a thousand words about superman. seriously, run. now.

[movies]

posted by tom / July 05, 2006 /

The casting wasn't the problem. Brandon Routh is boring, but so is Superman. I found his boyishness irritating, but didn't have any major complaints — better him than Nicholas Cage, right? Kate Bosworth was fine, although I wasn't blown away by her. And I thought Kevin Spacey made for a pretty good Lex Luthor — although the things the script had Lex doing ended up making it seem like Spacey did a terrible job.

For those who don't know, the plot involves Luthor trying to grow a new, kryptonite-enhanced island somewhere off the east coast. As sovereign of this new continent, Lex anticipates making a lot of money selling land. As you might recall, Luthor's plan in Superman I also involved real estate speculation. For some reason screenwriters seem to have defined "supervillain" in this franchise as "like a normal real estate developer, only bald and somewhat more evil". It's not very compelling.

It's all the more frustrating because Lex gives a legitimately great evil genius speech in the beginning of the movie, in which he compares himself to Prometheus and implies that he wants to steal Superman's powers and give them to the people of Earth — while taking a cut for himself, of course. Unfortunately, it turns out that this is simply his justification for drowning the eastern seaboard during construction of Kryptonite Kondominiums (Phase I).

But it could have made for a great plotline — its potential for putting the villain on the side of democracy (and for hooking Superman up to enormous, agony-inducing machines) make it fall neatly into two of the three ways that I think you can write a Superman story:

1. The Ethical Dilemma: Superman represents a huge concentration of power in an individual. It's undemocratic, paternalistic and potentially dangerous. These stories are probably the richest use of the character, but they're also the most boring — and are undercut by Superman inherently being on the wrong side of the moral dilemmas they pose. Obviously nothing can ever defeat Superman, so plots of this type tend to consist of a lot of monologue-heavy soul-searching by Clark Kent or Lois Lane, then end with a completely dishonest "fascism isn't so bad after all!" sort of moral. It's made for a lot of lousy comic books, and it'd make for a lousy movie.
2. The Plot Device: The guy's pretty much all-powerful. He's regularly employed as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, God or America (in ascending order). This kind of story can be great, but by necessity tends to focus on characters that aren't Superman. That's not what a summer blockbuster audience buys tickets to see.
3. The Martyr: This is my preferred Superman story, because it really boils down to juvenile wish fulfillment. You show how incredibly powerful and good the guy is. Then you introduce a new threat that proves his goodness isn't just a convenience afforded by superpowers. You make him undergo some superpowered suffering, and he perseveres, and everyone's saved, and the audience gets little chills down their spines, and are embarrassed because they really ought to know better. The primary creative decision for the storyteller is how overt the Jesus comparisons are.

Yglesias makes the case that the movie should have taken a cue from the comics and given Lex public legitimacy (he becomes president in the DC Universe, I believe), thereby providing the dilemma for Superman. I don't really agree. Sure, you could make him start awarding no-bid contracts to LexCorp in Iraq, but that kind of tawdry day-to-day evildoing isn't the sort of thing that really requires Superman's involvement. Superman bad-guys always have to have the sorts of outsized, obviously evil plans that genuinely aren't compatible with the public's endorsement — the sort of thing that writing your congressman simply isn't going to fix. As a consequence, Superman can just sit around and wait until President Luthor unleashes his kryptonite-powered robot spiders, or whatever, and then clean house. You can wring some good ethical dilemmas out of the waiting period immediately before Kryptonite Spider O'clock, but they never last.

At any rate, of the above plot outlines Superman Returns wisely opts for option 3. But it fails miserably at the implementation. Despite a lot of Jesus imagery, his suffering doesn't seem all that palpable. He doesn't even notice he's being exposed to kryptonite, then all of a sudden it's supposed to be terribly painful. And his potential emotional suffering — which, to the movie's credit, was set up quite well — is completely betrayed by how things work out with Lois's kid and her fiancee's apparent unwillingness to fight for his woman. It's just all pretty lame: the evil's not that evil, the pain isn't that painful, the superheroics aren't that heroic. Superman does catch a lot of heavy shit right before it hits the ground, though. If that's your thing.

In fact, he does that over and over and over. Why have one shot of Superman flying through a tunnel of fire when it can be followed with another such shot two minutes later? Why have one shot of a flying vehicle falling offscreen to apparent destruction when it can be repeated a moment later? The same goes for Superman getting nearly killed, then revived. It's downright weird how so many visual and story elements were repeated, and how quickly the repetitions occurred. Some of these functioned as bookends, which is perfectly reasonable. But in most cases Singer seemed to think there was merit to repetition for its own sake. There wasn't.

Anyway, this entry is obviously way, way too long. But I'll finish by noting that I think I'm as disappointed as I am with this movie because I've been watching the newly-cancelled Justice League Unlimited cartoon for the past couple of seasons. That was the latest project of Bruce Timm and Paul Dini. Over several cartoon series during the last decade, those two have pretty well defined how you write Superman and Batman stories. The junky plot that Singer put on screen looked amateurish by comparison.