I just saw the pre-opening night screening of Superman Returns last night.
It’s bad.
It’s really, really horrible. I gave the screen the finger on my way out, that’s how bad it was.
I tried really hard to give this movie the benefit of the doubt in the lead-up to it’s release, but now I’m letting it all out.
I never liked the casting from the get-go. Brandon Routh looks college-aged, he’s too young to play Superman. Christopher Reeve was the same age when he first played Superman (26), but he pulled it off. Brandon cannot pull it off, and that’s all there is too it. Everything about him from his looks to his voice to the way he carries himself says “boy”. He does not have Superman inside him. The casting of Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane was even worse. She’s 23 and her Lois Lane looks like a high-school student, but we are to believe that she’s a single mother of a five-year-old who also maintains an award-winning career as a journalist. As for the kid, what the fuck is he doing cluttering up the movie?
I liked the idea of Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor from the start, but I did not enjoy watching him in this movie. Parker Posey and James Marsden play two characters who just plain don’t need to be there (Parker is Lex Luthor’s trophy girlfriend and James Marsden is Lois Lane’s fiance) and it’s very interesting because had they cast Parker Posey as Lois Lane and James Marsden as Superman, you’d have the beginnings of a swell Superman movie.
Basically, it plays as though it’s a sequel to Superman 2, but Superman The Movie never happened. Except for the first forty-five minutes of Superman The Movie on Krypton and in Smallville, and we have to pretend that Marlon Brando as the father, not Sarah Douglas as the mother, spoke and gave guidance to Superman throughout Superman 2. And that Superman & Lois Lane were 18-21 years old. Now the first forty-five minutes of Superman The Movie and then all of Superman 2 make up the part one, and Superman Returns is the part two to that. The advance word on this movie had me believing that Superman Returns would be essentially a third installment – another crack at a Superman 3 – but that’s impossible because the plots are so similar that this can only be a full-on remake of Superman The Movie. There’s been much made of how this movie pays homage to the 1978 original, but there is a difference between homage and being too lazy to come up with your own movie. My only guess is that the producers talked the money guys along by selling the thing as an homage to the ’78 flick, but then the creators got down to the wire for time and just hashed out the first thing they all came up with in an evening. Either that or Bryan Singer was just too stubborn an asshole to tell Warner Brothers “I got nothin’!” when they first asked him to think about doing the movie. What’s wrong with this movie goes all the way back to the very conceptualization of it. They took a wrong turn at the brainstorming stage and never got on track after that. If the ’78 movie was a smooth Frank Sinatra ballad, Superman Returns is a dirty, revved up cover version performed by a really shitty punk band.
This is not Superman for a new generation. In fact, I shudder to think that kids are going to see this movie. Avi Arad, exectutive producer of all of the movies based on the Marvel stable of characters (Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, Ghost Rider), once said of the first Spider-Man movie that they went in with the understanding that it had to be a right, moral story for kids. Sam Raimi, the director, explained that the responsibility when handling a character like Spider-Man is to remain true to the spirit of the thing, being that the audience goes in already carrying the hero on it’s shoulders. The movie can be adult but the story, on a thematic level, has to be right and moral. This is even more true for Superman than it is for Spider-Man. I posit that this is more true for Superman than for any other fictional character, period. At the very least, it’s more true for Superman than for any other comic book superhero. Calling something ‘adult’ conjurs up certain images and attitudes, but something can be aimed at an adult intellect and still be right & moral. Superman Returns is anything but right and moral. It’s the Superman movie for The Usual Suspects audience. It’s Superman done dark and dirty. Lois fucked Superman when she was 18 and got knocked up, and now she’s shacking up with the boss’ nephew and nipping up to the roof at work for a smoke whenever she can. Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen go drinking. Maybe I’m square, but that’s not right for a Superman movie (please don’t get at me about how Lois Lane smoked in Superman The Movie. You know as damn well as I do that that was a long time ago and the social code has changed). They’re not going to make a Harry Potter movie where the students of Hogwarts are fucking and partying, you know what I mean?
Part of the what makes Superman Superman is the image of the bright primary colors blazing across the sky as Superman is off to the rescue. Superman is supposed to be high adventure, not high melodrama. This movie is really dark. You know something’s wrong when the Batman movie is brighter and more joyful than the Superman movie. There’s a lot of times when we’re supposed to be awestruck by the grandeur of mighty Superman carrying some unbelievable weight aloft. It works when it’s Superman in his blue suit and bright red cape with the big bright sunshine sky behind him, but here his costume is so dark that the red on Superman’s cape and chest emblem almost looks black a lot of the time. This is not helped by the fact that whenever we’re seeing Superman, it’s either night or we’re in dark, stormy surroundings. It’s dark in both the look and the tone. The movie starts out really serious and heavy at the beginning and just stays there. It never gets fun anywhere along the way.
I should be able to say that at the very least, the action pieces are good. But they’re not. I never quite bought the flying, as it looks like they got Brandon Routh to stand tippy-toe and look at the ceiling and then tilted the camera on it’s side. And the action is so dark you can sometimes barely make out what’s happening. It might have been easier if Superman’s costume was still bright, juxtaposed against the darkness of the scene, but it’s not. This movie will probably play better on DVD than in the theatre, but only from the point of view of making out all of the details in Superman’s wind-flapping cape.
OK, so Superman’s been gone for five years, blah blah blah, now he’s back. He stopped an experimental rocket launch from crash landing, and now Lex Luthor’s growing a continent that’s made out of some crystal shit from the planet Krypton that Luthor stole out of Superman’s arctic hideout. Superman’s gotta save Metropolis before Luthor’s growing contintent shoves all of the ocean water onto the city. There’s no rhyme or reason for much of what goes on here, except as an excuse to show us Superman lifting shit, blowing super-breath, and using heat vision. Then Luthor and Superman have a face-off. Uh oh, this whole continent thing is made out of Kryptonite! Luther kicked Superman’s ass! Everything’s black or really dim, except for Luthor’s white coat! Blah blah blah, Superman lifts the whole continent up over his shoulders and hurls it into outer space. Now we’re ready for the big final showdown.
EXCEPT THERE ISN’T ONE. I’m serious, THERE IS NO CLIMAX to this movie. They made a superhero movie with no action in the whole third act. That continent is made of Kryptonite so Superman hurls it into space, falls to Earth, lies in a hospital bed in a coma, wakes up and goes and delivers one of the lamest speeches in movie history to his and Lois’ son, and then flies off, roll credits. There is no ending. From Superman falling to earth, through the whole hospital shit to what lame ending there is, is like half an hour or something with no payoff. Maybe the creators wanted to really tease us with the idea that they’d kill Superman off in this movie, but we don’t buy it for one second. We know that Superman will make it through. It’s not supposed to be about the question of if he makes it, it’s supposed to be about how he makes it.
I was really bummed last night because I really wanted to like this movie. I spent most of my early childhood with a red cape around my neck and my Superman underoos on, so you know that I go in predisposed to liking it. And even with that being the case, I’m still saying that Superman Returns is horrible. Not just disappointing, but totally not even worth watching. A complete waste of time. I wanted to go home about an hour and a half into it. But the bloody thing is two and a half hours long and instead of playing like a grand epic, it plays like a morose, self-serious, over-long drama. I said to one of my friends that I saw it with that it’s a $200 million practical joke.
All of this from me, the guy who’s always the last one still finding the good in everything when it’s all gone to shit. Me, forever the optimist and bright-sider, I’m telling you that Superman Returns is so bad that it is an affront to me. There was once a time when I would have, like most who seem to like it, been happy with whatever it was. Seeing Superman in action would itself have been enough to warrent a positive review. But now I feel ripped off not just for the $13 I spent on the ticket, not even just for all of the time and energy I spent being excited to see Superman Returns, but for all of the years spent calling Superman my hero.
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