| Bilgi :
The longest gap between James Bond movies was
six years, between the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan eras.
The longest gap between Batman movies was eight years, and
Star Wars went sixteen years between films. But the longest
gap between Superman movies beats them all. It has been
nineteen years since Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
brought the once-mighty series—starring Christopher Reeve—to a
cheesy yet sanctimonious end; and what's more, Superman
Returns ignores the last two films entirely and positions
itself as a direct sequel to the first two movies, both of
which came out over a quarter-century ago. So when the new
film's opening credits begin, with the John Williams fanfare
blaring from the speakers and the blue letters streaking
across the screen, they boldly herald what may be the most
daring attempt at franchise resuscitation in movie
history.
The Man of Steel assumes a pose
reminiscent of his first comic book cover
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Director Bryan Singer, whose work on the
first two X-Men movies played a key part in putting
superheroes back on the big screen, certainly makes frequent
nods to Superman's past. In one scene, Superman (Brandon
Routh) holds a car above his head, at an angle that perfectly
matches his pose on the cover of the first issue of Action Comics. The
first time we see Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), he persuades a
wealthy widow to leave him her entire estate—and she is played
by Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane on the
1950s TV show (and Lois's mother in the 1978 movie).
But Singer is, if anything, a little
too stuck in the past. Superman Returns not only
stands on the shoulders of the first two movies, it also
retraces their footsteps, sometimes in small ways (e.g.,
numerous bits of dialogue are recycled here, and nothing new
or fresh is done with them), and sometimes in very big ways.
This is the sort of thing that lesser sequels, like
Superman IV, do. Then again, Singer and his writers
also introduce some new elements which would seem to
contradict the earlier films. It's all a bit of a muddle, and
it is hard not to think that Singer should have just started
from scratch, like Chris Nolan did with last year's Batman Begins.
The movie begins by telling us that Superman
left Earth rather impetuously five years ago, when astronomers
spotted the remains of his home planet Krypton. As the story
progresses, we learn that he apparently left this world
without saying goodbye to his closest friends, or without any
thought to what the consequences of his absence might be—for
example, the villain Lex Luthor is out of prison now because
Superman failed to appear and testify against him at his
parole hearing.
Supes still has a thing for Lois,
though she's now engaged and has a child
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But no sooner has the movie begun, than
Superman comes back. And while some things go back to the way
they were rather suddenly—as Clark Kent, he gets his job at
the Daily Planet back right away, no questions asked,
and within minutes, he learns that Lois Lane's (Kate Bosworth)
life is in danger, so he has to go and rescue her once
again—he also learns that some things are very, very
different. In particular, he learns that Lois is living with
Richard White (James Marsden), nephew of Daily Planet
editor Perry (Frank Langella), and that she has a young son,
Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu). Lois and Richard are also engaged,
but no wedding date has been set, yet—and she doesn't like it
when people ask her about that.
This complex web of relationships is the
emotional heart of the movie, but the actors who have to pull
it off are not quite up to the task. Routh does his best to
mimic Reeve—as Clark, he wears big glasses and
says words like "swell," and as Superman, he struts around in
his suit and cape—but he neither makes the role his own nor
comes close to inhabiting the part, body and soul, as his
predecessor did. In a nutshell, he lacks Reeve's sincerity and
flair for physical comedy.
Bosworth is even more poorly cast. Not only
does she lack the spunk and sexiness of Margot Kidder, she was also 22 when the film
was shot, which makes her almost impossible to accept as the
mother of a five-year-old boy who also happens to be at the
top of her game as one of the world's most successful
reporters. (Just for comparison's sake, Kidder turned 30 two
months before the first film came out.)
Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent in the
Daily Planet newsroom
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Spacey, at least, makes for a promising
Luthor, at first. The early scenes of Luthor and his entourage
(including Parker Posey as a deadpan ditz named Kitty
Kowalski) are quite amusing and do a good job of stoking our
anticipation. Luthor goes up north to steal the Kryptonian
crystals that built Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and then
he plans to exploit their properties. His first experiment,
conducted within a large model town complete with train tracks
and tiny mountains, is filmed like a disaster movie with
toys—and it turns out to be much more interesting than the
actual disaster that follows, when Luthor finally puts his
plan into motion.
Indeed, when Luthor's plan is ultimately
revealed, it is something of a letdown. For one thing, it is
basically a retread of his real-estate ambitions in the first
movie—an overblown, hyperbolic, special-effects-heavy retread,
to be sure, but a retread just the same. For another, the film
increasingly tries to impress us with the sheer hugeness of
Luthor's plan, but never makes it awe-inspiring or majestic;
instead, the plan is rather dull and lifeless, and
increasingly, so are Luthor and his team, too.
There is a fair bit of God-talk in this film,
not all of it Christian. Luthor, for example, compares his
theft of Kryptonian technology to the myth of Prometheus, who
stole fire from the Greek gods and gave it to mankind; after
he succeeds, Kitty sings, "He's got the whole world in his
hands." This line is echoed in a later scene, when the giant
globe atop the Daily Planet building falls to the
street and Superman catches it, holding the globe on his
shoulders in a way that recalls certain depictions of
Atlas—another Titan who, like Prometheus, was punished by the
Greek gods.
Lex Luthor, probably NOT mulling
over the difference between 'stalagmite' and
'stalactite'
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Other scenes invite us to think of Superman
as a Christ figure. His father Jor-El (the late Marlon Brando,
here portrayed via footage from the first film and sound clips
that were originally recorded for Superman II) says he
sent his "only son" to Earth to be a "light" that would show
us how to be "a great people." Superman floats in the air and
listens to the sounds of the city, before deciding where he
should intervene. And when Lois, bitter after Superman's
absence, tells him that the world doesn't need a "savior," he
replies, "Every day I hear people crying for one."
But we shouldn't make too much of this sort
of thing. The Superman movies have never shown anyone
actually following Superman's inspiring lead; if
anything, they have shown people waiting passively for
Superman to rescue them. What's more, the Superman of the
movies has shown a remarkable tendency to shrug off his
responsibilities—first abandoning his powers (and thus the
safety of the world) so he could sleep with Lois in
Superman II, and now abandoning the world altogether
for several years prior to the events of Superman
Returns.
In addition, whereas the first film had an
almost mystical sensibility that lent itself to religious
allegory, the new film does not. The Kryptonian crystals that
seemed to keep Jor-El's spirit alive long after his physical
death are just a form of technology here. (Indeed, Luthor
quotes a famous line from atheist sci-fi writer Arthur C.
Clarke, who said any sufficiently advanced form of technology
is indistinguishable from magic.) And that bit in the first
film where Jor-El talks about the father and the son living in
and through each other—a line that many Christians have seized
on for its Trinitarian overtones—is now nothing more than a
poetic ode to paternity.
Still, the film's weaknesses aside, there is
no denying that Singer has pulled out all the stops in his bid
to make the biggest, loudest summer blockbuster possible—and
he sprinkles the movie with welcome grace notes of visual
beauty and comic absurdity, from a startling moment of
weightlessness aboard an airplane before it plummets to the
ground, to a hilarious scene involving a thug, a hostage, and
a grand piano. And have Superman's flights to the rim of space
ever been more breathtaking or seemed so dangerously high?
It's enough to make you really, really wish—if you didn't
already—that Singer hadn't left the X-Men so soon. |
