Blogging Superman

I was originally going to post my thoughts on Superman Returns last Wednesday morning after Tuesday night’s premiere. But then I decided to give it a few days in order to mull it over a little more.

Before writing anything else I have to back up. The original Superman films (I & II, we’ll pretend like III and IV never happened) hold a special place in my adolescence and awareness of film in general. Superman was the first film I truly fell in love with as a kid. To this day it's still one of my very favourite films. It was the first film with which I became cognizant of music in film and its ability to tell a story. For my tenth birthday my grandfather gave me a VHS copy of the film. I think I wore out the first 5 ½ minutes of the tape watching the opening titles over and over and over. The old soundtrack album was one of the first compact discs I ever bought. I think I might even have more copies of the score than The Pikey. For me, few moments in cinema/music are greater than the moment during the helicopter sequence of Superman: The Movie in which Christopher Reeve pulls his shirt open to reveal the “S” to the accompaniment of John Williams’ theme in the home key of C major. It just tells you musically from the outset that everything is going to be okay. Rarely since have I encountered moments in film that were so perfect, so inevitable. The Lighting of the Beacons in The Return of the King springs to mind as one of those moments of perfect melding of music and picture.

With that in mind one can hopefully gain a greater grasp of what this new film means to me.

My initial reaction to Superman Returns was one of awe and joy. I hadn’t experienced that much excitement and energy from an audience in a movie theatre since the Special Edition of A New Hope in 1997. Also since I’d never seen any of the original films in the theatre I’d waited 28 of my nearly 29 years to see that title sequence and hear that music on the big screen. WOW!!!

I think that Brandon Routh was cast well enough. Obviously they went out of their way to find someone that looked like Chris Reeve. I think he was a little uneven at times but we should cut the kid a little slack. He’s got big boots to fill and it’s his first film. I think that Kevin Spacey makes quite a good Lex Luthor. I think he gets to explore the darker side of the character in a way that Gene Hackman never really got to. That’s not a slight against Hackman, either. We all know how terrific he can be in those roles. James Marsden is, as always, quietly terrific and has what is probably the most sympathetic role in the film. I think that the weakest performances in the film are in the female roles. Parker Posey, who I think is terrific in Christopher Guest’s films, is flat-out boring here. It seems like she more-or-less phoned it in. This may be a result of direction, too. I don’t know. While Posey was a yawn I think Kate Bosworth was a downright poor casting decision. I think this part would have been better suited for someone like Miranda Otto who we all know can be tough and vulnerable rather than flat and bad. I think that perhaps the strongest casting choice was Frank Langella as Perry White. I enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t high-strung and barking orders like Jackie Cooper in the original films or J.K. Simmons in Spiderman. Cool, calm and collected=good.

As far as the film itself is concerned it’s obvious that it was made with a lot of love. They served up enough trivial minutiae that those of us who know the originals well were able to get all geeked up about certain aspects of it (like the piece of kryptonite that was found in Addis Ababa in the third film that Lex and Co. stole from the Museum of Natural History). Production values are tremendous. The special effects are wonderful and the airplane sequence is downright breathtaking.

As far as the music goes, John Ottman proved that he actually can write a warm melodic score when given the chance. I think his incorporation of the original themes are well done. It's just that, too. An incorporation. It's not like the sequels where there's little or no new music, just the original cut-and-pasted. My biggest problem with the score is actually in the performance of the main title itself. I realise it's *a march* and that it's not supposed to be about subtlety. It is, however, supposed to be about musicality and the Hollywood Studio Symphony's performance isn't shaped nearly as well as the LSO's performance from the original recording (this could also be a mixing issue). I suppose that my other quibble musically is how Ottman hit us over the head with the theme when Superman first appears. There's no inevitability about it. John Williams' build-up to the theme during the helicopter sequence of the original is textbook for building tension. With Williams we have to wait until 3 minutes into a sequence that is almost 6 minutes before we get the first true statement of the theme! But when we get to it, it sounds perfectly natural and even inevitable.

The shortcomings of the film are things inherent to the genre. The characters are all ultimately 2-dimensional; the female sidekick to the bad guy always has a change of heart; the story is pretty thin. Just like the first film it’s basically a land grab by Lex that drives the plot. I understand that writing a good story for a comic book film is a difficult thing to do; too simple and you wind up with the mess that is Batman and Robin; too weird and you get The Avengers (okay, technically not a comic book film, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway) too complex or convoluted and you get the unintelligible The Hulk; non-existent and you get Spawn. You get the idea. I do also wonder where they are planning to go with their little subplot. It could ultimately become a serious story liability in the sense that they have written themselves into a corner with it.

There was one story element that I had a serious problem with. When Lex is in the Fortress of Solitude it appears that the hologram of Jor-El doesn’t recognize Luthor and just assumes that it’s Kal-El. There’s a scene on the DVD of the original that’s not in the theatrical prints (and I’m pretty sure was never in any of the television versions either) in which Superman is clearly interacting with the hologram (or whatever; it just seems easiest to use this term) and that it’s not pre-programmed with every possible response. Also, in Superman II he pretty clearly interacts with his mother to the extent that she appears to take physical form. I realize that Marlon Brando is dead, but that problem has been digitally circumvented before with Oliver Reed in Gladiator and Sir Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Come to think of it Olivier has been resurrected twice. There’s a scene that was reinserted into the DVD of Spartacus in which the audio had degraded beyond the point of usage and they had Anthony Hopkins come in and do his best Laurence Olivier impression (bet you didn’t know that, did you?). But I digress.

Ultimately I loved the film. It is not as good as the first or second film in the series but I saw it as a continuation of those stories. A lot of critics have kind of showed their dissatisfaction with the fact that Routh is too much like Reeve, there is too much incorporation of the original music and there are too many little hommages to the original films in the series. I tend to see it quite the opposite. I think that, for those of us that were raised with the originals, it doesn't matter who you put in the suit, we're going to see Chris Reeve. And as far as the music goes, why not incorporate it? Is anyone actually going to write music that captures the spirit of the character better than John Williams? I don't think so. I think Bryan Singer and the writers were just tipping their hats to the originals and knew that they were creating a story that should feel like a natural extension of the originals. This does, however, give them the freedom now to explore new territory in the sequels.