My very first movie review.. and fittingly, it should go to Superman.
Hmm.. Superman, the fourth instalment in a immensly successful movie trilogy has finally return to our big screen.
And boy, does he make a Grand return!
Just imagine saving a plummeting plane filled with every agency's reporter sent to cover a much watch national event about a mid-air space craft lauch. Not only that.. but as you gently land in a stadium in the middle of a football match which is pratically bursting with spectators, more reporters & tv crew.. right in the center of the field. What a scene!!
What a way to say, " I'm Back."
Apart from the amazing SFX, there’s so much geek love emanating from Superman Returns that it’s more than enough for me.
Routh is delightful as Clark/Superman, he looks and sounds so much like poor departed Christopher Reeve that it’s a bit eerie. (see below)
But he’s his own charming self, too, with a sense of vulnerability that is at once sweeter and edgier than Reeve’s was.
The audience knows that Clark’s five-year absence has been taken up with a visit to the remains of Krypton in search of any other survivors -- there are none, of course, at least not that he can find, and one scene early in the film, after he returns “home” to Earth and to Smallville and laments to his Ma about his loneliness, sets up the undercurrent of poignant isolation that characterizes this version of Clark/Superman.
There’s plenty of humor in Superman Returns, but this isn’t so much an overt comedy as the ’78 Superman was. This is a very geeky movie in the sense that it takes this shit seriously while it has its fun.
Superman is here much more a figure of pathos than maybe any other Superman has been before. He’s facing outright rejection even from the women he loves.
Lois, in his absence, has won a freakin’ Pulitzer Prize for an editorial called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,” and why doesn’t she just rip his little alien heart out and stomp on it while she’s at it?
Even something as simple as the little bit of intimacy Superman is able to snatch with Lois, when he takes her on an evening flight over Metropolis (which of course brings us back to the ’78 film), is an opportunity for Singer to highlight his alienness: “I forgot how warm you were,” Lois says as he takes her into his arms... hmm... his Kryptonian metabolism working overtime, maybe?
Oh, and Routh? Singer found a guy to play his superfarmboy who is not only actually from Iowa, but he’s a geek, too. Routh’s being quoted all over the place as saying he made himself “sick with excitement” over the prospect of seeing the ’78 Superman on TV when he was a kid. And he even won a halloween contest just a few years ago for dressing up as Clark Kent. What a dork. And you know I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
But even the comedy, much of which is concerned with Lex Luthor, is undercut by something dark. Spacey is a hoot as the mad genius, but there’s a coil of genuine wickedness in his Luthor, too.
His hatred of Superman is far more uncomfortable to watch in action than Gene Hackman’s was, kicking a superhero when he’s down isn’t just an expression for this Luthor and Spacey imbues his evil plans for world domination, which once again, hee hee, involve beachfront property, with something malevolent and almost lecherous.
Some of that is tied up in the fact that his evil plans literally rattle downtown Metropolis, which has obviously been hit with terrorism, because Metropolis’s Twin Towers are missing, too. (And it makes you wonder: if Lois Lane had been in Tower 2 on that day, would Superman have found a way to rush back from Krypton to save her?)
But mostly it’s Spacey, who’s having a ball with Luthor but also finding a kind of furious glee in mass destruction that feels more real after 9/11 than it would have before.
There’s a kind of hugeness to Superman Returns, and I’m not talking about the huge and unprecedentedly expensive FX, though they are indeed gorgeous and impressive. It’s a personal hugeness, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron: the film takes Superman to new places and puts him through some big things, some of which can be undone, and some of which can’t. It lays new meaning on the character, tearing him between a fictional world in which he feels lonelier and less needed than ever and our real world, in which we can’t help but wish even harder for a champion like him.
Overall, I find this movie very well-paced, with enough excitement & laughter for me to forget that it's an 2hr 34 min film. As I exit the cinema, my mind & heart are still with the movie. Thinking... wondering... dreaming... smiling.
If a movie can turn me & my girlfriend into a 5-year old again watching our very first Superman way back.. all I got to say is..
"Well Done, Singer!"
It makes you wanna believe a man can fly.
But then again.. he's not just a man...
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5 Stars!
*****
Oh, I've included 2 clips.. it's to the right.. >>> Enjoy!
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