Superman Returns

[ivyfic]

Well that was ... nostalgic. I mean, I've seen that movie before. No, really. I've seen that movie before. It was called "Superman" and it came out in 1978 and starred Christopher Reeve and had a score by John Williams.


I was cool with the title sequence. And the retro clothes. And the use of an almost identical production design. And reusing Marlon Brando. But there comes a point where you're not referencing the story points everyone knows and thus highlighting the differences in your story (turning the cliches on their head, you're actually making the same movie. I was watching the whole thing thinking, ah yes! This is where Lois misspells catastrophe! This is where Superman x-rays her lungs! This is where she does that crappy poetry-to-music can-you-read-my-mind thing! This is where Lex's bimbo falls in love with Supes! This is where Lex waxes poetic about land (location, location, location)! This is where he should say, "Otisville"! Kevin Spacey's doing his best Gene Hackman impression and whatever-his-name-is is doing his best Christopher Reeve impression.

In the third act of the film I was thinking if he flies backwards around the world to turn back time, I am fucking walking out of this theater.

This movie was awfully pretty. Superman was an Adonis. It doesn't matter if he's my type or not, he looked like a Greek god. And the special effects were great. (I was awfully impressed by Superman's hair actually moving when he flew. And what was his cape made out of -- pleather?) The writers managed to not piss me off, which for a movie which has as its set-up that one half of an OTP has moved on with her life is not a simple task.

But there was no there there! There was one, maybe two scenes with dramatic tension. For all the inherent drama of the set-up, they just let the story lines lay like limp noodles while they blew shit up. The pacing was all off for me: I was bored the first time Lex used a crystal. I knew exactly what was going to happen and given how long he spent on that sequence, I knew he'd have to repeat at the end with a real city and spend even longer. Special effects are nice, but where's the meat? I can show you a thirty-second scene from "Traders" shot in one take with two pieces of plywood for a set that had more drama than that whole film.

This movie had no characterization at all. The only answer to why any given character does anything is the film is, "because that's what character X does." Lex Luthor does what Lex Luthor does. Jimmy does what Jimmy does. Perry does what Perry does. Lois does what Lois does. And Superman -- oh, Superman just does what he does. Look pretty and remain untouchable.

You know what would be a good story? The story of Superman leaving. Cause let's look at the facts. Clark pines for years over Lois. Lois pines over Superman. Clark finally succumbs and uses Lois's hero worship to get her in the sack without telling her his secret. (And I'm sure the condom broke cause - yeah.) Then he takes off. I don't buy this Krypton bullshit. So they found where his planet used to be. So what. It's not like it's in iminent peril. There was no need for him to take off immediately with no warning to Lois or the world at large.

So what happened was Clark failed his own personal morality by abusing his position of power. He clearly still pines for Lois but recognizes that she's in love with an idea, not him. He feels intensely lonely, probably guilty as well. Suddenly he hears this news from the astronomers: he has an excuse to cut and run and he takes it. No thought at all to how this looks to Lois (yeah, I slept with a guy and the next morning he left the planet), to the people he saves, or to his mother, who clearly asked him not to go.

That's a good story! That's drama! That's about what happens when a hero falls from grace, and Clark, being the BDA, doesn't handle it well. But of course that doesn't have a nice happy ending with shit blowing up and Superman moving a continent (where were the tsunamis? Hmm?), so obviously we have to tell this insipid piece of crap. Grrrr.

Comments

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

1978

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

That would have been a better movie.

Alternatively, I would have been OK with this but with the pointless and insipid drama cut out--just give in and make it a cartoonish action movie. But then it would have only been about 40 minutes.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

You amuse me.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

No, it still would have been over two hours. Cause it was a cartoon action film. With less than ten minutes of dramatic material.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I won't argue with you about plot, but I will argue the point on characterization. There were two errors in characterization that I saw: Lois and Perry. Given that Perry wasn't onscreen much, he's excused, but Kate Bosworth's Lois wasn't at all worthy of the two guys she manages to have orbiting around her. She never shines as the sassy, independant Lois Lane we've come to expect. I can buy a softening of that person with having a child, but not to the degree to which it was taken. The only moxy Lois showed was when she was a tad impatient with the lady explaining the shuttle-plane take-off thingy.

I also wish that Clark Kent had been given more screen time. I wish that we could have seen more of him perfectly at ease at being the intermediate man between the Clark and Superman personas that he seemed to be in Smallville (the shot of him watching the sun rise and remembering learning to use his powers makes him a homey superhero).

But they chose not to continue to play out that scenario, which has more or less been done to death (I can't think of an adaptation that's failed to exploit the Clark-->Lois-->Superman non-triangle). Instead, they introduced Richard, who is one of the most three dimensional characters ever to grace the screen, let alone a "comic book movie." He's a genuine hero in his own right, more tragic for the fact that he does right despite the fact it will cost him his own happiness, but he's also just a guy. He can tell Lois doesn't love him the way she does/did Superman, and it bothers him. He's insecure in her affection--with good reason--and in the end, he seems to let her make the choice but you can tell how disappointed he is. He's the usurper from the fan's point of view, yet it is his life that Superman messes up, not the other way around.

And as for the big guy, I don't get the more heartless read you do from the whole thing. I think he definitely acted like a jerk, making Lois forget everything (such that she very likely doesn't even remember getting pregnant by him) and then leaving her. If I were her, I wouldn't ever forgive him. He clearly wants her to, he wants to fix her and him together like he can everything else, but his analogy between their relationship and the planet that needs his help is faulty, and they both know it.

On the other hand, his relationship with his son shows some measure of contrition over his behavior. He never consciously confuses Jason as to his paternity. He may visit and befriend as Superman or Clark, but there's a real distance there--the constant watching from the outside--that shows he's allowing Lois to set the boundaries.

I find this domestic arrangement fascinating, and I wish they'd kept Richard as the father for greater dramatic pull. That would show Lois truly could move on from Superman, and that any relationship she and he might pursue would have to bend to accomodate an irrevocable connection she had to another man--I don't see Lois of any ilk, let alone the Bosworth one, refusing Richard paternal rights of child-rearing. As is, were Lois and Richard to break up, she could drop the genetic bombshell on him and isolate him from the child he'd been rearing as his son. I don't think she would, but there's an easier out to making Lois and Supes and Jason a happy family than would have existed had they not pulled their punches on that one.

But as for Spacey, the kid playing Jimmy, Parker Posey, et al? Yeah, they were kinda one-note. But it was well done one-note, and the film is nostalgic enough for a bygone era, not just of the original Superman films, but of old, grand romances. What's important is not sex but sensuality--thus making it very true, the distinction between Richard's kind of flying versus Superman's--the feel is everything. And this had a good feel, as a movie.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

One of the things that did bug me, and it occurred to me later, was the lack of a climax. There wasn't a confrontation other than the one where Supes lands on the island, and that certainly didn't go well! In true comic book form there should be a second encounter, where he returns and wins despite everything. Instead we see him lifting an island. He never defeats Lex--hell, he doesn't even go after him and incarcerate him! That was weird.
But I enjoyed the film otherwise. Yes, it was heavily relying on the first one and was basically an homage. But it was a really good homage! All except Lois, who I thought was awful. And that wasn't the writing, it was the casting. Bosworth isn't old enough, talented enough, or solid enough to play Lois.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

You think Superman made her forget that they slept together? God -- that's even worse. That increases his abuse of power from using his image to sleep with Lois to essentially using her as a sex slave. Talk about cowardly. Does it make it "better" if she doesn't remember? It certainly makes it easier for him.

I think she does remember. Otherwise she would have been much more WTF? when her son threw the piano. Part of me was actually wondering if he was so sickly because she kept him around kryptonite to prevent the development of his abilities. Which would be evil, in a truly fascinating way. Is she doing it to make her son "normal" or to hide her secret from her husband?

I agree with you, though, that Richard was the most well-developed character in the film (which falls into the category of the writers not pissing me off). Making him so rounded makes it impossible to dismiss him and go back to the ohmygodtheyaresomeanttobetogether OTP. I also agree Kate Bosworth didn't do well as Lois. She had some classic Lois lines, but none of the fire of the other Lois's.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you're right! And the whole time he was lifting the continent I was thinking the ocean floor is not that shallow, there should be a lot more of it, and removing that much mass from the ocean would create a tremendous whirlpool.

To me it was a homage instead of a movie. It had every single obligatory iconic Superman scene:
-a meteorite strike at the Kent farm
-Clark superspeeding through the cornfield
-Clark arriving at the Planet with his suitcases
-Superman saving Lois from a plane
-Superman lifting a car one-handed
-Superman being stabbed by kryptonite
The list goes on and on. Which made the film boringly predictable for me. The only thing new was the love triangle, but they didn't spend much time on that and Lois is a bit of a wimp. Plus they spent almost know time on Clark characterization. I would have liked to see Lois realizing that this infatuation she has for Superman isn't real and she needs to be faithful to her husband and Superman realize that he can't woo this woman because even if she wasn't married to someone else a relationship with her could not work. I didn't clearly see either of those epiphanies.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't think, given the exact happenings of Superman II that Lois could remember. Because in that movie, she found out he was Clark, and her uninterested demeanor towards Clark in Superman Returns suggests she doesn't realize he's Clark (plus there's the whole pause he does when his glasses fall off, then the rush to put them back on; Lois and Richard joking about Clark's physical resemblance to Supes...). If not for her getting pregnant, I would have said making her forget was the kinder thing only because removing from her memory any of their intimate moments ought to have lessened the impact of his leaving. Clearly, he underestimated their chemistry or her attachment, whichever.

As for the baby, I bet Lois did figure it out, hence her crazy souring on Superman, but I don't know when she did. She must have done in time to sleep with Richard, too, and create the confusion, either consciously or not. As Superman took years to develop his powers, it's entirely possible that Jason has shown no super abilities at all to raise suspicion, save what few his mother might have noticed (extraordinary resilience? something?).

Then again, if Jason is truly a sickly kid, as he seems to be (I don't think it's just nerves that he hyperventilates that much when he's scared), it's possible Lois had no idea, and she was supposed to be more astonished when she discovered it in the movie. I can't quite tell. There's some ambiguity about who knew what about Jason in the scene where Lex asks her who his father is. Lex shoves kryptonite in the kid's face, but it doesn't really affect him. He looks a tad worried, but it could be because this shouting maniac is shoving something in his face. Or because he has some innate fear of the substance, or because he's picking up on mom's fear of the same.

I don't give this Lois enough credit to have kept Jason infantilized or depowered with kryptonite beyond her hyperchondriacal raising. The whole bit about the vitamins and such she's got him on establishes her as overprotective, not manipulative or resentful. However Jason came to be, whatever she remembers about his conception, she loves him, and I don't think she'd do that.