Now only if we could get a Superman movie that made one feel the same way. For all the child-like
glee I got from the reintroduction of the theme music, I didn’t have the same feeling for Superman Returns (2006) as a whole.

Has Bryan Singer, the famed director of both X-Men (2000) and one of the top three comic book films of all time, X-Men United (2003), brought his strong special effects skills to this DC Comic’s mythology? Absolutely.

Has the new cast, featuring Brandon Routh (Superman), Kate Bosworth (Lois Lane), James Marsden (Richard White), Frank Langella (Perry White), and Kevin Spacey (Lex Luthor), performed well? Yes, almost flawlessly (especially in light of the script they were given).

Has the story become the epic, defining film that you hoped Singer’s team would bring to the Superman franchise? Not even close.

For a 150-minute film, the story doesn’t quite hold up to epic standards. Superman returns, stops a few tragedies, reunites with Lois, faces Lex Luthor again, defies death, etc. But haven’t we seen this before? Admittedly, I loved some of the new touches of this film (dialogue not quite as campy, better special effects for the flying sequences, a Pulitzer-worthy feel in the new Lois Lane). Unfortunately, the “threat” by Luthor was, again, simple and childish.

This stems from the unfortunate attempt to meld the movies’ Luthor (deceiving, bitter villain) and the comics’ Luthor (business/criminal mastermind). Singer should have worked on a storyline that would
have reintroduced Luthor as a more devious and powerful threat so we could see Superman at his most heroic.

For example, why couldn’t we have watched Superman return to find Lex, released from prison, working his way up into the business world of defense weaponry, surrounding himself with powerful national figures who support his own story of “redemption,” and then have Lex create Metallo (an international terrorist named John Corben willingly turned into a terminator-like half-man, half-machine villain powered by Kryptonite) to do Lex’s dirty work in seeking revenge on Superman, while Lex secretly sells his advanced weaponry to the highest bidder and creates more terrorists like Corben? (This plot would be borrowed from a comic book storyline, but then, the best comic book films usually are . . .)

Instead, we find Lex getting rich via an old widow (because of the “pleasures he gave her”—don’t need to know, don’t want to know) and getting hired help (lame thugs) to gather Superman’s crystals and plot a stupid real estate scheme involving a new Krypton. What? Why?

For all I love about Singer’s reintroduction of Superman as a Christ-like defender of Truth and Justice—including a great sequence between him and Lois where she says the world doesn’t need a Savior and he tells her he hears people crying for one everyday—why can’t we see him really save humanity? If he’s Superman, can’t we get a global threat for him to save us from? For all of Singer’s efforts to set this film in our day and age, I didn’t feel like we got to see the $300 million dollars this film supposedly cost to make
on the screen, especially in the storytelling. Why can’t we get a threat where he actually needs all his great powers to lead us in stopping it?

There is a “big” plot twist in Returns, but it left me more uncomfortable then surprised, wondering if Warner Bros. is really planning a successful future for these films. Singer and Co. will just have to prove me wrong on that one, and you’ll have to take in the film yourself to know what I’m talking about. Because this film is worth seeing for Routh’s performance and some of Supe’s heroics (the plane rescue sequence glimpsed in the previews is a bring-down-the-house moment on a big screen with full surround-sound, even if it does come before the halfway point of the film).

But if we’re going to be told about our need for a saviour like Superman, why can’t we get an entire epic story that reveals him as someone a bit more Savior-like?