Supermen

I wanted to write a post about the new movie with my thoughts, but literally everyone did that. So I decided to bake my thoughts into this list instead. Plus I get to share all my thoughts about a bunch of old movies, which is like my second or third favorite thing to do.

I stuck to live action, and to film representations. So I won’t be talking about Dean Cain or Jack Quaid. I also decided to ignore BvS and the Justice League because I’m actually not rational about those two. If I started writing about digital upper lips, or how it’s redundant to even have Batman in a movie with grumpy/dark Superman, or the fact that the most ridiculous and un-talked about aspect to “Martha-gate” is not that their mom’s sharing a name somehow saved their lives and the whole planet, but that a nice boy from the heartland would, in his dying breath, refer to his own mother by her first name…. well let’s just say I don’t think there’s enough space on the internet for all my issues…

Universally accepted as the worst of these movies. Poor Chris Reeves wanted to make an anti-nuke movie about world peace, but they wouldn’t give him enough money to make it happen, so he tried anyway. He ended up in a mess. In some ways, the new movie achieves a number of Reeves’ goals and I think he would have loved the film.

Broadly comedic and pretty terrible. This movie is more like a random Richard Pryor comedy that happens to take place in the same universe as Superman. Superman is literally a supporting character in Pryor’s character’s story. It feels like this was meant to be a Brainiac V Superman movie at some point, and then someone said “What if we get Richard Pryor to come in and play a computer hacker instead, and he has no idea that he can hack computers or how he’s doing it and it’s never explained”? And then someone else went “YES!” To his credit, Reeves hated this movie and nearly turned down returning as Supes, which may have given us (according to internet reporting of 45 year old casting rumors) a Jeff Bridges, or possibly a Tony Danza Superman… So thank you Christopher for stopping that from happening. It’s probably Superman’s most important save.

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I’ll keep this one brief… this movie suffered from a case of too much reverence for the films that came before. Trapped inside the idea that this movie needed to be a direct sequel to some of the earlier films, none of the very talented people in here ever really had a chance. A+ director, A- cast overall, F story.

Brandon Routh is really good and would have been an excellent Superman in a better movie, but everyone is just doing an impression of the actors who played these roles in the original films. I don’t know why Kevin Spacey is just impersonating Gene Hackman. I don’t know why Lex is still just using his genius to do real estate scams. They also successful made Superman kind of a creep, using his powers to spy on his ex in one scene…

I can just feel the Snydercut people stirring, an itch coming to their fingertips that is only scratched when they tap out MoS praise on message boards… Here’s the deal, guys… It’s a BEAUTIFUL movie. Absolutely gorgeous. The first time Superman flies? I showed that to my kids because it was a fucking experience. It’s stunning.

That aside… it gets everything that comics lovers love about Supes dead wrong. It barely ever shows him interacting with people. He’s a moody loner and he’s supposed to be struggling to choose between his “humanity” and his blood. There’s no world where my Superman snaps Zod’s neck.

Here’s a man with incredible powers who is supposed to be our protector because he was raised among us with laughter and friends, and loving parents who taught him right from wrong and created his moral center. And he spends the whole movie on a personal journey and shying away from almost any human interaction whatsoever. I have no idea why he’s doing anything he’s doing in the movie to protect us.

Also they introduce Jimmy Olson and then immediately shoot him.

It’s a shame there haven’t been more Superman films over the years, because it seems crazy to rank this one JUST AHEAD of the previous two movies…

The story is that Richard Donner was tasked with making Superman I & II simultaneously. Halfway through filming II, they ran out of money and decided to focus on finishing the first film and seeing if it made any money before deciding what to do about #2. Then when it was time to finish II, apparently all hell broke loose. They replaced Donner with Richard Lester, a broad comedy director (and the brain behind Superman III). Gene Hackman refused to work with Lester, so in the background of some scenes you can see someone wearing a Lex wig and trying to stay out of direct sight…

Later, Richard Donner was allowed to make his own director’s cut, which was WAY better. It had more Brando. ‘Nuff said.

Superman gives up his powers to be with Lois (such was his connection to and love of a human) and then has to contend with 3 evil Kryptonian military types. Ultimately he needs his powers back and has to give up on the idea of living his life completely like a mortal man. A beautiful personal story, with a great action movie built up around it. And Terrence Stamp is SO GOOD as Zod.

One big flaw - lame ending.

I really wanted to make it a tie, you guys. I really, really did. I tried to talk myself into it. I tried so hard, you guys.

I love this movie. I LOVE it. It’s an excellent origin story. We don’t talk enough about Reeves as an actor. The dude just IS Superman, and then he IS Clark Kent, and they’re different people and they can’t be confused with one another. The music is perfect.

I have 3 problems, all of which come in the second half of the film.

1. Lois. Somewhere in between how she’s written and how Margot Kidder portrays her, I just lose the ability to get why Clark loves her. She seems to be kind of headline chaser. She’s always just getting herself thrown off buildings… like, she doesn’t seem terribly capable, let alone like one of the best reporters in the world.

2. Lex. Real estate scams. That’s his big plan. Create beachfront property to make money. It’s… dumb. He’s the smartest man in the world and his plan, frankly, sucks.

3. Kind of related to #2, how does the smartest guy in the world pull a BS Bond villain move like leaving the hero to die without any villainous supervision? He puts a Kryptonite rock on a VERY loose chain around Supes’ neck and then just leaves?

James Gunn just fucking gets it. He gets the comics. He gets what makes the characters tick. He gets what worked about all the previous films, and what needed to be revised. He gets that we don’t ever need another origin story for Superman.

I’ve seen it twice. I actually went a second time to try and find actual flaws. If you’re not into sci-fi, and feel like Superman should just be superimposed onto a version of the real world we all live in, you won’t like this. But that’s not a flaw.

The closest thing is that Clark seems like a shitty reporter who gets away with it because he interviews himself. I’d really, one day, LOVE to see intrepid reporter Clark Kent just be a great reporter in a storyline. He’s incorruptible. Would make a hell of a reporter.

That one VERY MINOR THING aside…

Everything everyone does in the whole film is motivated. That seems like a basic part of good storytelling, but it’s also the kind of thing storytellers often forget to think about. Here’s a man, deeply connected to friends and family (which we see), who believes he’s here to help and protect, and then is shattered when he learns he was sent to rule us. (SIDEBAR: I’m convinced that the original intent was to find out later that Lex faked the footage… I can’t prove it. Just a feeling.)

What does he do when his whole understanding of who he is and what he’s supposed to do is shattered? He recedes from humanity, goes into hiding, pretends to be a lumberjack or fisherman or something, and tries to get in touch with his dad’s hologram…. OK that’s not what he does at all. He goes and tries to save his cousin’s dog. Why? Because the dog is probably alone and scared somewhere.

This is just one example. But everything everyone does is like this. It’s all based on what James Gunn wants to tell us about who these people are. As the world is caving into a black hole, the dedicated staff of the Daily Planet sit around pitching the story about Lex’s connections to a war halfway across the world… why? Because Gunn wants us to know that these people believe what they do is important and possibly worth dying over.

Also, Lex. I LOVE Gene Hackman. But everything about this Lex is an upgrade. He’s smarter. He’s using other supervillains against Superman. His real estate scam is just a pretext for destroying Superman, the only being on the planet that challenges his worldview. His plan and his execution are both better, and only don’t work because of his character flaw - he assumes good people won’t come together to try and stop him. Ms. Teschmacher and Metamorpho both turn on him because they are good people, and Superman’s real superpower is to inspire the people around him to be the best versions of themselves.

I could write a whole post JUST about the scene where Lois interviews Superman in her apartment. I’ll spare you, but if you’re a writer, study that scene. It tells us everything we need to know about these two characters, about how they’re different and how they fit together. And it tells us everything we need to know about the coming conflict. It’s exposition that plays as a lovers’ quarrel.

But I’ll wait a few more days to write about it.

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