With Man of Steel only a few short months away, I thought it might be a good time to review the last reboot of Superman… Superman Returns.
Superman Returns is a movie I was really looking forward to seeing when I first heard it was going to be made. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Superman fan. Then the trailer for the movie came out and I was blown away! It had the classic John Williams score, Marlon Brando as Jor-El; it was the Superman 3 we had all been waiting for (pretending the other Superman 3.. and 4 for that matter, didn’t exist). What we actually got was, um, really weird actually.
From the first really out of place scene where Lex Luthor was apparently having an affair with a 90 year old woman to swindle her out of her money to when we later find out that woman’s dog ate it’s brother (or sister). We also got several running jokes about Lex Luthor’s wigs (maybe one would have been okay but we got it, he wears a wig). All of this would seem out of place in just about any movie, but especially a Superman movie. It was just unneeded, weird and added to an already super long running time.
What Bryan Singer was thinking I really have no idea. There is also the scene where young Clark is learning about his powers, and for some reason he is wearing glasses even though he didn’t need those for his disguise until years later. It makes no sense and is never explained. The movie has a huge running time but nothing is really even happening during a lot of it. Just cutting out the pointless scenes dealing with seducing 90 year old women and cannibal dogs would have helped a lot.
One of the most exciting prospects about a new Superman film was that one hadn’t been made since the mid-80s. Special effects had come along way since Superman 4. We could finally see Superman face off against a major super villain, someone like Darkseid, Brainiac, Metallo, etc. What we got was Lex Luthor in a plot to gain real-estate. Hm, seems like I already saw this in Superman 1, 2 and 4. Now I am not against references to the older movies, it’s kind of cool actually, but we waited 19 years for a new Superman movie and all we received was the same thing we had already seen before.
Not only had we seen the basic plot before (done much better), but Superman didn’t even fight anyone in the entire movie! It was mostly him spying on Lois (I’ll get to that more in part 2 of this review) and flying around dealing with disasters caused by Lex Luthor stealing some Kryptonian technology. Again, if we wanted to see Superman dealing with natural disasters caused by a villain, we could have rewatched Superman 1, 2, or 4. All of the things mentioned so far are bad but none of them are as bad as the real reason Superman Returns sucked.
In part 2 of this review I am going to cover how Bryan Singer turned Superman into a total scum bag.
No comments:
Post a Comment