If Richard Donner's 1978 feature film Superman: The Movie made us believe a man could fly, Bryan Singer's 2006 follow-up, Superman Returns, lets us remember that a superhero movie can make our spirits soar. Superman (played by newcomer Brandon Routh) comes back to Earth after a futile five-year search for his destroyed home planet of Krypton. As alter ego Clark Kent, he's eager to return to his job at the Daily Planet and to see Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Lois, however, has moved on: she now has a fiancé (James Marsden), a son (Tristan Leabu), and a Pulitzer Prize for her article entitled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." On top of this emotional curveball, his old archrival Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is plotting the biggest land grab in history.

Singer, who made a strong impression among comic-book fans for his work on the X-Men franchise and directed Spacey in The Usual Suspects, brings both a fresh eye and a sense of respect to the world's oldest superhero. He borrows John Williams's great theme music and Marlon Brando's voice as Jor-El, and the story (penned by Singer's X-Men collaborators Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris) is a sort-of-sequel to the first two films in the franchise (choosing to ignore that the third and fourth movies ever happened). The humorous and romantic elements give the movie a heart, Singer's art-deco Metropolis is often breathtaking, and the special effects are elegant and spectacular, particularly an early airplane-disaster set-piece. Of the cast, Routh is excellent as the dual Superman/Clark, Spacey is both droll and vicious as Luthor, and Parker Posey gets the best lines as Luthor's moll Kitty. But at 23, Bosworth seems too young for the five-years-past-grizzled Lois. It's nice to see Noel Neill, Jack Larson (both from the classic Adventures of Superman TV series), and Eva Marie-Saint on the screen as well. Superman Returns is one of those projects that was in development for seemingly forever, but it was worth the wait -- it's the most enjoyable superhero movie since Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles. --David Horiuchi

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Superman Returns, but he might as well have stayed away

Wow, that was like bad fanfiction. Bryan Singer did a great job on the first two X-Men movies, but this one was atrocious.

The basic plot of the movie, for those who don't know already, is that Superman has been gone from Earth for five years, investigating the remnants of Krypton, recently discovered by astronomers. He returns to Earth to find that Lois Lane, bitter about his sudden departure, has won a Pulitzer for an anti-Superman editorial ("Why the World Doesn't Need Superman") and is engaged (to fellow reporter Richard White) with a son. Much of the movie is devoted to Superman's struggle to once again fit in to the world, and to his angst over Lois' being engaged.

Why does this suck? Well, much of the movie is ponderous and pretentious, one of those comic-book movies that's ashamed of being a comic-book movie, and desperately wants to have Real Human Drama. It wants to have Real Drama so much, in fact, that there are lots of scenes featuring little more than the actors furrowing their brows and looking concerned. It's certainly possible for a comic-book movie to have real drama, but not when it's so self-conscious about it. It doesn't help that Lois' beau is played by the very smarmy Jason Marsden, who played a very smarmy Cyclops in the X-Men movies. There's no real identification with the character when he's so unlikable. With so much emoting-for-its-own-sake and so little action (more on this later), the movie begins to feel very soap-operatic.

Now, there is one really good thing about this movie, and that's Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. He's both gleefully evil and genuinely funny, a very, very bad man who revels in his complete amorality. Arguably, his performance gets hammy at times, but it's certainly entertaining. If only his henchmen didn't ruin much of it. In this movie, Luthor hangs around with a series of comically stupid goons with the approximate competence of the burglars in "Home Alone." And he has as a sidekick a hooker named Kitty Kowalski, whose character is strictly restricted to being a complete airhead and saying stupid things for comic effect. In almost every modern (post-Crisis) version of the Superman mythos, Lex Luthor has been a serious, well-organized master criminal. It makes absolutely no sense for him to surround himself with bunglers who wouldn't be out of place on the `60s Batman TV series.

Speaking of Luthor, his master plan is the sort of dumb that evinces laziness on the part of the writers. He's found all the neat Kryptonian doodads in Superman's Arctic Fortress of Solitude, including some crystals that, when placed into water, expand into massive crystalline structures ("Just like Sea Monkeys!" quips Kitty moronically.) He plans to dump these crystals into the Atlantic ocean, creating a new continent. However, since "the laws of physics say that two objects can't exist in the same place," the water displaced will engulf America. (Based on the location of the new continent displayed in Luthor's computer simulation, it's not clear why much of Europe won't be sunk as well, but hey.) After destroying America, he will, get this, become filthy rich by selling "beachfront property" on his new continent to the rest of the world.

Of course, Luthor knows that Superman won't stand for this sort of thing, so before shooting his magic crystal into the sea, he wraps it in a sheath of Kryptonite (which, according to the museum he heists it from, is "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide with fluorine," which really shouldn't be radioactive in any way, but I digress), so that when the crystal grows, it will take the form of more Kryptonite! After all, "when a crystal grows, it takes on the properties of the minerals around it."

Now, you can't nitpick the science of superhero movies too much. It doesn't make sense, for instance, to bother (correctly) arguing that most of the complete fantasy stuff (like, say, the Green Lantern's ring) wouldn't really work. The point of comic-book stuff is that it's silly and escapist. But it's hard to suspend disbelief at a plot device that turns on a blanket statement about basic physics and chemistry that anyone who passed middle-school science should know to be laughably wrong. I mean, everyone knows that if you grow some crystals from a kid's chemistry set in the presence of a diamond, you won't get more diamond. Alchemy doesn't happen. The writers could easily have made up some technobabble about how this works, without pretending that BS is a fundamental principle of nature.

Anyway, Luthor has his new Kryptonite island, and when Superman lands there, he is immediately depowered, and Luthor's goons beat the tar out of him, with Luthor finally shanking him in the kidney with a jagged piece of kryptonite, then tossing him into the sea to drown. Of course, he's saved, this time by Lois and fiancé in their seaplane. That's fine, but later on Superman's weakness to Kryptonite is made quite inconsistent (and I'm being kind) when he picks up the entire island and flies it into space. Now, maybe I'm being overly critical, but considering that immediately upon landing on this island, Superman can't even throw a punch to defend himself against generic loser henchmen, he really shouldn't be able to achieve escape velocity holding megatons of the stuff.

Oh, and did I mention that there are, for all intents and purposes, no fight scenes in this movie? Superman vs. Luthor's men is akin to some bullies beating up the scrawny kid for his lunch money - Superman does not fight back at all. And I guess early on in the movie, a bank robber with a gatling gun (whatever) shoots at Superman impotently. That's it. Not to be crass, but one does see a comic-book movie for the action, and when said action gets passed over in favor of high school-level angst, it does give the impression that the creators had their priorities distinctly muddled. What about all the cool members of Superman's rogues gallery outside of Luthor? Braniac, Metallo, the Parasite, Livewire, Luminus, Volcana, Darkseid... the list goes on and on. A real villain outside of Luthor's Kryptonite island would have done wonders for this movie.

And I've yet to mention the stupidest part of this movie. During a scene where Lois and her son are trapped on Luthor's yacht, Luthor immediately suspects that the kid is Superman's, and starts waving a piece of Kryptonite in his face, which has no effect. This was just before the movie started to suck horribly, and I thought it was an amusing scene, with Luthor worried about a bad fanfiction possibility from a sickly kid with bad asthma. It was funny because I was sure the producers wouldn't be so dumb as to have the kid actually be Superman's.

Oops.

As soon as one of Luthor's goons starts shoving Lois around (for trying to fax out a distress call), the little tyke kills him by, get this, smooshing him into the wall with a piano. I had to work to avoid audibly groaning in the theater at this point. And it's not as if the kid's powers are even consistent; later on, when he, Lois, and Richard are trapped in a sinking ship, Junior can't muster up the strength to bust the hatch open, despite having recently done a superlative job at administering death by piano.

Of course, the real reason for having the kid be Superman's is so that we can have some emotional father-and-son moments, the worst of which consists of Superman sitting in a room with the sleeping kid and pontificating: "The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son." Yeah, and garbage stays garbage, especially when it makes the lead's actions out of character. If the kid really is Superman's, than presumably he took off for outer space five years ago leaving Lois with a bun in the oven. What an jerk! I mean, does it really make sense to make one of the most iconic heroes ever into Man of Steel, deadbeat dad?

This movie was apparently a commercial success, which probably means that sequels are in the works. Frankly, I think the Superman film franchise might be pretty well broken at this point, unless they decide to retcon this one out of existence as they did for III and IV. Honestly, this was worse than the Joel Schumacher Batman movies: they were stupid, but they knew it, and at least they had some entertaining action scenes. This movie was stupid, but it thought it was high drama.

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wow, this was a great movie. my favorite part was when the mexiacan ninja monkeys fend off the space hampsters at the end. It deserves an academy award for that scene alone. Oh yeah, this is superman, not that other movie! It wasn't that good really. It was a fun movie to see in the summer ballbuster lineup, but I'll never watch it again. and the fact that they put the stupid kid in there is really going to make the sequels stupid.

a huge disappointment on all levels

I had been looking forward to seeing this film for a long time, but after I did, I wish I hadn't. The disappointment was that huge.
The acting was atrocious and all over the map. The set design was grand but seemed more like the landscapes of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, rather than the Richard Donner feel of the first two installments in the series.
There were plot inconsistencies all over the place and things that just didn't make any sense (example: where did Superman get the spaceship to travel back to earth from if his home planet had been destroyed years ago? Also, why is Superman in such agony when he returns to earth since the film makes it clear that he is always enjoying some R and R in outer space before returning to earth).
There was zero spark between Clark and Lois this time around, which compared to Reeve and Kidder, shows just how much the filmmakers missed the mark.
And Superman would never have that much trouble stopping a plane from crashing. I mean look at the ease he caught the falling helicopter in the first film. He's Superman, not Bruce Wayne or Peter Paker (actual humans). I think the filmmakers forgot which superhero they were working with.
At 150 minutes it is way too long to sustain interest.