I just rewatched Superman... and it sucked

Cafe Society
1

I just finished watching Superman for the first time in ten years or so. Maybe more. While watching, I slowly realised something horrible.

It sucks.

This movie, that I used to love as a child, totally sucks. OK, it’s no Signs, but it’s close. There are just so many flaws in it.

1. It has no plot. It’s not about anything at all. There is no encompassing storyline. We find out what Lex Luthor’s plan is when he tells Superman about it, minutes before Superman prevents it.

2. The villain is not a character. Lex Luthor has no motivation. He’s evil for the sake of it. Sure, he wants those billions of dollars, but why summon Superman and tell him about his project? Why revel in his own evil the way he does?

3. The villain is illogical. He is the most sought-after man by the Metropolis Police Department (mentioned by name by some cops pursuing him), and yet his only henchmen seem to be a ridiculously dumb oaf and a wimpy woman. He also owns Lex Luthor Inc, which should tip the police off to how to find him. He doesn’t appear to have any resources, yet he manages to fire two 500-megaton missiles.

4. The villain is stupid. He keeps insulting Otis, but expects him to follow him blindly. He tells Eve Teschmacher outright that he’s going to kill her mother and doesn’t care, and then leaves her alone with the dying Superman, with the opportunity to save him. What, he didn’t realise Eve might want to save her mother’s life?

5. The physics don’t make sense. Jor-El knew about relativity; he mentions it in his speech to Kal-El while the latter is in the pod. He also says that when Kal-El is 18, he’s been dead for thousands of years, which, depending on how you look at it, can be considered true. But according to Lex Luthor, Krypton exploded in 1948 and it took the pod three years to reach Earth. Three years according to what time? Also, the kryptonite has travelled to Earth in 33 years, from another galaxy!

6. Nothing makes any sense, period. Lex Luthor reads about a meteorite and suddenly knows that kryptonite kills Kryptonians while leaving Earthlings unharmed. And I’m not even going to get into the “flying around the world and making time go backwards”.

God, how could I ever like this film? It’s not even action-packed or interesting. It’s nothing. It’s got great music (but I think John Williams was still on a Star Wars high when he wrote it) and I did kind of like the opening scenes on Krypton, but apart from that…

Nahh, I’ll just go to bed. Nighty-night.

2

>:P

and that’s all I have to say about that. Well no but I’ll save it for a later moment.

3

I hated the opening scenes on Krypton. They were pointless; far better to have all that revealed only when young Clark Kent finally walks into the Fortress of Solitude.

I loved the rest.

4

“Superman sucks.”
Suck = fellatio.
Fellatio is pleasurable.
Superman is pleasurable.

5

It’s long, tedious, and has Lois Lane doing a spoken word of “Can You Read My Mind.”

Is it any wonder that Margot Kidder went insane?

6

It was the 70s. The entertainment industry was fueled by cocaine.

7

Yeah, but back then Christopher Reeve was really cute.

8

And the sequels were far worse (Superman IV could have been directed by Ed Wood).

9

Funny thing, I recently watched Superman again as well. And what do you know, I absolutely loved it, because the dialogue is hillarious.
Sure, nothing makes much sense, but then again, we’re talking about a comic book movie here, so I don’t see that as a valid argument, heh.

10

I agree, but assumed that it was supposed to be campy. Oddly, I like some things that are supposed to be campy. The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. The Princess Bride (and a few others I’m ashamed to admit) but I did not like the Superman franchise.

11

So baby Kal’s trip in the ship bothers you, but you’re OK with the whole turning-Earth-backwards-to-reverse-time thing?

12

No, he’s not OK with it. Read again.

13

For the last time, he didn’t turn the erath backwards, he travelled back in time (thus, to his POV making time and the earth move backwards) by flying faster than the speed of light.

Back before CRISIS, Superman would travel to the dawn of time or the 30th century as casually as you or I would go to the mailbox.

I didn’t like that movie very much either. Mostly beacause Luthor was stupid (see Smallville or the recent cartoon Superman for how to do him right). It did, however, have a sense of wonder that was quite good, and lacking from the not-so-great comic adaptations.

14

Wasn’t this the first modern comic book hero movie? One that tried to be sorta “true?” The tagline for it was “you’ll believe a man can fly” (or something like that). We’re jaded now; comic book characters on the big screen are a dime a dozen. But when Superman came out, it was breathtaking!

That said, I always thought the plot was stupid, but I enjoyed looking at Christopher Reeve for a significant amount of time.

15

“Man, that outfit is BAD!”

Any movie with that line can’t be all bad.

Marc

16

Listen to the commentary tack, I am pretty the director says he is spinning the world backwards to make it go back in time. Plus, after he is done turning it backwards, he reverses directions to change the spin back the correct way.

17

Love the way he can fly fast enough to reverse time but he can’t catch two missiles.

I kind of also remember a melodramatic moment in the golden Kansas cornfield with the sweeping majesty of an orchestra building in the soundtrack.

In his defense, Mario Puzo knew nothing about Superman when he wrote it. Maybe he let his toddler write it.

18

Provided Major Kong is wrong, and I’m pretty sure he’s right, this doesn’t make sense anyway. At this point, Superman doesn’t know his top speed, as he tells Lois. How could he know he can reach the speed of light, let alone what would happen once he got there?

19

Superman 2 is the money movie. General Zod is the man. And he can make you kneel before him, don’t mess with that power!

20

I love this movie, and I think Superman 2 is one of the two or three best comic book movies ever made (Ghost World is the best). It does, however, have one sequence that just stops the movie dead in in tracks. Every time I see this movie, I cringe at “Can you read my mind”, and wonder why they left this piece of dreck in, but took out the sequence of rooms Superman goes through (fire, freezing cold, machine guns) to get to Lex’s lair. “Can you read my mind” is the “Raindrops Keep Fallin on My Head” of Superman.

Superman 3 was poor, and 4 was misguided moralizing disguised as a movie.

Mario Puzo wrote the original screenplay. It was a novel that would have been five or six hours long if filmed as written. It went through several rewrites, until Bond veteran Tom Mankiewicz got ahold of it. Most of what you see on screen was written by Mankiewicz; Puzo gets first credit because of the rules for screenwriting credit that existed at the time, but very little to none (depending on who you ask) of what he wrote is actually in the final screenplay.

And the line the pimp says is "Say, Jim! That’s one bad out-fit.