Superman Returns; I Suggest, "Go Back."
Superman Returns; I Suggest, "Go Back."
Jul 03I was in Orlando, FL for a job interview on Friday and staying with my in-laws. After the interview, my mother-in-law says, “Why don’t you go see a movie?”
Instantly, I want to see Superman Returns, because I am freaking hyped, and because I very lamely ditched seeing the flick on Tuesday night with Sarah and hubby Jeff due to a crying baby and the aforementioned impending trip to Orlando.
Only when I say I’m going to see Superman, my mother-in-law is like, “Great! Let’s go!”
And so I saw Superman Returns with my mother-in-law, who is about as far from geeky as can be imagined. Which was useful, because after seeing it, I realize she is probably more of an appropriate target audience for Superman Returns than I am. Overall, and I must be wrong here cause the intarweb says so, I don’t necessarily think this movie will appeal to geeks so much as it will the great unwashed nongeeky masses, looking for a thrilling plane crash and an unrequited romance and some reheated John Williams from nearly twenty years ago.
They just want summer superheroics, and we want much, much more.
Remember the 90s, comics fans? A dark age for the medium, by all accounts. There were plenty of bright spots, but plenty of high-level disasters.
And then there were the Superman books. To me, the 90s on the whole could best be described as a “workmanlike” era for Superman. Hell, I’ll court the seething hatred of all you mooks with an “S” insignia tattooed on your left buttock and claim that since the Byrne reboot, MOST Superman comics released (meaning the majority, meaning that there are probably exceptions, none of which I can recall at this moment) have been workmanlike.
Good superheroics, clever enough ideas, solid pencils, decent characterizations. But very little zip, fun, splash, excitement, whatever. Think back on the defining images of the era–Supes with a mullet, Supes with weird electricity powers, Supes dead in Lois’ arms. Nothing overtly bad. Yet very little to truly stir the imagination.
I mean, you know how you read a comic, and you’re done in ten minutes, and then you think to yourself, “That was perfectly satisfying, but absolutely unremarkable, and I will probably never read it again”? THAT’s how I’ve felt about Superman for pretty much most of the time I’ve collected comics.
That is the Superman we get from Bryan Singer et al. in Superman Returns. Workmanlike. There are marks he has to hit, and so Singer hits them–wacky, demented Lex Luthor; a stunning rescue sequence where Lois is in deadly peril; Clark behaving as the biggest dork.
Most of it is lacking in any wit, verve, or sparkle whatsoever. It’s the Mullet Supes. It’s Dan Jurgens killing the Man of Steel in a series of above-average full-page splashes. Workmanlike.
Or, maybe I just went in with all kinds of the wrong expectations. Singer and his screenwriters have gushed in many public places about their reverent love for the original Richard Donner Superman film from the late seventies. And love it they should–it’s a remarkable piece of filmmaking. It hits the marks, but it also has wit, verve, and sparkle. It’s hard to explain why–it’s not at all campy, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and yet it dives into the ridiculousness of a man who can fly with sincerity and gusto, and shakes out every ounce of fun it can.
What I expected was a movie that fused this slightly mad, slightly reverent, slightly silly spirit with the FX brilliance of the modern age of filmmaking. Same attitude, same zip, same fun. Except now we REALLY believe a man can fly, and lift airplanes, and charm the pants off a cute star reporter from high altitudes.
Instead, Singer is way too reverent, and actually takes Superman TOO seriously. He even lathers on a mild Christ allegory, which seemed intriguing as hell in the trailer where Brando is intoning about how “they only lack the light to show the way.” In practice, which basically means a couple ham-handed crucifix-invoking images of the Man of Steel, it’s annoying and awkward.
Look simply at Lex Luthor himself. As portrayed by Gene Hackman and written in the original Superman films, he may not exactly be the Lex we recognize from the comics, but he’s all over the fucking place–apeshit crazy, mildly sociopathic, a stone-cold killer with diarrea of the mouth.
I’ve read a few online reviews that suggest Kevin Spacey as Lex chews the scenery too much, and to that I reply, what the fuck are you talking about?! There are whole scenes where he seems to only have five or ten words of dialogue. We see countless shots of this paunchy bald vaguely menacing fellow just staring at something and seeming to think evil thoughts, but he doesn’t SAY enough. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve probably even seen his two best moments (“WRONG!” and the stabbing of Supes).
I WANTED him to chew the scenery, just like I WANTED the Daily Planet scenes to have that same electric old Hollywood charge that they did in the Donner films. Just like I wanted Perry White to do more than stand around and mumble orders. Just like I wanted Lex to have minions with more personality than the goons that follow Jack Nicholson around in Tim Burton’s Batman. I didn’t get anything I wanted, really, except those boffo special effects.
One last example, and then I’m off. It wasn’t until just recently that someone pointed out to me the absurdity of Superman using his super-speed and flying powers to reverse the spin of the earth and travel back in time in the original Superman film. From the moment I saw Superman as a child on through to my current adulthood, that act seemed perfectly reasonable. Even as a cynical and smarmy grown-up, it worked. I never contemplated it as a nitpicky sci-fi filmmaking thing; Superman wanted to save Lois, so he did it, and it was a damn fine idea, because it worked.
In Superman Returns, we see an act from the Man of Steel in the film’s final action setpiece that similarly defies logic–Superman lifts a gigantic chunk of Kryptonite from out the ocean and carries it through the sky before hurling it into space.
I did NOT accept it. I instantly saw the green streaks of Kryptonite, and wondered why Superman was having no trouble lifting a land mass the size of Rhode Island that’s packed with the one substance that can kill him. Especially when just moments before, he was so weakened by simply standing on the surface of this rock that he could be beaten to a pulp by a pack of average dudes, then STABBED in the kidney region by Lex.
In other words, my disbelief was not suspended. At all.
I didn’t just want to believe a man could fly–I wanted to believe this MOVIE could fly. I wanted it to float above the summer mess and skip across the still, cool waters of my ever-geeky soul.
Instead, it sinks like a stone. An earnest, perfectly serviceable, boring, workmanlike stone.
