Superman Returns

posted by Cheshire on Fri, Jun 30, 2006
in Irrelevance

(Spoilers follow. Read at your own risk.)

Since Impact is the go-to Bay Area theatre company for superhero plays (The Wake-Up Crew and Meanwhile, Back at the Super Lair..., but let's give props also to Prince Gomolvilas's Fabulous Adventures of Captain Queer), I think a review of Superman Returns is in order.

I really wanted to like this movie. I really did. I was a huge fan of Superman and Superman II when I was a kid. Not so much Superman III, and I don't even think I saw IV. But that supposedly puts me right in line with Bryan Singer, who's said in a number of places that Superman Returns is meant to follow II. If that was indeed his goal, I think Singer succeeds. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's a good thing.

My two main problems with the movie are that 1) it's not big enough and 2) it's not really about anything. Here's the gist: five years ago Superman (Brandon Routh, looking and acting the part just fine) left without saying goodbye, and now he's back. Lois Lane (an annoying Kate Bosworth) has moved on, mostly: she has a young son and a baby-daddy (but she's the commitment-phobic one), and she has a Pulitzer for her poison-pen piece, "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." Lex Luthor has been released from prison because Superman missed the parole hearing (what, he's the only one who has an opinion about Luthor's supervillainy?), and now he's swindled a rich old lady's family out of their entire inheritance, including a big boat. He's off in the big boat to the arctic circle, to get the secrets of the Fortress of Solitude.

What's he going to use those secrets for? Eh, let's not give it away too much, but it's cartoonishly big, not dangerously big. This is Superman, for chrissakes -- the biggest superhero of all time. He needs a huge supervillain to go up against and a huge danger, and I never bought into the concept that Luthor was going to radically re-Pangaea the world. Even when he puts his plan into action, I barely believed it.

The personal stakes are pretty low, too: Superman's five-year absence from Earth is explained but not fully justified. Lois may have moved on, but the planet is pretty happy to have Superman back. There's no backlash, no lingering bitterness, just huge gratitude. The person with the most at stake in the movie is Richard, the aforementioned baby-daddy, who's worried (rightly so) that Lois is still in love with Superman and will dump him now that the Caped Crusader is back in town.

Kevin Spacey is great as Lex Luthor, but the character himself is thin. One of the thrills of Smallville, a surprisingly terrific show, is that it's a harrowing portrait of the descent of Lex Luthor from Clark Kent's friend to Superman's arch-enemy. In Smallville, Lex is a tragic figure; in Superman Returns, he's just a bad man with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a bunch of stupid henchmen, and one stupid henchwoman (Parker Posey, who isn't given enough to do).

And in the end, if there isn't a huge threat, at least I wanted the movie to be about something. The Spider-Man, my favorite recent superhero movie, is about accepting the weight of responsibility. Batman Begins, my second-favorite, is about exorcising personal demons and the questionable merits of vigilantism. Even Bryan Singer's own X-Men movies are about being outsiders in society.

The closest this movie gets is a halfhearted meditation on what it means to be alone in the universe. A worthy subject, but one that's never fully explored. Superman's absence and quest should have been a huge part of this movie, not a barely explained prologue.

Oh, well -- hey, Netflix! When's my next Smallville DVD coming?