SUPERMAN RETURNS
I’m a horrible person for hating this movie. I actually wish I could stop hating it. This movie so has its heart in the right place that you want to give it a pass on its epic failure of will and imagination. Even though I’m going to draw a comparison to Revenge of the Sith, it’s nowhere near the same level of soul-sucking abyss. Bryan Singer and his collaborators came up with a great game plan for a mythic popular entertainment, but lacked the nerve to fully implement it. He wanted so bad to honor the first two Superman movies, and add a good piece of work to the canon. He tried and fumbled. He meant well, and that counts for something. George Lucas, on the other hand, is just a dick.
The setup is that Superman left Earth for a time, forcing Metropolis, America and the world to cope with life without him. Superman’s been gone five years. In our timeline, that puts his departure in 2001. Quick, what happened in 2001 that took away America’s sense of safety and security and upended the world order? Holy crap, isn’t that a brilliant metaphor? The post-9/11 world equals Metropolis deprived of Superman. Genius, eh? Well enjoy thinking about it because the filmmakers aren’t going to touch that one with a ten foot pole. I honestly can’t say if they had that in mind or if the dates are just coincidence.
In fact, in the film there’s no sense that anyone much registers Superman’s absence whatsoever, or even that the world is any worse off without him. There’s no emotional setup that gives us any idea how life on Earth has been affected by the void he has left. (Mario Puzo and Richard Donner would have given us a smattering of those marvelous man-on-the-street vignettes that would have set the emotional tone of how people are grappling with their suddenly less-certain existence.) So when he does return there’s been no setup that would allow us an emotional catharsis, no dramatic buildup to his reappearance, no sense that the world has been slipping into chaos and confusion without him. He just shows up one day, to be met by a bunch of fakey shots of cheering crowds (that bit in the baseball stadium made me want to puke). None of the main characters seem to think it’s much more than a curiosity that he’s back. Perry White seems to think it’s a big deal, but only as an angle for a lead story. Lois is the only one displaying any emotion, primarily by making a show of suppressing her emotion. She’s been so busy suppressing emotion for the last five years that she even wrote a Pulitzer-winning editorial arguing that Superman totally sucks ass, and he’s a big stupid-head, and she never liked him anyway, and she wouldn’t want to kiss him because he’s totally gross so there.
The title of the piece, “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,” seems to be positioned as the alleged theme of the film. Great idea, guys. How about developing it. Any reasons given pro or con? I guess if the Pulitzer committee is honoring it that sort of indicates that a lot of people agree with the sentiment. Could this be something that the characters could be discussing among themselves as the stage is set? Points? Counterpoints? Do you think we could even hear a tiny bit of this editorial that was brilliant enough to win a friggin’ Pulitzer?
No, because the editorial is only an empty plot device, a stand-in in place of anyone having to write some genuine loss and anger for the Lois character to express. We find out soon enough that she basically wrote it in a fit of spite, because Superman didn’t have the nads to let her know that he was going to be kind of leaving planet Earth a little. So really the big conflict of the love story grows out of Superman acting the punk. Then he comes back and immediately starts acting the punk again. He’s not around for me to ask, but I’m pretty sure that Chris Reeve’s Superman would have come back, sussed the situation, realized he had no one to blame but himself that she got married to someone else, swallowed his disappointment and set about trying to make his return as emotionally uncomplicated for Lois as possible. Certainly not head straight to the bar and drown his sorrows in product placements. (Wait a minute, the most powerful being on Earth figures its okay for him to go get a little shitty with his buddies after work?) He’d definitely have the decency to not try to coax another man’s almost-wife out alone with him when no one’s looking. I guess in that scene I was supposed to be desperately wishing to see them back together. Instead, all I was thinking was, what do you think you’re doing, you moron? You’re going to break up a family because you couldn’t man up way back when? Fuck off!
If they’re going to swing from Superman II’s nut sack so much, how about this: Superman was heartbroken that he had to erase Lois’ memory and any trace of their romance. That was the real reason he left to go to Krypton when he heard about the astronomers’ findings. He couldn’t stay and face her day after day. Meanwhile, little does he know he knocked her up, and carrying the pregnancy to term had the effect of jarring loose the memory-wipe. By then it’s too late and he’s gone, not suspecting that Lois remembers everything, is carrying his kid, and is all kinds of hurt and enraged. That would be truly tragic. Isn’t that the scene we’re missing between Superman and Lois at the end? Shouldn’t this all have come spilling out like an emotional freight train once the truth has been revealed? No, we just get the umpteenth cryptic non-conversation between the ciphers standing in for these characters.
That’s why I really hated this film: they actually came up with a treatment for a great Superman story. A great one. Superman goes to find remnants of Kryptonian civilization, leaving the Earth unprotected and turning a lot of people against him. Lex Luthor gets his hands on Kryptonian technology while Superman is away. Superman is unaware that he fathered a human child with Lois. This is the skeleton of a great, great story. It’s just that they forgot to write the screenplay for it. I’m so tired of blockbuster movies where I have to go in accepting that the characters are one-dimensional idiots for anything to make sense. Every scrap of dialogue in this film felt like a placeholder for some real screenwriter to come in later and breathe life into it. Take the conversation between Clark and Ma Kent: it was just like a conversation I would have with my own mother. If my mother and I somehow hadn't ever met each other before that day and were told to feign a relationship. Superman and Lois also never come across as having any shared history, as having any messy emotional baggage, or even being marginally intelligent human beings who can express any but the blandest, most obvious sentiments. Seriously, I felt like it was aimed at an intellectual level around about the average person’s kneecaps. Luthor employs zero ingenuity to harness the kryptonian technology. He walks in, puts his hands out, and we discover that Jor-El was such an idiot that he didn’t so much as password-protect the most dangerous technology ever to exist on Earth. Oh, and you activate the crystals by tossing them in water. Cool. On to the next scintillating plot point.
Luthor even threatens at one point to pick up on the theme of whether Superman is good for the world or not (as in Azzarello’s Luthor comic). It would have been interesting for he and Lois to be arguing the same thing from different angles, but the filmmakers don’t follow through on it. For the movie to be about something besides rebooting a franchise is asking a little much. Luthor’s scheme just devolves to harnessing the power of a god for another oh-so-clever land grab.
I had read that the problem with the film is that you have to have seen the Donner films to understand it. That’s not it at all. The problem is that the film offers no reasons to care about the characters if you don’t have a soft spot for the previous films. The characters never have interesting conversations, they just seem to be coasting off whatever happened between them in the past. (If Lois and Superman’s conversations had always been this dull I don’t know how either of them could have stayed awake long enough to conceive.) Thus this film is completely dependant on its audience’s emotional investment in the previous installments. Here, sadly, for all its good intentions it must join the walk of shame with take-the-money-and-run garbage like Revenge of the Sith and Hannibal. Like those films, this one is loaded with visual and verbal shout-outs to the originals that just reminded me that this film can’t stand on its own.
I got the sense that Singer and co. were so concerned with being properly reverent to the originals that they didn’t venture to give their film a soul of its own. They were so busy respecting these characters that they didn’t have the courage to write them.
I sensed trouble when Superman’s quest to Krypton was reduced to an opening title card. Uh, I’d like to see a bit of that, if you don’t mind. Let me work it out for myself, thanks. Lo and behold, apparently a Krypton sequence was completed at a cost of 10 mil, but Singer felt it didn’t belong in the same movie. You’ve got. To be fucking. Kidding me. So instead we get Lex Luthor’s Anna Nicole Smith moment with the rich old lady, which of course simply screamed Superman movie.
It’s a weird thing when I’m not on board with a movie, and then one scene comes along in which everything suddenly clicks. The scene with the guard and the piano was that one for me (significantly, it had no dialogue). The characters’ actions were surprising and intriguing, the emotion scanned as real, and the dramatic tension was palpable. I suddenly woke up and gave a shit what was going to happen next. And then they dropped that monster of a twist, a potential disaster that was played beautifully. I must be an idiot for not seeing it coming, but I was really tickled by it. Then everything went straight off the rails again. The third act in a nutshell: “I’m rescuing you!” “No I’m rescuing you guys!” “No we’re rescuing you!” “Well you can’t rescue me because I Have To Go Back.” Pretty soon I couldn’t even remember what movie I was watching.
By the end, when Superman visited the family’s house I was halfway out the door, furiously composing a scathing review in my head. Then when he stood over the kid’s bed and recited the Brando monologue, I instantly lost it and started blubbering uncontrollably. I can’t even hate right.
