Not All That Super

I didn’t rush out to see Superman Returns when it opened. I’ve never been a huge fan of the character, for reasons I shall detail later; thus I felt no pressing need to brave the lines and see it in its first week.

Since I knew Pirates of the Caribbean would dominate the box office upon its release, I thought I could safely attend a matinee of Supes and check out the film. Many of my coworkers who had seen it enjoyed the movie; a few others were luke warm at best. What follows is my very own spoiler-laden opinion.

Superman Returns isn’t a bad movie. It is no Hulk, no Elektra, no Batman Forever. But the bar for major superhero movies has been set so high by Spider-Man (both), X-Men (the first two), and Batman Begins that Superman Returns comes off as a bit of a letdown. I still consider it worth seeing and I did enjoy it… just not as much as I wanted to.

Why am I not a huge fan of the Superman character? I believe heroes are not interesting because of their strengths, but because of their weaknesses. Superman has one: Kryptonite. Other than that, he’s pretty much invincible, incredibly powerful, and he can fly. Oh, and he shoots laserbeams out of his eyes and his breath can freeze stuff. Plus, he sees through everything but lead. Honestly, I have no idea how any character with all those powers and only one weakness has been written about in all the thousands of comics and stories that have carried his name.

Now, all this would be okay if Superman had some emotional weakness. And he sort of does, in his love for Lois Lane. One of the bright points of this film is that Lois has moved on and is involved with another guy, raising a child with him. This hurts the Man of Steel, so much so that he nearly becomes a super-powered stalker in the process. There was a great opportunity here that could have been taken further. Instead, he basically ends up doing the simple, noble thing as far as Lois goes, as we all expect he would.

And what vulnerability does Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor exploit to bring our hero down? Kryptonite. *yawn*

My opinion is that, for a Superman film to truly measure up to its current crop of peers, it must find a way to make all of his powers meaningless without taking them away via Kryptonite or some other gimmick. Superman II came closest to achieving that, which might be why I like it the best of any of the series, but it was still a bit weak in that regard. What I want to see is a fully capable Superman brought to his knees in a way that makes all the power in the universe meaningless. How? I dunno; that’s what filmmakers earn their huge salaries for coming up with.

Here’s the other major way I felt the film fell short. In Batman Begins, the scenes with Bruce Wayne are every bit as enthralling as the scenes with Batman. In contrast, the scenes with Clark Kent are painfully awkward and dull. We don’t care about Clark Kent; we care about Superman.

Again, there is great untapped opportunity here. As pointed out in Kill Bill, Superman is the only major hero whose secret identity is actually his human counterpart. Superman is Superman by birth; Clark Kent is the persona. There is a goldmine of psychological potential there waiting to come out. The series Smallville does a nice job with it, and I was hoping this film would do a better one. It doesn’t.

I liked Brandon Routh a lot and felt he played both characters well. Kate Bosworth did fine, though she provided nothing to stand out in the role from what any other actress would have done. James Marsden did a nice job, playing both a more interesting and sympathetic character than his role as Scott Summers (you made a wise choice in giving priority to this film, James). The two main casting tragedies involve two of my favorite actors. The funny and talented Parker Posey plays a useless cookie-cutter stereotype, while Kevin Spacey (one of our generation’s finest thespians) looks like he is playing Gene Hackman playing Lex Luthor rather than his own version of the role. A waste of two great talents.

I’ve used a lot of positive adjectives in this review. Again, I basically liked the movie. And it wasn’t that my expectations were terribly high; I was just hoping that Bryan Singer would give me a pleasant surprise, much as he did with the X-Men films. Instead, I got what I expected: a good movie with great special effects that didn’t live up to all it could be. Still, a reasonably solid groundwork was laid, so I hope the inevitable sequels build that into something much more memorable.