Superman Returns was flawed. Deeply, deeply flawed. But at least it had the optimism that a Superman Movie should have. I saw what Bryan Singer was trying to do.
Man of Steel…
What the fuck? Just - what the fuck?
I didnt know how to vote. I mean yes "They’re equally bad.", absolutely, they suck. But "Seriously, I think Peter Jackson was involved." would indicate they’d be fantastically great films,on the level of Superman the Movie.
How is this a punishment? I got a basket all ready to catch them.
But you know how much I hate Lois Lane and her portrayal. You want me to talk about Lois Lane? I’ll talk about Lois Lane.
The "plucky’ "award-winning gutsy journalist who does stupid shit and gets herself in trouble trope has done a lot to damage women. I know that back in the day it was the only kind of strong woman they could imagine apparently - one who does dumb shit because she’s a dame and still gets in trouble and has to be rescued by Superman and is too blind to notice that Kent and Supes are the same.
I started going through all of the films to list all of the ways I hate Lois and her portrayal. I just couldn’t do it. It annoys me too much. In fact, another movie I rather like, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, is also ruined by the Plucky Reporter Girl Trope - the girl does dumb stuff, gets in trouble, blames the men around her for everything, and in the end manages to not even take the lens cap!!! off for what could very well be the most important shot of her life.
Ok, lastly, there is no reason that Supes is not a deadbeat dad. He:
- hooks up with Lois Lane
- apparently doesn’t or can’t use birth control*
- proceeds to disappear for five years without any word to anyone
- comes back to find Lois with a five year old son and living with another man (but not married to him)
- finds out that the kid reacts to Kryptonite
- does eventually find out it’s his son and still doesn’t take responsibility - hell we chase regular fathers for child support
Superman, the good and honest and moral crusader we know, would not have slept with a woman and then disappeared for five years. Superman would not have ignored the possibility of pregnancy. And even if he had somehow done all that, upon coming back and finding a five year old weirdo son, would have at the least demanded a DNA test. Which also makes Lois look bad again! She can’t even tell the father of her son whose boy he is! And I still can’t find it in my heart to completely blame her - he left! Skedaddled! Skipped town!
I don’t love Superman and he has never been my favorite hero but the liberties they took with the character in this movie kind of offended me. Anyway. There’s lots better superheroes out there, right!
So you’re comparing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to StM? Have you lost your goddamn mind?
I will concede that Fellowship is a great movie, and Towers a good though one, and* Return * tolerable so long as you’re watching it on disc so you can just skip to the scene with Sam fighting Shelob and Eowyn being generally awesome and Theoden telling his army, “Yewah, this battle is hopeless. I’m going anyway, 'cause I’m like that. Now let us go out and die like men, and if anybody feels the need to rip out an orc’s liver with his teeth I will overlook the extraagence.” But PJ squandered the good will from the first two LotR’s by turning Aragorn into some sort of weird indecisive mumbling Pompeian, and though he regained some of it with the generally well-done King Kong with the big dino fault, he unredeemed himself with The Lovely Bones, and then he proceeded to ruin the Hobbit trilogy to such a degree that he is probably immortal because he certainly ain’t going to heaven and WILL NOT BE ALLOWED HELL!
I’m not buying that this makes Supes a deadbeat dad. Hooking up with Lois is fine. Yes, not using birth control is irresponsible, but maybe they did and his super seed found a way. Disappearing for five years in search of his home world doesn’t make him a deadbeat dad - at that point there’s no reason to think he knew Lois was pregnant. He seemed surprised to learn the kid was his after he got back which is consistent with that.
Lois living with someone else and a 5year old son is somewhat suspicious, but that doesn’t make supes a deadbeat dad. Lois probably knew, but chose not to tell him. Once Supes finds out about the kid, you can see he is watching over him, and that happens toward the end of the movie so no idea if that would continue. Based on what was shown I would expect it to. None of that makes him a deadbeat dad.
I always skip the scene with Sam and Shelob. 
Return of the King - well, the points you make about Aragorn are true, but I think what really happened is Théoden just stole the whole freakin show. Viggo Mortenson is a great actor but he simply could not measure up.
I can’t throw rocks at you, babe. Rule 7.
I love Superman. He is the tenth greatest of all super-heroes, right after Thor, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Thor, Thor, Daredevil, She-Hulk, Black Canary, and Thor. I may have called the Son of Jor-El a deadbeat dad; I don’t recall, and as you well know I don’t know how to scroll up. But upon review I will retract the accusation – which is not to say I’ll defend RoS!Supes.
Kal is not that boy’s father. He’s a sperm donor. Wht’s his name, Cyclops or whatever, is the father of Lois’s son, because he’s done the damn work. Kal is a mensch so he wants to think he’s a father, but the best thing he can do is stay out of the damn way so the Lane/Cyclops family can remain stable. That’s why Wonder Woman needed to be in the movie: so someone could call him out on selfishly interfering and then* punch him in the face.
*
You make good points too…but that doesn’t change the bad taste that I got from that movie. Whether or not he is a 100% the defniition of a deadbeat dad, that is exactly the feeling I got from it, and I am certainly not the only one.
Now I agree that the guy she ended up with is the “real” dad. Hell I was adopted I know all about that. But that doesn’t excuse Supes.
Ick, the whole thing is just gross. I kind of figured Superman was a virgin hero, anyway. He wouldn’t sleep with someone without being committed, I feel.
Welp! So much for that! Apparently he just flings his super sperm around and doesn’t even think twice.
Superman Returns has plenty of things to hate that are either incredibly dumb or make absolutely no sense.
As for Man of Steel? Here’s my blog post on how the film addresses several specific things about the Superman mythology that none of the other films ever did. It’s not a perfect film, but its ideas and point-of-view are provocative and make it a worthy vehicle to revisit the character and his purpose.
The movie has to be seen from the continuity of Superman II. It’s supposed to take place after that, so Lois and he had a relationship. I don’t remember if this was my internal fanwank, or this was stated somewhere. I thought the kid was conceived when when they were at the honeymoon suite and later Clark hypnotizes her to forget he was Superman. Shortly thereafter he gets the call that Krypton may be out there and leaves without knowing about the pregnancy. Lois chalks it up to one of those things, or emmaculate conception.
SR wasn’t great. The kid aspect was annoying. The hommage to Donner was stifling. But I have seen the movie multiple times and I have no desire to see MoS again. The idea of Superman being emo is just shit.
As I recall, the set-piece action scene in SR consisted of Superman lifting a big rock over his head.
I, for one, loved Superman Returns and hated Man of Steel. The former is a bit on the campy side, but as an homage/love letter to the Donner films it’s pitch-perfect, and I thought it did a good job of portraying Superman as the self-doubting Messiah-in-spite-of-himself who hates himself because he can’t do enough to save all the people crying out to him.
Man of Steel, IMO, was an utter betrayal of everything that Superman stands for, and in a just world there’ll someday be a multiverse crossover in the comics where the mainline Superman meets MoS-Superman and tears him a new one for letting so many innocent people die.
Superman doesn’t kill. Period. End of story.
Except for Byrne’s post-Crisis Superman.
Well, and the pre-Crisis Superman.
Plus the Golden Age Superman.
Honestly I think Superman returns wore the Donner film like shackles. It was a homage to a fault.
Not only did he kill in this instance, he killed when he was not strictly forced to. The three Kryptonians were powerless, yes they were threatening to get their powers back, but to Superman’s knowledge there was no way they could (of course he also couldn’t know that they really couldn’t either). So he killed them because he feared they would regain their powers and destroy the world.
So Superman rarely kills, but will kill if pressed. Kind of like in “Man of Steel” (although the stakes were clearly lower).
I liked both movies (and I am Canadian, go figure) but I thought Man of Steel was the better movie in that it was a little bit more entertaining. I find Superman Returns a little dull.
I can’t stand MoS, but Supes was exactly right to kill Zod. The stakes weren’t lower; they were IMMEDIATE. Zod was clearly a better fighter; Supes only held him back because he was still a hair stronger, and that was not necessarily gonna last. Zod was gonna kill more people, and even one was too many.
I agree. I actually thought “Man of Steel” handled it much better than Superman #22. It is similar to the Doomsday situation. Superman knows he’s going down, maybe for good, and there’s nobody left to stop Doomsday (at a minimum not in the immediate vicinity). So he’s fighting for keeps at the end.
I think they both stunk. Superman resorting to killing is BAD writing, whether comic book or movie. It’s shitty storytelling that goes against character, which basically is 99% of Byrne’s later career.
Superman does not kill.
I thought they were both entertaining movies – certainly way, way better than Superman III, at any rate (which I find basically unwatchable nowadays, except for the novelty of seeing Calgary in the 1980s).
Superman Returns didn’t have an origin story to use as a plot crutch, so it gets bonus points for that. But I think they’re about the same in terms of quality.