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X-Men director Bryan Singer’s
long-in-the-making screen revival restores the luster of the world’s best-known
superhero, loosely following the framework of the first two Christopher Reeve
movies while giving the character a patina of angst.
This aptly titled fantasy comes 28 years after Superman
made a star of Christopher Reeve and started the still-continuing wave of
modern superhero movies. Director Bryan Singer’s revival of the series
(scripted by his X2 partners Michael Dougherty and Don Harris) doesn’t retell
the whole origin story, the way Batman Begins did for that series, but
follows loosely on the first two Reeve films and regains the serious tone lost
in the last two. Where 1987’s Superman IV showed the Kent family farm as
abandoned, Returns starts with Superman (Brendan Routh) crash-landing
and finding his widowed mother (Eva-Marie Saint) worried sick. Seems Krypton’s
last son had left home five years earlier to check out the remains of his home
planet. He never called, he never wrote. Nothing. More angry than concerned is
his old flame Lois Lane, who has aged even less than him and looks just like
Kate Bosworth with dark hair. Still writing for the Daily Planet, she’s
gotten herself an award for an article called “Why the World Doesn’t Need
Superman.” No doubt she’d seen the last two Reeve movies. A lot of this earlier
part of the movie is setup. Family farm, check. Daily Planet, yep.
Photographer Jimmy Olsen still worshipful, certainly. Lois Lane an unwed mother
with an asthmatic kid and a boyfriend? Hmm, that’s new. Archenemy Lex
Luthor (Kevin Spacey) still scheming, definitely. Some needed excitement
arrives with the film’s first major action sequence, in which Superman rescues
Lois from a space-shuttle accident, apparently Luthor’s doing.
Luthor is the only villain, so it’s good that Spacey is a
worthy replacement for Gene Hackman, making lines that seem flat on the page
sound like dryly evil wit. (Parker Posey as his bubble-headed sidekick, a new
character, brings some minor comic relief.) Star Routh won’t win any awards,
but he looks right in the part, particularly in the scenes where he plays nerdy
Clark Kent. (Even though Kent’s returned to the Planet right at the same
time as his faster-than-a-speeding-bullet alter ego, ace investigative reporter
Lois still can’t tell they’re the same person.) For the most part, Singer gives
the series the old-fashioned yet timeless feel superhero fans are likely to
favor while utilizing convincingly updated special effects. Returns also
incorporates some of John Williams’s 1978 score, an old-style credit sequence,
and even a digitally resurrected Marlon Brando as Jor-El, the Man of Steel’s
wise biological dad. There’s also, however, a patina of angst about this
resurrected demigod of Metropolis. The film itself is frequently literally
dark. It’s long and slightly ponderous, with Superman often seen looking
pensive as he flies about. Is he bummed out about wasting five years checked
out the destroyed Krypton? Or about the people he failed to save when he was
gone? His lost innocence, as a flashback boyhood scene may suggest? Does he
feel guilty for allowing Luthor to get out of prison? (He wasn’t around to
testify.) Hard to tell. All the cinematic superheroes lately—Spider-Man,
Batman, and certainly Singer’s X-Men—seem like they could do with a few
sessions with a therapist. Surely the Man of Tomorrow could have resurrected
the more optimistic brand of heroism I remember from the original series, or
even a movie like the underrated Rocketeer. Luthor’s outright brutality in one scene is
another thing that gives the movie a somber feel. But I quibble. The
plot (involving Luthor’s use of stolen Krypton technology) is absorbing (though
not more), the effects terrific, and the conclusion fairly satisfying (while
leaving enough open for a sequel). Overall, a welcome Returns.
