Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006
Brandon Routh
Kate Bosworth
Kevin Spacey
James Marsden
Parker Posey
Frank Langella
Some are for the spider, some are
for the bat, but I have always, always, been monogamous
when it comes to superhero lovin’. There was only
one hero for me, and he was the super-est of them all.
However, when the idea of a return of Superman was first
mooted I was somewhat indifferent. After all, rumour had
it that Kevin Smith (cough, splutter) was heading up the
project and his team were intent on cladding the man of
steel in black. Black I tell thee! I couldn’t allow
myself to get excited over something that was so evidently
a cataclysmic mistake. If I am utterly disinterested, then
I can’t be broken hearted by the result. Next up
to the plate was Tim Burton (Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory), which did no more to arouse
my enthusiasm. Although he uncharacteristically scrapped
the black in favour of the traditional blue tights and
red Y-fronts, it was more the fact that he expressed an
interest in Nicholas “put-the-bunny-back-in-the-box” Cage
donning them that bothered me. Alright Nic might be a devout
Superfan (he did name his son Kal-El) but the man of steel
he is not. And which part would Johnny Depp play – Lois
Lane? When Warner temporarily canned the project I can’t
say that I was disappointed. Then McG (Charlie’s
Angels) and Brett Ratner (Red
Dragon) wrangled with the
production for a while until someone proposed a name which
had the effect of a fog lamp being lit in the smog filled
haze: Bryan Singer. Cue chorus of angels. Now there’s
a mortal that could do Superman. My ears pricked
up and I stood to attention sniffing the air like an excited
meerkat, waiting for the slightest whiff of news that it
was not in fact a cruel joke. Wasn’t Singer in pre-production
for a remake of Logan’s Run? And what about X3?
Well
Logan’s Run got put on ice and, as we know,
Ratner got X3. With Singer at the helm, Superman was
going to be the epitome of summer ’06. At least I
desperately hoped so…
Superman Returns roughly picks
up where Superman II left off. He returns to Earth after
having been away for six years seeing what could be salvaged
of Krypton. Upon his return Superman is faced with a world
that has learned to live without him, and finds that his
love, Lois Lane, has moved on, is virtually married and
has become a mother. His enemy, Lex Luther, has been released
from prison and (having watched I suspect a few too many
episodes of Sarah Beeny’s Property
Ladder while doing
bird) has procured an interest in some unusual real estate.
The beauty of Superman
Returns is
the meshing of the nostalgically familiar with the altogether
new. As soon as the film opened those memorable blue titles
streaming onto the screen had me weeping, in tandem with
the John Williams score (I had been da, da-da-da, daaah-ing
all day in eager anticipation) I was awash with goose pimples.
I knew in the fist two minutes that Singer had hit the
spot, because I was immediately transported back to being
a kid watching Superman on video for the first time. Brando’s
speech had that paternal reassurance, and when Superman
repeated it himself in the latter part of the film, it
had me blubbing all over again.
The
first time Clark tears away his shirt and becomes Superman
(in both the Donner and Singer movies) it is to rescue
Lois from an air disaster. Upon grounding her to safety
he uses the same speech directly lifted from Donner’s
original film. The same applies to the happy familiarity
of: the smoking scenes, Perry picking up Lois on her appalling
spelling, and the same headlines on the Daily Planet newspaper
as in the Donner classic. The familiar details within the
film were a subliminal reassurance that Singer hadn’t
screwed with Supe. Yet there was still plenty to make it
new: the cast for one.
Just as Richard Donner took a then unknown actor in Christopher
Reeve to play his Superman, Bryan Singer cast Brandon Routh,
whose CV boasted of little more than an episode of Will and
Grace. Column inches and magazine covers have been devoted
to the fact that yes, Routh does bear a striking resemblance
to the late Reeve, (his first appearance as Clark in the
Daily Planet office is more than a little spooky), but a
mere doppelganger would not be enough to appease the fans.
Routh is suitably bumbling as hapless Clark but
not as vulnerable as Reeve’s interpretation. When, in Superman,
Lois hands Clark a fizzy drink that she has shaken and
it spills all over him he makes the statement “what kind of person
would want to make a total stranger look like a fool?” He is so
decent and full of integrity that it is beyond him to imagine
that someone would do such a thing. As such, Reeve’s Clark Kent
is every bit as vulnerable as the victims that his alter
ego saves. Routh’s
Clark is more impervious. But then Kate Bosworth is no
Margot Kidder. Kidder’s
Lois is precisely the sort of person who would willingly
make a stranger look like a fool, Bosworth’s Lois is not. Kidder,
resplendent with sunken cheeks and a lined face, looked
as though she had lived. She was every inch the hard-nosed hack. When
Bosworth put the cigarette in her mouth in the balcony scene I remember
thinking that girl’s
lungs are as clear as her flawless complexion. She’s just a bit
too fresh to play Lois. Not that Bosworth did a bad job
because she really didn’t;
it just felt as though the more seemingly empowered Clark
was, the less so Lois. Reeve, as Clark, used to look at
Kidder’s
Lois with evident admiration, and rightly so, she was feisty,
ambitious and funny. Those traits were not so apparent in Bosworth’s
Lois, and to be honest, besides being incredibly pretty, I couldn’t
really see what Clark saw in her. However, none of that seemed to distract
from the love story, which this film essentially is. It’s not so
much a love triangle with Lois, Clark/Supe and Richard (James Marsden)
but a love square with a floppy haired sprog thrown into the equation
too. Kevin Spacey as Lex Luther was every bit as good as you would expect
Spacey to be, and it was my worry that Spacey would upstage the fledgling
Routh and act him off the screen. Thankfully that wasn’t
the case as Routh’s Superman was pitch-perfect, both dramatically
and aesthetically.
Superman Returns stands as a perfect example
of how high-concept, mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters
should be made; with stunning effects, a great script
and a lot of heart. It is super, maaan, and I, for one, am chuffed,
if not just a tiny bit relieved.
