Jul

5

Superman Returns

Filed Under Books and Culture 

As the father of a seventeen-yearmonth-old daughter I don’t get out to see movies very often. This is not a big deal as I am really a book person rather than a movie person (not that you can’t be both). It is harder on my wife as she is a much more visual person and loves to see movies on the big screen.

Saturday we were out with friends when the exhibit we were going to see at the local children’s science museum was sold out. It was hot and muggy so we weren’t sure what to do instead. A movie seemed like a good idea. Everyone wanted to see Superman Returns. My wife rationalized that our daughter Ella was tired and might very well take nap in the dark theater. I was skeptical but didn’t want to be the party pooper. My wife and our friends agreed to take Ella to the lobby if she got to loud, etc.

So we went ahead and saw the movie. Two things: Ella didn’t take a nap and I wished I had.

The first thing that defeated my wife’s well intentioned plan to have our daughter sleep was the deafening loudness of the theater. When the previews came on the sound was so in your face loud that it scared Ella and, quite frankly, was a little loud for my taste. It was almost to the point of hurting your ears.

After the scary loudness, Ella was fine. The only problem was that she was bored. She didn’t cry or anything but she began to chatter loudly and wanted to get up and walk around. Lisa had to take her to the lobby a couple of times and so missed chunks of the movie.

I felt bad, but it was her idea in the first place. Plus, the movie was so slow at the beginning that I was afraid I would miss the good parts if I left. Turns out the movie never really got much better.


It wasn’t that Superman Returns was a complete dud so much that it just never quite went anywhere. The plot simply wasn’t complex enough or compelling enough to suck you in and keep you interested. When we left the theater my friend said: “I thought that movie was never going to end.” Here a couple of quotes from reviews that I think capture the movie’s faults:

David Edelstein:

The bigger problem is that Singer’s weighty rhythms are disastrous for Superman, and the movie actually gets heavier in its last half-hour. Spacey’s Luthor—until now less a supervillain than a clammy businessman—mutilates Superman with sociopathic relish: The sequence is so ugly that Luthor’s lame, jokey comeuppance feels monstrously inadequate. But by then the audience has moved far ahead of Singer. A scene in which Lois tries to persuade her fiancé to turn his plane around and help the disabled superhero could have been compressed into ten seconds instead of dragged out to a minute, and the final scenes would make Wagner check his watch. It’s not that the movie is 157 minutes; it’s that it feels like 157 minutes.

Superman Returns has grace notes. The computer artists make Superman’s cape billow lyrically, and there’s a gorgeous moment when Clark uses his X-ray vision to watch Lois lifting off in an elevator. As Luthor’s moll, Parker Posey is splendidly tart, although the writers don’t seem to be sure if she’s dumb or savvy. (Did they change their minds midway through?) In a witty scene, one of Luthor’s thugs joins Lois’s son in a piano duet of “Heart and Soul” while Lois surreptitiously faxes for help. But even here Singer lingers too long. How can you make a superhero movie with no pop pulse?

Peter Suderman:

The rich detail makes a good distraction from the fact that the film’s narrative lacks anything remotely like the super strength of its hero. Overlong and burdened with too many undeveloped ideas, it aspires to something far more grand than it delivers. Even Kevin Spacey’s zippy combination of smarts and menace as Luthor cannot save the film from the fact that its villain suffers from a dispiriting lack of motivation. Many of the scenes with Jimmy Olson and Perry White in the Daily Planet newsroom fall flat, coming off as pale imitations of similar newsroom scenes in the Spider-Man films.

Singer seems to be operating on the assumption that if Superman isn’t physically vulnerable, he at least ought to be emotionally vulnerable. He’s not the Man of Steel — he’s the Man of Emo. But if this high-minded idea of a superhero who face up to both his feelings and his role as savior of the world is ambitious, it also robs us of the character’s gleeful, juvenile vibrancy. What Superman Returns needed was a little less ambition and a lot more of a brawny guy flying around in blue tights and underwear pummeling the bad guy.

I told someone that this movie felt like a chick-flick version of a superhero movie. It was all emotion and symbolism and very little action. There wasn’t a single plot point you couldn’t see a mile away and literally nothing took me by surprise or grabbed my attention. Perhaps, I was distracted by my daughter but I thought it fell flat despite the skill with which it was put together. Hollywood seems to forget that it take a good story to make a good movie.

Comments

One Response to “Superman Returns”

  1. Jeff on July 6th, 2006 8:22 am

    dude…you mean 17 MONTH old daughter, right?

    I forgot to mention, i saw you became a member at trinity a couple of weeks ago. Congrats!

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