blake johnson

I saw Superman Returns on opening night last week, and I have to say that I loved it. I am heavily influenced by the fact that I am simply a Superman fan (I religiously watch Smallville), but there was something about this movie which transcended the usual summer blockbuster. Some of this had to be that the movie had slow and beautifully framed segments to offset the action. For example, in one such section Superman brings Lois Lane up with him so that she can see all of Metropolis. The sequence is stunningly beautiful.

This movie takes the Superman movies in a different direction than they have gone before. Whereas Superman 1 and 2 focused on Superman’s humanity and his struggle in dealing with that in relation to his relationship to Lois Lane, this latest movie shows Superman as a man apart, really, as a savior. The Christ analogy is hard to ignore: a vastly superior being sends his only son to earth to save mankind, and a crisis ensues which causes the son to sacrifice himself so that others might live. NYTimes writer Manohla Dargis clearly thinks this was overdone: “It’s hard to see what the point is beyond the usual grandiosity that comes whenever B-movie material is pumped up with ambition and money”, but I disagree. I think it is a perfectly valid metaphor and serves to anchor the modern mythology of Superman.

Something that I was really pleased with was the degree to which this latest installment played homage to the earlier movies. This started with the opening credits, which are a close approximation of the style of the credits of the originals. An aspect of the first movies which worked really well was that the dialogue was really hammed-up. The actors played their parts like they were on a theatre stage, and this definitely helped sell the idea that it was a comic book. That is continued here, but I will agree with NYTimes that Brandon Routh is no Christopher Reeves. Don’t get me wrong, he does a fine job as Superman, but as Ms. Dargis puts it:

Part of the charm of Mr. Reeve’s interpretation was that a guy this impossibly handsome, who literally towers over everyone in the office, could hide behind a slouch and oversize eyeglasses. It was absurd, but then so too was the idea that a powerful extraterrestrial would hang around Earth to take the kind of abuse perennially heaped on his human half.

In any case, go see this movie. You will enjoy it.