I was nine years old when Superman arrived on the silver screen. When someone asks me what my favorite film is, Superman is one of a dozen that I use as part of my stock "I don't have ONE favorite film" response. I love this movie so much that I've actually sat and just watched the opening credits because they get my blood pumping and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Between John Williams amazing march (his best piece EVER) and those streaking blue titles flying through the cosmos towards Krypton, I get jazzed watching this wonderfully lyrical film.
Needless to say, I was excited, intrigued and a bit nervous when I heard that Bryan Singer had finally gotten a new movie into production and that it would use the 1978 Richard Donner directed classic as a base for re-energizing the franchise. With a lot of pressure riding on this film, how does it stack up to the original as well as all the comic book adaptations of the last few years. Pretty well if you ask me. It's not perfect, it's not great like the original film, but it is damn good and should easily pave the way for at least a sequel or two.
Putting the events of Superman into a vague past (with room for parts of Superman II and the potential existance or non-existance of Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace), Superman Returns starts exactly as I would have wanted it to...with John Williams march blaring as we see a full opening credits sequence (how often do you see that in any movie these days) of blue titles streaking towards us against the cosmos. That's enough to get things off on the best foot. Then we quickly discover that Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has done a stint in prison, is bitter about it and has gotten on with his life by marrying a dying old woman (to inherit her money...which he does right off the bat) and hatching his latest land grab scheme (which is a weak link in the film if you look at it too closely) which involves stealing the crystals from Superman's Fortress of Solitude and using them to create a new continent off the USA's East Coast, destroying much of North America in the process.
Meanwhile, Martha Kent (Eva Marie Saint in what amounts to an extended cameo) is all alone until her son, who has been away for five years, comes hurtling back to Earth. Clark (Brandon Routh) quickly inserts himself back into his old life at The Daily Planet (which is a bit odd that his job is conveniently available as someone else has just died leaving a vacancy). Unfortunately, everyone else...particularly Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has moved on. She's living with RIchard White (James Marsden) and has a five year old son.
The film plays not just as a "sequel" of sorts, but also as a "remake" of sorts. Luthor's plan is almost exactly the same as it was the first time around (only on a bigger scale). We even have a ditzy girlfriend whom he tends to treat badly in Kitty Kowalski (Parker Posey...who isn't bad here, but the character doesn't hold a candle to Valerine Perrine's Miss Tessmacher). Heck, we even get whole lines of dialog lifted verbatim ("When I was six years old, my father said to me..."). Superman saves an airplane (in a spectacular sequence that seems to follow laws of physics better than most films as the wing rips off when he tries to grab it, the nose crumples when he stops it, etc) and then goes on a spree of stopping crimes in a montage.
There are also plenty of "neat" nods to the original. If you look closely at the pictures on the mantle in the Kent farm house, you'll see Glenn Ford among them. The meteorite that Luthor steals from the museum is labelled as being from "Addis Ababa, 1978". Superman makes a few clothes changes that are very similar in shot and intent...he even says "swell" at one point (prompting a great reaction from Richard White).
The film is a lot of fun, remains as lyrical as the original and has a lot of heart behind it. Brandon Routh steps into the dual roles of Superman & Clark Kent without doing a Christopher Reeve impression, but maintaining that essence Reeve brought to both. Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane is very different from Margot Kidder's, but she works very well as a character and has great chemistry with Routh. Spacey's Luthor is an oddity to me. He's got some of Gene Hackman's qualities, but at the same time I think I've grown so used to the more recent interpretations in other media that it's hard for me to see this as a great continuation. Rather than his new land grab deal, I'd have rather seen that as an excuse for dealing with Superman (which it is to an extent as Lex's new continent is laced with Kryptonite). I guess I was hoping for more in this area.
Which brings us to the most potentially troubling aspect of the film...and you can stop reading now if you don't want spoilers or don't know how to read numbers...and that's Lois' kid Jason. The hints are there from the start that the kid is really Superman's and once we find out the truth it opens up a whole other can of worms. Thankfully, this film doesn't have the kid flying about and saving the day (he's just five) and the one real instance of him displaying any sort of power makes sense in the context of the film. But what do you do with the character in a sequel? It's almost as if the franchise has "jumped the shark" before it even got started again. It's not a horrible aspect in and of itself, just a bit troubling for the future.
This film needs, no deserves, to be seen on the big screen. Superman has always been larger than life and while this film may not be quite Superman, it is as good as Batman Begins and Spider-Man 2. Superman Returns is a good restart to something that could be great.
Meanwhile, on the animated Superman front we get what is a terrible end to something that had been great. The recent animated series (which has been completely released on DVD) is, in my book, the definitive word on Superman as it mixes and matches, almost to perfection, decades and decades of mythology. So, it was natural that with a new movie on the big screen a no-brainer would be a direct to video movie based on this prior success.
So we've got Superman: Brainiac Attacks.
Apparently, no-brains was the operative word. It's not so much that the voices of Luthor and Brainiac have changed from Clancy Brown and Corey Burton to Powers Booth and Lance Henrikson respectively, it's that the characters have been changed so drastically in persoanlity. Luthor is a ruthless businessman who also has loads of scientific accumen. Brainiac is an emotionless recepticle of stolen knowledge. Here, Luthor is like a bad clone of the Joker from the 1960's Batman TV show and Brainiac has more emotion than an after school special.
There are a few positives as Tim Daly and Dana Delany return to voice Superman & Lois and the design of the animation remains top notch, but the negatives outweigh all this. The "movie" is a travesty to the memory of the animated series and flags should have gone up once we saw that Bruce Timm (the master mind behind the recent animated Batman, Superman and Justice League) wasn't involved. Let's hope they do another direct to video movie just to redeem the characters from this one.
Tomorrow...a recap of Malcolm's first birthday.
Be seeing you.
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