Notes on Brian Singer’s “Superman Returns”:

1) Richard should have been the hero. This movie is clearly a chick flick, and if you look at the basic setup, its message about romance should be clear. Lois Lane doesn’t leave her longtime husband and (supposed) father of her child, James Marsden’s Richard, to be with Superman. She clearly still loves him, but only in a childish, fascinated sort of way, as opposed to the adult, complete way in which she loves Richard. Neither relationship is very well fleshed out, but Richard clearly gets the short end of the stick in terms of audience empathy. Though he accomplishes many truly heroic acts, the film gives him no credit for them whatsoever. Singer’s camera loves the effortless majesty of Superman lifting a tanker out of the ocean, but can’t capture the human sweat, terror, and strength that Richard shows while piloting a seaplane carrying his wife and son through a storm. Worse, in the climactic moment of the human drama, when it’s finally clear that Superman and Lois Lane won’t be getting together, Richard isn’t even present. The film makes him a cipher, and he deserves much more than that.

2) They may have saved Luthor’s brain, but they threw his balls away. Lex Luthor is by no means one of the greatest supervillians in comic-dom – but then again, neither are Doctor Octopus, or the Green Goblin, and Sam Raimi managed to make both of them at least slightly compelling. And what Singer himself did with the X-villains was true poetry. So why is his Lex Luthor such a useless putz? The main interest in Luthor as a character, at least after about 1975, is that he conducts all his dastardly plots under cover of being an upstanding corporate citizen – a setup that could hardly be more timely. But instead of letting Luthor stand in for corporate malfeasance on a grand scale, Singer, along with screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, basically turn him into a glorified purse-snatcher: the opening scene of the movie has him defrauding a little old lady for her fortune. Admittedly this is after Luthor’s release from a long jail sentence, but the idea that the genius head of a multinational corporation would emerge from a stint in the joint with no resources to fall back on is simply ludicrous.
Even worse than the embarrassing unmanliness of this reboot, is that it robs Luthor of his audience – the public. This means that Kevin Spacey, who when not playing genuinely terrifying psychopaths is a fantastic ham, gets to chew scenery with an onscreen audience consisting only of his henchmen. He doesn’t make a single grand pronouncement to the world, threatens noone’s safety - it really deflates all of his grandstanding.

3) The villainous plot sucks ass. Luthor’s grand evil plot basically consists of speeding up global warming and getting some oceanfront property out of the deal. There’s little internal logic to it, and despite the character’s repeated declarations that “billions of people will die!”, even they have a hard time sounding like they believe it. There’s just nothing very terrifying about an . . . island. And on that note . . .

4) The psychology sucks ass. Sorry to harp on Luthor, but man . . . other than a few oblique references to getting revenge for his time in jail, there’s no sustained or rich reasoning behind Lex’s single-minded quest to get Superman. It might be back there in the original couple of films, but it needed to be reiterated here and it wasn’t. This means that there’s absolutely no frisson when it seems that he might actually succeed – we don’t identify with the villain even in his moment of triumph, because we have no idea why the fuck he’s doing what he’s doing.

And finally . . .

5) The superheroics suck ass. Superman is a terrible character and a terrible superhero for a very simply reason – he’s unbeatable and omnipotent. The movie makes no effort to enliven the character by putting any element of risk into play – it’s clear through the entire thing that Superman will save the day, and he does, again and again, just at the moment when “all hope is lost.” This means, of course, that there is never a moment when all hope is lost, and no amount of dramatic orchestration and strained facial expressions can change that. The one moment where the film really shines – the rescue of a crashing jetliner – does so because we at least witness some real effort on Supe’s part that goes beyond a couple of portentious beads of sweat and a constipated look on his face. He wrestles the plane, gets bucked like a cowboy, rips the wings off in his misguided enthusiasm. Superman can screw up, we’re told – and maybe this time, he will.
But in the much more plausibly failure-filled finale, in which Metropolis is essentially hit by a huge earthquake, our suspension of disbelief gets not even a smidgen of help from the film. This, after all, should be where Superman is not particularly strong – he may be unstoppable against a single opponent or in averting a localized disaster, but something on the scale of an earthquake or hurricane should tax him to his very limit. Can even a man capable of moving at near the speed of light truly be at all places at once? There must be failures, things he didn’t respond to quite in time. But instead of playing with the humanizing possibilities of failure, Singer gives us the impression that Superman is able to make it as if the disaster never happened, to reduce the cost in human life to zero. He snatches falling crane workers from mid-air, vaporizes falling debris, and finally snatches the falling globe of the Daily Planet building before he can crush the innocents below. But apparently there is absolutely nothing else going on during the Planet rescue, because he sure takes his sweet time.


Overall, this is not a terrible film, but you have to really look hard to find its upside. It seems to intend to focus on two things – the love triangle between Superman, Lois, and her new husband on the one hand, and the Superman-Lex rivalry on the other. But neither of these is well developed, and we’re left to fill in the blanks.