Superman Returns

programmers like fluffy movies like SR because...

I expected very little of this but my 6-year-old son really wanted to go. I was very surprised - it's a neat flick. Predictably excellent effects, overlong in the non-action sequences but otherwise a good choice for big and little kids. Franchise premise is interesting too - I'll definitely go see the next one.

But I have a secret reason for liking this movie too. As a kid in Sydney aged 7-9, I spent all my pocket money on superman comics from the local newsagent. Knowing they wouldn't exactly fit my parents' conception of literature, I hid them under the bottom shelf of my wardrobe.

They were just black and white melodramas on cheap woodpulp, hardly anything collectable or "classic". But I loved them. When my stash was discovered and I was forbidden them, I developed a comics-Jones that didn't get satisfied till I rediscovered the medium in my early twenties. These black and white comics were the coolest things in my 8-year-old experience outside the great 1950s Jet Jackson show - known in the US as Captain Midnight.

George Reeves Superman was on the TV too, of course. Reeves was a meat-faced bloke wearing underwear on the outside of his trousers fighting a never ending battle against bad writing, bad direction, and no continuity past a half an hour. The 1960s comics Superman was a real guy with real problems that went on in great arcs for dozens of issues - decades in 8-year-old time.

If only I lived in Metropolis ... well, it turns out I do. Unlike the previous movies, SupermanReturns is very recognizably filmed in Sydney. We have no Daily Planet building, but apart from that and the accents they really didn't change much about the place. And driving home my inner 8-year old kept peeking up at the sky trying to figure out ... is that a bird ... a plane ... ?

-- PeterMerel

Your 8-year-old drives? Now I understand!

Superman (yes, "ubermenche") was the original Test Tube Baby superhero. Its inventors deliberately set out to make the most powerful superhero possible - one capable of flying through the Sun without getting a tan. This required him to be an alien - from a planet whose native radiation held everyone down, and evolved their latent superpowers. So this provided the bad-guys their necessary plot-device against Superman.

I saw the original 2 Christopher Reeve movies, on the big screen. Their themes matched the USA's recovery period after their involvement in the Indochinese War. The Carter Era gave peace a little chance, and so CR's Superman could be naive and optimistic. Yet this Superman always seems to focus on the continent with the least troubles.

For anyone who cries out in anguish, Superman is a deity who lends an ear, and maybe a helping hand. The Brandon Routh Superman atones for his absence by rediscovering his foster culture. He hovers in the altosphere, over the glittering street-lights of their night, in poses that deliberately evoke sainthood, and self-sacrifice.

In practical terms, a real Superman, truly interested in bettering the human condition, would spend his idle hours quietly thwarting internation shipments of cheap bullets to trouble-spots like the Congo. Superman IV experimented with this theme, and failed. We don't need a Superman movie that focusses on the less cinematic aspects of sustainable agriculture and global suffrage.

Metropolis could use more suffrage, too. In a post 9/11 world, the themes we recognize are Superman saving (spoiler alert but it's just the set-piece at the beginning) both the Space Shuttle and a doomed airliner. It's the post 9/11 world that Superman needed to return to save. He has been away too long.

And this leads to the movie's greatest failure. An action hero cannot sell tickets by addressing the root causes of terrorism, lobbyism, militarism, and wartime profiteering. So the movie can only prop up its plot by deliberately re-hashing the exact same Lex Luthor theme as Superman I. A petty millionaire, small fry, in a world being destroyed by billionaires. The style wanders into deliberate self-parody, Kryptonite-induced, complete with nods to Titanic and Atlas(Shrugged!). Superman catches the World - the Daily Planet globe falling from atop its newspaper offices - to carefully avoid the much cheesier option - Superman catching Osama bin Laden.

And then extracting an honest confession how he knew when his window of opportunity was...

-- PhlIp

Um, you're forgetting Clark Kent. Kent isn't just SM's secret, he is also his identity. A small town hick endlessly surprised by human weaknesses. CK isn't SM in a 3 piece suit. SM is CK with an erection. Plus isn't it odd how you never see CK and Jesus in the same room ... --Pete.

Swell! --PhlIp