07.23.06

Superman Returns

Posted in Home at 11:45 am by guy_simmons

I saw it last night, & really enjoyed it up to a point (which I’ll come to in a moment), but I really found myself missing Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent. Reeve’s Kent was always front & centre during his scenes, which he played beautifully. Routh on the other hand didn’t have a great deal of dialogue or presence as Kent, & in most of his scenes seemed to be in the background, while others delivered exposition & what not in the foreground. Minor gripe I know, but those scenes just felt really weak to me. But anyway, where it fell flat for me (*spoilers coming*) was the whole crystal island laced with Krytonite thing. When Superman landed on it & lost his powers, that was cool, & Lex Luthor kicking the crap out of him was cool too. Obviously he was going to survive, he’s Superman after all, so I got all excited trying to think about how the writers were going to get him out of this & what was going to happen next. Their solution was what killed the film for me, basically he just flies underneath the island, picks it up & flies it into space, despite the fact that great chunks of Kryptonite are growing around him & digging into his hands (the barest vein of the green stuff running under his feet had rendered him powerless 5 minutes earlier). I mean whafuck? Was this Jon Peters pulling rank on Bryan Singer I wonder? Or Singer just writing himself into a corner? After that it all just seemed to get a bit silly (thank fuck Superman didn’t come back to life when Lois Lane kissed him, but then how did he come back to life btw?).

So yeah, overall it was okay. I thought the effects were really good, Superman doing really cool Superman things (& I loved the flapping cape, both the way it looked (apparently a couple of puppeteers were involved in flapping that around constantly) & the way it sounded), & the music was lovely too (it was definitely built around the original John Williams score throughout, despite people saying it was *just* the title music). It was just the last 20 minutes or so that sucked, shame that.

6.5

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