TRANSCRIPT:
What's left, Superman And The Mole Men? I mean, it's great, watch it really, but it's essentially a modest, expanded episode from the Adventures of Superman TV Show that didn't even exist back then and that movie served as its pilot
So, about that production hell. After the major successes that Superman The Movie and Superman 2 were, someone thought it a good idea to make a semi-parody in Superman III, while Superman IV.... Superman IV is a very sad tale for another time, but the gist is that despite Chris Reeve's best intentions, the film should've never been released especially at the time it was released.
Warner Brothers, who owned DC by the time Superman IV came out, never quite gave up on another Superman film, but they never really rushed to production either, not knowing for sure if they had it right. Throughout the '90s a ton of scripts were written and then thrown out, with the most notable one coming from Kevin Smith and based loosely on the Death & Return of Superman storyline. Smith's script was actually genuinely good, but he had to deal with the insanity of Hollywood Producer Jon Peters and he was kicked off the project when Tim Burton was brought on to direct and he requested a completely new script.
Burton's film never got made either and more attempts continued, including one in 2002 with a script by J.J. Abraams, which tried to shake up a lot of classic elements for better or worse and was also eventually thrown out, allegedly because of a terrible review from Ain't It Cool News! which acquired a copy of the script at the time.
The problem with all of the above was that those people got paid. Each and every one of them attached to the project at one point or another were paid and while they provided work, none of it ever got to the market, making the Superman project a financial black hole.
Superman was still making money on television and to a lesser extend comics and merchandising, but this was an era before wide-spread DVD releases and ticket sales that also pushed toy advertising were the X marked on the treasure map.
The super-hero movie craze that broke out early last decade thanks to X-Men and Raimi's Spider-Man cleared the path for a new Superman. While the project was still a risk, getting an idea underway was easier thanks to the increasing popularity of the sub-genre and the audience's like for big super-hero iconography in their summer movies.
So eventually in 2004, Bryan Singer brought his credentials from directing the two well-regarded X-Men films and an idea he had, pitched it to DC and two years later we got "Superman Returns".
Superman Returns received mild critical praise, but it wasn't that well-liked by audiences. I myself quite liked it the first time I saw it, but it's a film so deeply flawed that with each subsequent viewing I really grew to hate its guts.
WB found Singer's approach safer than it really was. The man having grown up with the Christopher Reeve films and seeing themes on the character that reflected his own conflict opted to shy away from retelling the origin and making a quasi-sequel to those films instead.
What Singer failed to realize is that just because you know an origin story, it doesn't mean retelling it is unnecessary, as if cinema isn't entertainment but instead a history textbook that aims to inform instead of entertain. Don't we celebrate Jesus' origin story, like, every goddamned year?
The film came bundled with a number of far larger issues but that one was hanging over the whole film the whole time. Feeling like a super-hero movie from another time, with a super-hero that belonged to another generation not because of his personality but rather his presentation, even I found it hard to follow his character arc throughout the film and I'm a Superman fan, I don't need much in terms of background details to follow the material.
It definitely didn't help one iota that the film Singer wanted to do was largely to project his own conflict of being both gay (i.e. different) and adopted (i.e. feeling alienated). It was a valiant effort, but it was done by shoehorning Superman's child into the story.
That's just too much baggage for a character in a film that's supposed to re-ignite public interest in him after three decades of absence. Extra problems include a cast that's hit or miss, with Brandon Routh being often-times wooden in his delivery despite his inherent charm, Kate Bosworth not having the acting chops to pull off Lois Lane in a billion years and Kevin Spacey. Just Kevin Spacey. The man is an amazing actor, but I'll be damned if he made the tiniest effort to get into character as Lex Luthor.
Still, you can argue that a bald-shaved Kevin Spacey running up and down the set is still pretty fun to watch.
The plot was also all over the map, with a monumentally stupid villain plot, an internally inconsistent use of Kryptonite that made the single physical challenge for Superman in the film seem even more forced and Superman just kind of lifting things. I've never been one of the people that want Superman to punch stuff, even though that's welcome; for me the character has always been at his best when he's preventing disasters ala Superman The Movie. But he didn't even do much of that either in this film, with the exception of the gorgeous plane rescue sequence early on in the movie.
Singer also made the mistake of laying on the symbolism and the subtext a bit too thick, burying all story beats underneath them. In the end for all the movie has to say it seems that very little actually happens. Superman feels isolated because he returns to a world that's not pining for him, but still welcomes him with open-arms when he comes back. Lois is the only one who's sceptical and honestly she's right to be, considering the guy bailed out on her without so much as a goodbye.
Worse, considering that this is supposed to be a vague sequel to Superman II, either version really, Superman's pathos in this movie is directly contradictory to the character arc he went through in the first two films, which had him realize that his role as protector will always put him in a separate place from humanity and this will have to do, because it's a goal noble and necessary.
In his effort to reflect his own inner conflict onto a character he didn't really own, Singer made a very unsympathetic Superman who spends his time in the movie looking like somebody kicked his puppy in the nuts, then tries to break up a family, then he kind of sort of kills some bad guys, then almost dies but for some reason doesn't and then he no longer feels lonely because he realizes he has a son.
This is many things but proper story-telling isn't one of them. Despite the effort at a character arc, Singer also misses the connotations of Superman as myth within the context of his world and ours as the audience, reducing him yet again to a basic messianic figure on par with Jesus Christ.
This is a point that I can rant on for hours, but people who think that Superman is a clear parallel for the origin of the Christian lord and saviour are way off mark and their stubbornness to support this position, as if one imaginary friend isn't enough for them, is honestly exhausting.
There had been no parallels of Superman and Jesus Christ until the 1978 Donner film and whatever followed *that* version of the character ONLY. Before that there was no great plan for the father to send down his son to save mankind as a god. There was just a desperate father shooting his infant son to wherever in HOPES he'd save his life. The only and I mean ONLY biblical metaphor in Superman is that of the origin of Moses, not Jesus.
Drawing parallels between the two most well-known origin stories in the history of mankind is a cop-out and a disservice to every single complex literary, mythical and mainly philosophical element that Superman has in his very make-up. Making him a metaphor for Jesus friggin' Christ is undermining Nietzsche’s influence on the character and by extension everything from his impact on pop-culture to the fucking name!
You can't look at Superman as a myth when you've essentially transformed him into a full-on god figure without the necessary layers to critique humanity and stand as an example and our potential and not as a saviour that extends a helping hand because he's better than us.
In the end though, I really can't blame Singer for doing the movie he wanted to do. It wasn't for me and I admit that annoyed me, but it was a fan's dream-project and honestly it's not all bad. The first forty or so minutes of the film are fantastic. The cinematography is gorgeous despite and at times because of the muted colours and Singer has a good eye for action even if there isn't a lot of it in the film. There is a train-set sequence early on in the movie that's one of my favourite scenes in any picture, ever and a Superman beat-down sequence later on is absolutely heart-breaking. Despite the occasional wooden delivery the cast is pretty solid and even though the main characters are major dicks, Lois Lane in particular is a terrible person in her efforts to be feisty, Superman's alienation resonates especially when Lex Luthor purposefully takes away from him his Kryptonian heritage when he's already in the process of questioning his humanity. It's a good movie that has something to say and deserves to be seen.
It's just sad that between the added baggage and the terrible pacing, for the man of steel's big return on the silver screen it really was a failure in re-establishing the character in popular culture and failed to look into the inner workings of its protagonist, rather than those of its director.
Financially it made double its money back and WB had slated a sequel, with Bryan Singer saying time and again he'd go all "Wrath of Khan" in it, i.e. having established the basics he'd do a full-on action movie, but the film failed to generate the hype the character needed and even though it was profitable for the studio, it wasn't the break-out success they wanted and a sequel still presented a far greater risk than a household name like Superman should've posed.
This was partly Singer's own fault, for spending far too much money on a Return To Krypton sequence that he filmed but never used and then containing Superman into the human and the pedestrian, instead of the sci-fi epic the mythos has in its very genetic make-up. But in all fairness, part of the blame relies on WB themselves, as Superman Returns had to not only make a profit on its own merits, but also cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost on the project over the decades following Superman II.
As such the sequel was scrapped, the cast and crew moved on to other projects and WB looked for new ideas for Superman, until they settled on David Goyer's pitch. And while how that turned it remains to be seen and judged on its own merits, I can't say I'm heartbroken that I never saw more of what Superman Returns set up.
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