Superman Returns (2006)

Superman should “return’ for some re-thinking.

After director Bryan Singer successfully adapted X-Men to the screen to the delight of the ever so hard-to-please comic book crowd, he seemed the a logical choice to resurrect the Superman franchise after many years of dormancy. Stepping into the lead roles are newcomer Brandon Routh as the Man of Steel and Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, while Kevin Spacey adds considerable Hollywood heavyweight as Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. After all the years the franchise has been buried, has the wait been worth it?

Unfortunately, I have to say that Superman Returns is a moderate disappointment.

Somewhere along the journey to finally getting a new Superman movie to the screen, an odd decision was made to just tack this new installment onto the existing Superman mythos created by scriptwriter Mario Puzo and director Richard Donner in the early 80’s and brought to life by the late Christopher Reeve. Let me begin by pointing out that I can certainly appreciate the effort to build upon the legacy Superman had already created 20 years ago. There seems to be a great amount of respect on those involved in the film to acknowledge what’s been covered already, paying homage to the previous films in small pieces such as the opening title sequence, the use of the familiar Superman theme music, to the use of archive footage of Marlon Brando himself, the movie assumes you already know the entire origin of Superman, so it doesn’t bother going over it again. Instead, it chooses to bridge the gap between the previous movies and now, by working this into the plot. Superman has been missing the past 5 years and now he returns to a very different world that seemingly no longer needs him.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems I have with this approach is that too much time has passed since the last movie. This is a different generation of cinema. A good portion of the target audience, teenagers or younger, are probably too young to feel nostalgic about the older films, so it might benefit them to start over again anyway. And for the adults old enough to remember the older movies, we go in wanting to see Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. And while they may not go down in history as the greatest thespians of our generation, we know them as Clark Kent and Lois Lane, so seeing younger fresher talent in those roles is a bit jarring. Think about it, we had a hard enough time going back to visit Star Wars 20 years later, despite the fact that the Episodes I, II and III focused on a new story, involving a different generation of characters. So that makes Superman’s attempt of going back to visit the same story, picking up where the last one left off all the more difficult.

To their credit, the new cast is not bad in their performances. You can tell Brandon Routh has tried his best to embody Christopher Reeve as much as possible and at times he is convincing. And Kate Bosworth, though I feel a bit miscast, is talented and perky enough to draw your attention away from any memories of the past, if only for a moment. Kevin Spacey is probably the brightest spot for the new film, as he stands out enough to come across as a very maniacal Lex Luthor.

So I find it a shame, that with this kind of talent, the overall plot of the movie is a bit lackluster and underachieving. Despite the filmmakers’ attempts to jazz up the characters by having Lois now a mother of a young child and sort of involved in a love triangle (an obvious carryover from Singer’s teenage angst-ridden X-Men movies), I found the rest of the movie - the entire “steal Superman’s crystals and use them against him” plot, to feel a bit tired. After so many years, surely Lex Luthor could certainly come up with a better scheme than that. But that’s not to say the movie is not technically well done. I don’t think anybody is going to complain about how 20 years of advances in computer graphics have been unkind to the Man of Steel during his flying sequences.

Nevertheless, the end result is a movie that feels a bit awkward to me. Technically well-crafted with competent performances by the cast, “Superman Returns” just lacks a certain amount of heart. Maybe Singer plays it a little too safe by trying to resurrect the past. I think he would have been better off by completely reinventing the Superman story, similar to the brilliant move made by Christopher Nolan to simply forget what was done in the past and reintroduce the audience to a new interpretation of the Batman in last summer’s excellent “Batman Begins.” Instead, with Superman, we are presented with a movie that feels somewhat familiar, but isn’t quite as good as we remembered it to be. Several of the right pieces to make a worthy film are there, but the pieces just feel like they are assembled incorrectly. I wish the filmmakers had gone back to the drawing board to come up with something more ambitious.

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