With Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer pulls off a super-rescue of his own: saving a 28-year-old film franchise from campy, crappy irrelevance.
The challenge was considerable. Superman may be the epitome of the comic-book superhero, but it’s always been the idea of Superman that has captivated people. Every realization of Superman—from DC Comics to television to film—has come up against the same problem: how do you make him interesting? With his godlike powers and goody-goody attitude, he’s somewhere between Christ and the guileless hero of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He can sustain one great film (1978’s Superman), and maybe one good sequel (1980’s Superman II). But when the ideas run out, he ends up becoming the unwitting butt of the joke, a caricature of goodness forced to act as straight man to, say, Richard Pryor (in the wretched 1983 sequel, Superman III). And by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, when he’s being taunted by Jon Cryer while duking it out with a nuclear-powered adversary, all we’re left with is John Williams’ brilliant score to remind us of the original idea of Superman. So with this remake coming 20 years later, the question that comes to mind is, “Does the world still need Superman?”
Singer, who showed with the first two X-Men films how well comic-book characters can be adapted to the screen, solves this super-problem in three ways.
First, he turns the question of whether we need Superman into a question of whether Superman needs us. The film begins by telling us that Superman (Brandon Routh, who manages to make Superman his own while delivering a pure Christopher Reeve homage as Clark Kent) has been gone for five years, searching for survivors of his alien race after Earth astronomers discover what remains of his exploded planet, Krypton. We later learn that Superman took off for home without bothering to say goodbye to his sometime girlfriend, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). He also left without showing up in court to testify against his nemesis, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey). These uncharacteristic oversights both matter to the story, but they’re more important as a way of giving Superman a sorely needed enigmatic side.
Second, Singer gets the whole unnecessary-remake issue out in the open. In fact, he and co-writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris turn it into a major theme in the film. In Superman’s absence, Lois wrote a Pulitzer-winning editorial entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Not only has she gotten over the Man of Steel; she’s also shacked up with another man (James Marsden, who played Cyclops in the X-Men films), and she has a young son who may or may not be Superman’s.
What happens to that damaged relationship between Superman and Lois after he returns dictates the film’s soft, understated tone. Slow-paced and deliberate in its allusions to both Christian and ancient Greek mythology, this is not a film for those expecting a slam-bang effects extravaganza. There are some great action sequences—especially the rescue of a crashing airplane that announces Superman’s return to the world—but the emphasis here is more on who Superman is than on what he does. (That said, watching a bullet bounce off Superman’s eyeball has got to be about the coolest thing you’ll see in an action flick this year.)
The third thing Singer does right is Lex Luthor. The misguided dame (Parker Posey) is still with him, but the oafish sidekick Otis is thankfully gone. Due respect to Gene Hackman, but does anyone do callous, offhanded evil better than Kevin Spacey? This Luthor finally has the murderous menace to go with his diabolically ambitious scheme—in this case, a Promethean plan to use Kryptonian technology to build himself a new continent and kill a few billion people in the offing. That kind of villainy makes Superman as needed in his world as he is, still, to everyone in our world who ever dreamed a man could fly.
(3/4)