Superman Returns |
  • USA • 2006 • 154m •    • Directed by: Bryan Singer. • Starring: Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Frank Langella, Sam Huntington, Eva Marie Saint, Marlon Brando, Kal Penn, Tristan Lake Leabu, David Fabrizio, Ian Roberts. • Music by: John Ottman.      Following a mysterious absence of several years, the Man of Steel comes back to Earth in the epic action-adventure Superman Returns, a soaring new chapter in the saga of one of the world's most beloved superheroes. While an old enemy plots to render him powerless once and for all, Superman faces the heartbreaking realization that the woman he loves, Lois Lane, has moved on with her life. Or has she? Superman's bittersweet return challenges him to bridge the distance between them while finding a place in a society that has learned to survive without him. In an attempt to protect the world he loves from cataclysmic destruction, Superman embarks on an epic journey of redemption that takes him from the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of outer space.
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Review:
Bryan Singer's X-Men movies were always awkward in their use of language-'jokes were strained, but the movies managed to hurry away from them (with appropriate embarrassment) in favor of grandiose action scenes. Perhaps the nature of the X-Men lent itself better to this treatment: X-Men and villains alike were able to stand up to two-second characterization, their personalities and powers inter-related enough and simple enough to justify some involvement on the part of the audience. In Superman Returns, Singer's inability to tell a story through the antiquated method of having one character talk to another reaches its logical extreme-'one could as effectively watch the movie on mute. Not only do no lines matter, none of them do anything at all.
We are then treated to the bare bones of what must have originally been pitched to Warner Brothers as the Superman movie: a plot by Lex Luthor to use Superman's Fortress of Solitude crystals to evil effect, high emotions as Superman finds that Lois Lane has moved on and that she has a kid, and a big rescue and some crime-fighting to remind everyone what Superman is all about. I won't bother giving you any more spoilers than that. Just know that all your old favorite characters are there, from Perry White to Jimmy Olsen, and all have had their vigor and personalities ripped from them, had their limbs pinned to the styrofoam plot, and left to be blankly observed by millions of viewers as their limbs twitch.
Lois herself is perhaps the blankest of all, without even an icon on her garments to remind us that she represents, at least, something that many of us love. Her character is much besmirched by the length of time that the movie implies she waited for Superman before moving on to another man. She won a Pulitzer in the time Superman was away for writing an article called "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman"-'the content of this article-'even its mere thesis is left unarticulated, unalluded to, unhinted at. (In the end, when Superman is hovering between life and death, Lois attempts to write a redeeming piece entitled "Why the World Needs Superman". She sits, staring at a blinking cursor. She is, of course, wondering, 'What was that first article about, anyway?') In the absence of any kind of actual content to push the movie along, Singer instead relies on an endless string of movie clichés. Lex Luthor quotes Greek myths, has a collection of ancient statues, and listens to classical music. A little boy gasps as he sees what all the adults have failed to see-'that Superman is Clark Kent. Lois Lane leans over a comatose Superman and says, "I don't know if you can hear me, but..." One would be hard-pressed, in fact, to find a single cinematic moment in Superman Returns that has not been done before.
This adds up to a movie that is-'above all-'boring. The end stretched vastly beyond my already exhausted ability to imagine that I actually cared about the fate of Singer's Superman, Singer's Lois Lane, or Singer's world. I ached to get up and walk out. When the credits finally rolled and several audience members burst into applause, I booed-'loudly. And that, fair readers, is the only possible reason any right-thinking person should stay to the end of this film.
Happily, we have better incarnations of Superman to fall back upon-'Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher were marvelous in the clever and consistently delightful Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman. Even Smallville managed to do considerable justice to Superman in between its teen soap antics. And in terms of superhero movies, we all must fall back again on the only director to have brought us anything like real inspiration in the last decade: Mr. Sam Remi, who has made the Spider-man franchise into something that-'while certainly not perfect-'has real life to it.
After having subjected myself to this frigid corpse of a movie, that alone seems like quite an achievement.
Review by nate451 from the Internet Movie Database.
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