While this may not be cutting-edge movie talk, I just watched Superman: The Movie for the first time since about 1980. Well, gosh. Don’t we have a few inconsistencies???
As an 18- year old, Clark is drawn inexorably to a pit in the dirt floor of the barn. Did he know it was there? We don’t know. Anyway, the pit has the green crystal that his father, Jor-El ( AKA The Godfather, AKA Marlon Brando ) placed into his space capsule. Now, c’mon. TELL me this isn’t Kryptonite? And yet our friend the 18 year old Superboy, he picks this thing up. It sure doesn’t make HIM sick, he freakin’ walks to the North Pole.
And yet later on, he almost dies underneath Grand Central Terminal from exposure to a metorite fragment of Kryptonite. Please. :rolleyes:
During the dual missile sequence at the end it’s rather clear that nobody can figure out what time of day this is. We’re talking minutes not hours and yet he bursts out of the street from under Grand Central into a lit NYC skyline. He flies west into a dark sunset. Moments later, it’s mid-day out in Arizona, or wherever that dam is. Eastern California? It doesn’t LOOK like it’s 4 pm for god’s sake. People are dressed in NYC as though it’s summertime, so if it’s that dark, it’s likely about 7:30 pm, EST. That gives the West Coast a time of roughly 4:30 pm. Sure looks like high noon when Lois Lane dies in that car.
There are others, but these two popped right out at me. Still, a heck of an amusing script. I’d forgotten that Mario Puzo wrote the screenplay.
My favorite part was, and still is after watching again as an adult, the part where Superman first comes out and the super cool 70’s black guy says “Hey Man, that’s a bad outFIT”
I have the DVD version and I’m not sure if the regular version made clear that the little girl in the train was Lois Lane.
Kryptonite is an actual chunk of planet. The crystal was an artificial device that could store information and build gigantic structures that somehow no one can find even though there’s nothing else in the fucking arctic.
The man on the train (Lois’s father) was Kirk Alyn, who played Superman in the serials. The mother was Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane on the TV series.
In the comics (originally) it was stated that the explosion of Krypton irradiated the ore and whatnot (turning it into Kryptonite), but artifacts that left before the explosion (i.e. Kal-El’s rocket and everything in it) were unaffected.
The biggest screw up came in, not Superman, but Superman 2.
Towards the end of the movie when Supes is in the Fortress of Solitude, he’s playing some kind of game in which the disappear, reappear, and so on.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway,
Superman says to Lois: “Used to play this game in school. Never was very good at it” Huh?
He certainly wasn’t playing a hologram game in school here on Earth. So he must of meant back on Krypton.
But WAIT…!:eek: He was sent to earth as an infant. He didn’t go to school on Krypton.
Majpr screw up by the script writers. I caught that error quickly…while I was watching the movie in the theatre!
I didn’t understand the hologram bit or the levitation thing Gen. Zod used on some guy (he pointed and a white beam shot from his finger and lifted a man some 30 feet into the air). Or, for that matter, where the villians went when they fell into some kinda pits in the Fortress. The extended version of the movie has an utterly pointless scene at the end when the Fortress collapses on itself and is destroyed (presumably taking the villians with it), but no matter.
I will concede that a green glowing crystal doesn not equal Kryptonite.
I did catch the line on the train, " Lois Lane, etc etc". I didn’t look to notice Noel Neill as Mom, or Kirk Alyn as Dad. My bad. One has to assume that the man who played Jimmy Olsen in the t.v. series is still as astonishingly ANNOYING now as he was then, and so was not granted a cameo. Or perhaps he’s dead? ( I know I’m speaking in present tense even though the film was shot in 1977-1978 ).
The phone booth moment, oh gosh I remember that. I went to see it the day it opened. It was a Christmas Release, 1979 and I had Mid Terms in my Senior Year. We all finished our tests, and hightailed it to the train station and went into Center City Philadelphia to see the premiere. PACKED movie theatre !!! Very cool. When he stops and glances at the phone kiosk, the place errupted. One of quite a few intentional jokes in the movie.
Having whined about it, I have to admit, it’s a completely enjoyable flick.
Man, I must have seen that flick a dozen times and never noticed that. I did notice that everybody seemed to be just pulling new powers out of their asses as needed, which I didn’t like even as a kid.
There are some major flaws with Superman: The Movie (no one can pronounce Miss Tessmacher’s name the same way for one), but your example isn’t one.
Stuff from Krypton doesn’t become Kryptonite unless it was on the planet when it blew up, if it wasn’t it simply becomes invulnerable. In the comic, the cloth used for Superman’s costume is a bundle of baby blankets that Lara put on board the rocket.
The green crystal is a “Fortress of Solitude” grower. The fact that it’s the same shade of green as Kryptonite is either a coincidence or poor filmmaking. (I’d vote for the latter. Other than pure genius in casting and some wonderful moments, Superman: The Movie is pretty darned feeble in a lot of ways)
When the kid-who-would-play-baseball’s father died at the beginning of The Natural, I immediately quipped, “All those powers, and I couldn’t save him!”
Hmm…when Superman says he used to play that game at school but wasn`t good at it, it COULD be taken to mean that he was kidding about a regular game of hide and seek (comparing it to this hologram thing). But yes, the extra powers just being pulled out of nowhere did ruin the final confrontation.
What the hell was that cellophane S symbol he threw at the villains?
And the villains falling into a pit of dry ice fumes…!? Never explained. What would have worked better would be if our hero had whaled the tar out of them and put them into another flying CD cover which would whisk them away into the Phantom Zone like what happened to them at the start of the first movie.
And it is a bit ignoble for Superman to return to the diner and beat up on the bully, now that he has his powers back. I suppose you could say he was teaching the thug a lesson not to abuse other innocent bystanders because you never know when they might come back with godlike powers and smack you around, but I`d like to Superman as being a bit more enlightened than that.
Still, the opening scene with Superman racing to France to prevent a disaster and rescue Lois had the audience cheering when I first saw it in a theatre. That was what we wanted to see...a desperate situation, millions of lives in danger, and Superman rushing to save them. It`s the essence of the character, and the movie could have used more of it.
What gets me is when he turns back time to befor the earth quakes kills Lois. (first off Lois sucks, she is nasty, stupid and unattractive, why oh why does he want to save her?) If he goes that far back where are the missiles? Shouldn’t they go back and hit again? Plus he’ll go back in time for LL but the Hoover dam breaks and that can stay down.
I love the comentary track on the dvd. Most of the time they are like 'well today they would just digitize it but back then we burned kerosene in a coffe can and filmed in ultra slow motion.
‘I know you were sent here for a reason, and it’s not to score touchdowns.’
Even if the Green Crystal were kryptonite, in at least some versions of the continuity, different types of kryptonite have different effects. Some cause a greater or lesser degree of harm to Supes, some don’t harm him but harm others, some are actually good for him, etc. On the other hand, these types of kryptonite are apparently distinguished only by color, so the crystal, were it kryptonite, ought to be the debilitating green type.
Zebra, he doesn’t turn back time, he goes back in time himself, thereby effectively bilocating and stopping both missiles. At least, that was obvious to me, and apparently to about three other people in America, judging by comments I’ve seen here and elsewhere. They really should have worked a little harder to explain what was going on, to people other than nerdy kids obsessed with time travel.
Huh?