You’ll Believe A Man Can Cry
Posted on | June 30, 2006 at 7:09 pm | 3 Comments
Yeah, long time no see. Remind me to whine about all my personal problems sometime.
Saw Superman Returns Thursday night, with the bache-ing-it-this-weekend Bryce. Though I generally enjoyed myself and managed to stay awake (a major feat these days, especially for an evening movie), I still had a lot of problems with the movie. As far as superhero-reinvention movies go, Batman Begins was far superior. I give it a B- or maybe a C+.
Things I liked:
1) The visual effects were well done and the action scenes were believable. Yes, I did believe a man could fly, and could catch planes and blow out fires, and all of that.
2) There was a lot of Superman in the movie. Seems like most comic book movies these days are afraid to show the hero in costume much (see the aforementioned Batman Begins for example, where Bruce Wayne got a lot more screen time than Batman). Not this one. In fact, there was very little Clark Kent in this movie and a whole lot of Supes. That’s what I like to see when I go to a superhero movie – the hero.
3) The casting and acting was generally pretty good (with one big exception which I’ll get to below in the complaints section). Brandon Routh did a passable Man of Steel, though Christopher Reeve is a hard act to follow. I had real problems with his eyebrows though. James Marsden’s Richard White was a real standup guy in a role that they could’ve made villainous. Thankfully they didn’t go the easy route on that one.
4) The homage to the cover of Action Comics #1.
I’ll put the Things I Didn’t Like after the jump, since it’s impossible to go into it fully without revealing major spoilers. So be warned.
1) Plot-wise, the movie is pretty much a beat-by-beat remake of the first movie. The differences were just differences in scale and the fact that they had to acknowledge the first two movies already happened. Yeah, the whole thing with Lois’s son was new, but there were parallels to that in the original. Most glaringly, everything revolving around Luthor was just a retread of the first movie, right down to the goofy real estate master plan and the bad guy’s moll who ends up helping the hero.
2) Kate Bosworth was horribly miscast. She’s a fine actress and I’ve liked her in other movies, but she is not Lois Lane. She’s too young, too short, and not feisty enough. Though she was able to convey some intense emotions, she was still a bit too locked up inside. Margot Kidder gets a bad rap these days, but she was much closer to what Lois Lane is supposed to be. Even Teri Hatcher did a better job than Kate.
3) Luthor’s plan was stupid. He’s going to kill all these people and wipe out the country so that he can be in charge of this new landmass where everyone will have to go? The problem is that the landmass is pretty much uninhabitable, and he had to have known that was going to be the case (he’s seen the Fortress). This puts Luthor more into the “insane madman” villain category rather than “criminal mastermind” or “scientific genius”, as he is usually portrayed in the comics. And what was up with those crystals? All you have to do is Add Water and suddenly blammo – you get an EMP and mass magically comes into being from somewhere? I wish they would’ve showed Jor-El explaining how this works to Luthor, because it sure needed some kind of logical pseudo-scientific explanation. So… what… was there no water on Krypton? Reminded me too much of Signs.
I did like the model train set though, especially when it went berserk.
4) The long denouement at the end. The last 20 minutes or so bored me to tears. You knew Supes wasn’t going to die. You knew there would be some sort of resolution with his son. It was just too predictable. It was nice that he did the right thing and didn’t break up the Happy Home and all, but hey, he’s Supes! He always does the right thing. The time would’ve been better spent having a final showdown with Luthor. It’s like they decided to suddenly abandon the main plotline just so they could end the movie on a note that would get it good reviews for “not being all action and having a high emotional content”. I wanted to watch a Superman movie, not a tearjerker.
5) There is nowhere to go in the inevitable sequels. Nowhere good anyway. I really, really don’t want to watch a series of Superman & Son movies. I don’t want to see the little kid growing up to be a hero like his father or watch Superman struggle with fatherhood. I don’t want to see Son Of Superman: The Phantom Menace. I don’t want to see Lois’s continuing soap opera about whether she should be with the man she loves (the father of her child) or the man who is good to her. That’s all been done elsewhere, and that’s not what the Superman legend is about. The best we can hope for is that they pull an Alien 3 at the beginning of the next movie and dispose of the kid. He’s a dangling plot thread that paints the writers of any future sequel into a corner. I remember the first time I stopped reading comics was because of those series of imaginary “Super Sons” stories they had in World’s Finest. I just couldn’t handle the offspring.
6) Superman’s cape and boots should be red, not maroon.
Latre.
Comments
3 Responses to “You’ll Believe A Man Can Cry”
July 11th, 2006 @ 5:48 pm
You don’t make mention of any digital …ummm… manipulation of Superman’s oversize “package”. I take it that it was not noticable? Link
July 12th, 2006 @ 5:38 am
I don’t tend to focus on those sorts of packages when looking for digital manipulation…
October 6th, 2006 @ 3:39 pm
Brandon did a pretty good job in Superman Returns! But I don’t like the movie. The original was much better.