Correction: In a June 28 Style review of "Superman Returns" (which was excerpted in the June 30 edition of Weekend), Superman's home state was incorrectly identified as Iowa. He is from Kansas.
Happy 'Returns'
Zen and Now: Latest Superman Honors Heroes Past
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 28, 2006; C01
"Superman Returns" answers a question about the Man of Steel we boys have wondered about for decades.
Is Superman ga --
No, no, that's Batman .
The question is: What would happen if you shot Superman in the eye?
And the answer is: You'd have to get a new bullet. The one you fired would have pancaked flatter than a quarter and be spinning on the cement.
It happens in "Superman Returns," in a nifty little sequence where Our Hero has stood up to an electric Gatling gun hurling wads of copper-coated lead at him at a rate of about 3,000 a minute. They bounce off into the gloaming, trailing neon incandescence. So the bad guy marches up to him, pulls out a .45 and issues a coup de grace. Bad mistake, dude. You are toast.
The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun. Best is its love for the traditions of the Big Guy: It reaches out to embrace all the previous iterations of the caped flyboy, even finding room for Jack Larson and Noel Neill to get giant close-ups and dramatic scenes of the sort they never got in previous TV cameos. Neill, the ur-Lois Lane, plays a dying octogenarian who is swindled out of billions on her deathbed by Lex Luthor; and Larson, the ur-Jimmy Olsen, is a bartender who in a moment of stress actually hugs Sam Huntington, this movie's Jimmy Olsen. It's too bad George Reeves, the original TV tall-building leaper, isn't around to bask in a little afterglow.
Even the late, great Marlon Brando is disinterred from the archives and called up to deliver a warning to his son, though it's actually Lex and his minions who've penetrated the Fortress of Solitude and learn the lesson from Stanley Kowalski gone slumming in Richard Donner's 1978 incarnation. And the movie uses as its overture John Williams's blast of triumph that accompanied the big '70s and '80s versions, with additional music by John Ottman.
But the truly beloved figure of this trip to Metropolis is the late Christopher Reeve; he and his late wife, Dana, are the dedicatees at movie's end. More to the point, the young actor Brandon Routh seems chosen for the part not because he embodies Superman but because he specifically embodies Reeve's Superman, with dark good looks, a modest, even ego-less screen presence, a curiously muted sexuality and a sense of well-brought-up preppie's politeness and diffidence. He's a Superman who'd always call you Sir.
Yet at the same time, it's not an impersonation, it's a performance. In certain ways the director, Bryan Singer (of "The Usual Suspects" and the first two "X-Men" movies), has found new stylings to enable his leading man to make the part his own.
Flying, for example; Reeve and even Reeves were coached to see flying as athletic, an expression of strength and speed. To get airborne they took off, building up a head of steam, then (oof!) bounding into the air with a diver's gymnastics as he launches off the high board. By contrast, Routh is a much less athletic, much less muscular flier. For him, flight almost seems Zen. He doesn't have to put any muscle into it and when he's flying, he's not penetrating the atmosphere (his hair hardly moves) but rather transcendentally meditating his way through it. His landings aren't controlled crashes softened by super-strong muscles and ligaments (oof! again) but a kind of delicate settling. He's a Supe who's made peace with the air. I kept expecting him to break into, "Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I'm flyyyyying!"
That same glee seems to run through the movie's first half, when, since the story hasn't really started, there seems plenty of time to experience the sheer joy of Superman's return. As the script -- cobbled out by Singer, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, among the millions who have toiled on it anonymously -- has it, Superman's been gone for five years seeking remnants of Krypton among the stars. Satisfied, if melancholy that the old home orb is forever gone, he returns to Earth to pick up where he left off, and discovers what Thomas Wolfe really meant by "You Can't Go Home Again."
Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), for example, now has a child. She's even won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay: "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." Her boyfriend has great teeth, Daily Planet Editor Perry White has morphed into lounge-lizard Frank Langella, and Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has just exited the slammer, copped billions from the old lady (played by Neill) and started a new shenanigan.
The lack of forward momentum makes room for a lot of pleasant lateral movement. We get to watch Supe rescue Lois in an elaborate sequence in which her plane, trailing flame and shreds of twisted metal, is headed for the dirt. He puts it gently down in Shea Stadium before the thousands of adoring Mets fans who commemorate the return. If only he had a good fastball!
It follows that Lois and Clark deal with buried feelings, and there's even world enough and time for Supe to remember his boyhood in Iowa, where the corn grew as high as an elephant's eye but he could leap as far as a thousand elephants, end on end or on top of each other. (Eva Marie Saint has a nice turn as his mom.)
These sequences, particularly the invocation of tender feelings between Clark and Lois, and Lois and Supe (she has to know, at some level), have a kind of puppy-love innocence to them. They're not sexual, but pre-sexual, full of the awkward romantic gropings of kids who don't really know what happens when the lights go down. Everything is idealized: Since Lois is now living with Perry White's nephew Richard, played by face-guy James Marsden, Clark/Supe is honor-bound to preserve the sanctity of the union and therefore can only pine in private. Lois, meanwhile, is in harsh denial, and we understand that her essay was really not addressed to the world but to her own heart. She has, she tells herself, Moved On, even if she doesn't believe it and we don't believe it.
What's missing? Oh, right, a caper. A plot. Hmm, the movie's an hour and a half old, and nobody's done anything yet.
Here's where I wish the team had done it better. First of all, as great an actor as Kevin Spacey is and as perfect for this part as he seems to be: Nobody could do it better than Gene Hackman.
True, it's probably easy to underrate Hackman's turns as Luthor, but they were great pieces of work. He was avuncular, self-parodying, narcissistic, self-amused and evil all at once. They gave such balance to Reeve's square virtue while at the same time providing a lot of comic mileage in interplay with sidekicks Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.
By contrast, Spacey lacks Hackman's charm, Parker Posey hardly registers as Lex's immorata and the hilarious Beatty has been replaced by three moogs of utter banality.
Worse, the plot seems not nonsensical or lacking in weight, just uninteresting. Having discovered Supe's lair and copped some magic crystals, Lex uses them to -- see if you can stay with me, and pray that I'm able to stay with me -- generate new continents, which, rupturing out of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, seem fated to put half of North America underwater, while he claims sole ownership of the new land, which will be Luthorville or Luthorania or the United States of Lexatoria or some such. Never quite works, nor do the too many scenes of Lex and his pals playing pinochle in a wet cave that somehow is supposed to represent the Death of the West.
In fairness, the plot is just strutwork upon which to mount ever more elaborate set pieces, as Superman shunts faster than a speeding e-mail from crisis to crisis to undo the effects of Luthor's villainy. It would probably help if you brought a standard dead-tree World Mythological Concordance with you or watched with Treo 700p Smartphone in hand keyed to Wikipedia, for by the end of the film, Singer is looting world symbology for imagery. Atlas bent under the globe? Twice , even! The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus? In jillions and jillions of bright pixels! How about Icarus falling from the rays of the sun, or is that the fall of man, the death of Odin, the last act of Wagner's "Gotterdammerung," the final chorus of Beowulf or the end of Richard Fleisher's "The Vikings"? Or even Will Kane limping out of town in "High Noon."
It's all of them, and many more I haven't thought of or don't know in the first place.
But the news is good. It's a myth, not a miss. The bottom line is that Superman has returned and again, you will believe that a man can fly, and that virtue is its own reward.
Superman Returns (154 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for violence (parents should note that, at one point, the Man of Steel gets a tub-thumping beating).
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