as good as the villain. I fell it’s often the opposite. Look at Joker or the MCU
It’s not like there is a ton of stuff to run into in deep space…
There is a Laumer, I think, where a space craft crashes and senior diplomat Magnan immediately deduces on the basis of the landing technique that the pilot is Magnan’s subordinate Retief.
@91 – this is so true, and it totally bugs me when people write ‘nice’ characters as ‘bland’ characters.
@93 It is either a lack of imagination, or -like a certain DC movie maker- they have an ideological blindness to niceness as valuable and complex train in its own right.
@89. CLB: Agree that the show should’ve transitioned to Metropolis once they started setting stories there. One thing that doesn’t get mentioned is that the show also made Green Arrow viable as a character. I had doubts when he first appeared.
“Who’s more interesting, Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny?”
It could be argued that Bugs is the villain, endlessly tormenting the hapless Fudd. Bugs is Loki, an agent of mischief and chaos.
@95/Sunspear: IIRC, Smallville had its version of Lois adopt the habit of her DC Animated Universe predecessor of calling Clark “Smallville” as a nickname. So that by the time the show shifted mostly to Metropolis, the title Smallville subtly became a reference to Clark himself rather than his hometown.
As for Bugs and Elmer, I hardly think a man who’s going around trying to murder sentient creatures for sport constitutes a hero, or that the sentient creature trying to save himself from being murdered can be called the villain. True, in his early appearances, especially under Bob Clampett and Tex Avery, Bugs could be as wild and chaotic as early Daffy Duck. But once Chuck Jones put his mark on the characters, their personalities became more clearly codified, and Bugs emerged as the comic hero, using his chaotic powers to defend himself, or other innocents, against bullies and predators. Most of Jones’s characters derived their comedy from their self-inflicted failures, like Daffy through his hubris and Wile E. Coyote through his obsessiveness and mechanical ineptitude, but Bugs was the rare example of a Jonesian comic hero, a character who always triumphed through his wit and creativity.
@CLB: Not saying I’d support the argument, but Fudd would definitely be to a hero a certain ideological, gun-owning subset. A creature that resists giving up it’s life to become food already, dammit, would be an enemy to them. (Was at a b-day party recently where 2 or 3 guests were bragging about the size of their gun safes.)
Bugs is definitely the hero, but I like the thought of him being tempted by and tapping into his inner wickedness to mess with the dim Fudd. He did call himself a stinker more than once.
@97/Sunspear — Your comments ring a bell. I was at a convention recently where a panelist complained that rabbits had ravaged her garden.
Perhaps we should look at Bugs as a Depression-era “hero” in the same sense John Dillinger was a “hero”, or Jesse James in an earlier time. To paraphrase Obama, “He didn’t grow that carrot!” He stole it from Elmer Fudd: who represents our Second Amendment right to defend the fruits of our labor from vermin.
As somebody pointed out, Loki is more interesting than Thor. Villains drive the plot because they can be villainous in an infinite variety of ways, and can even choose to do good when they feel like it. The hero is more predictable,stuck with the job of reacting to the villain and trying to restore the status quo ante.
I can definitely see how in comics, the villains can be more entertaining than the heroes. For one thing, comic book series (and American television series too I guess) revolve around the heroes so they are often not allowed to really grow in any meaningful way, else that could lead to the story ending. We see in comics especially that after meaningful character development happens, it is often reset by new creative teams — I especially hate Geoff Johns for this.
Secondly, heroes are most often reactive. They are usually trying to set right something that the villains have done or are threatening to do. There are very few stories about the heroes planning ahead and implementing their own agendas, and when it does happen it can be disastrous (as with the Squadron Supreme).
That said, I agree that “nice” can be an interesting character trait. After all, it is impossible to truly give everyone what they want and tell everyone what they want to hear, so it would be interesting to get insight into how to manage those conflicts. We’ve seen in some stories how Superman (and Superman analogues like Busiek’s Samaritan) feels conflicted about who he saves and how many he saves. I’d like to see this expanded.
Getting back to this movie, I find this particular Clark Kent and Superman to be constipatingly earnest. I wish that more of Routh’s innate nerdiness were allowed to show through (as we see in Legends). It could have suited Clark just fine to be more like Routh. Ah well.
The fascination with turning villains into the heroes of the piece is something I will never understand.
@97/Sunspear: If that “gun-owning subset” would be just as determined to kill if their quarry was sentient, verbal, and anthropomorphic, then I really have no sympathy for their point of view. There are people out there who think Emperor Palpatine was the hero or that Fight Club was an endorsement of the toxic masculinity it was meant to condemn. The fact that the attitude exists does not make it valid; it just means some people are really screwed up.
@98/taras: I don’t recall Bugs stealing carrots from Elmer. More often, the setup was that Elmer invaded Bugs’s home forest with the intent to shoot him dead for sport, or otherwise intruded on Bugs’s attempts to live a peaceful life to a degree that compelled retaliation. That was the formula of the very first “true” Bugs Bunny cartoon, Tex Avery’s A Wild Hare, and it was the formula perfected by Chuck Jones when he standardized Bugs’s personality as a comic hero who always fought in defense of himself and others.
It’s not unlike how the Marx Brothers evolved from their early Paramount films, where they were just agents of chaos subverting societal norms and institutions, and the later MGM films, where they were always friends with the nice, bland romantic leads and inflicted their antics on the villains who endangered the young couple’s happiness.
And yes, Loki is more interesting than Thor, but I doubt anyone would say that Obadiah Stane or Justin Hammer was more interesting than Tony Stark, or that Darren Cross was more interesting than Scott Lang, or that Ronan was more interesting than Star-Lord. For that matter, hasn’t Loki now become more antihero than villain? It was his potential for redemption, for being more than just a villain, that made him more interesting than most MCU villains.
Villains going straight has been a trope for a reason.
@CLB: Add to your list those who are fans of Thanos and yes, “it just means some people are really screwed up.”
@vinsentient: “It could have suited Clark just fine to be more like Routh.” In some ways, it seems like Routh’s earnestness and goofiness as Ray/Atom is an extension of what Clark’s personality should’ve been.
Btw, trivia question about Bugs. Did he ever breed? Given that there was cross-dressing (Brunnhilde for one, with Fudd as Siegfried) and probably subtext that I didn’t get as a kid (haven’t watched one of these toons in ages), was there ever a Mrs.Bugs and little mad Bugs babies?
@102/Sunspear: I do believe there were one or two cartoons that gave Bugs a family for the sake of a gag, but it was never a continuous thing. However, there was a really weird Kids’ WB show in 2005-7 called Loonatics Unleashed, which was supposedly a far-future superhero team consisting of the descendants of Bugs, Daffy, Taz, Wile E., etc., which implies that they procreated. But only in the continuity of that weird thing.
The Christ imagery in SR did not bother me. What bothered me about SR was the plot: it just did not make much sense to me: from Superman leaving Earth to investigate a long dead Krypton to Luther’s real estate machinations. Also, Superman seemed bit depressed.
What I loved: Superman rescuing the space shuttle-jumbo jet hybrid and the gatling gun set piece.
This really is like the forgotten Superman flick and I can totally get why having seen it all of one time and having no real desire to repeat the chore. It is lethargic and dull with really only the plane rescue, Supes being shot at, and him being rushed to the hospital as the scenes of most interest. Brandon Routh certainly looks good and as others have said, it’s a shame he (and the flick in general) aren’t allowed to get under the shadow of the Donner films and be their own original thing. Bosworth does feel miscast and I read a review on another site how Parker Posey would have made for a better Lois Lane and I totally agree with that.
I also didn’t like Supes’ costume. The red portions were too dark reminding me of the “bad” Superman from Superman III.
This film (along with The Usual Suspects) also has the unfortunate distinction of having two of the worst offenders in the #MeToo era collaborating on it: Singer and Spacey.
Looking at this, I remember generally liking this movie, then realizing I liked Superman 3 better, because I can overlook a lot of flaws if I’m having fun. This was just ungodly dull. And I’m so glad Brandon Routh was brought back for Crisis as generically the Donnerverse’s Superman but with an implication that the timeline wasn’t entirely exact (Routh’s Superman alludes to Superman 3 happening). I just wish someone would box Crisis up in one box, you need a flowchart to watch it properly.
@106/wizardofwoz77: This movie’s reality — Earth-96 by its Crisis designation — was not meant to be the same universe as the Donnerverse, but one in which nearly the same events happened twenty-odd years later. There are some continuity inconsistencies between it and the first two Reeve movies, even aside from the timeline. So it’s entirely possible that some version of the events of Superman III also happened in it at some point.
@107 Okay, that makes sense. And makes everything else fit so much better. Honestly I think I decided Brandon Routh deserved better than he got in this movie from watching him on TableTop with Wil Wheaton and Felicia and Ryon Day, but I feel like his actual performances back my opinion up.
But seriously… This was an Idiot Plot in its conception. I swear they created the title first then worked backwards. And ran out of time while coming up with a reason for Superman not to be there in the first place.
What I remember the most about this movie was that Brandon Routh’s only previous acting credit was as Seth Anderson on One Life to Live, and he absolutely sucked in the role. I mean, laughably bad by soap opera standards. He was cast as Superman shortly after his stint on OLTL ended, so I never knew whether he’d been fired from OLTL (which was rumored at the time), or whether he’d quit in order to take the Superman role. Either way, he was surprisingly watchable as Superman, and I’m glad he’s gone on to further success in other roles, because he sure started out badly.