Superman Returns, with a whimper

The Usual Suspects was better. The X-Men movies were better. I saw Spiderman-2 a day before and that was a lot better. I came back to see LOTR-2 playing on HBO and that was a whole LOT(R) better.
Bryan Singer achieved the impossible with Superman Returns. He made it boring.

Everything I thought about the movie was turned on its head yesterday night. When I had first seen teasers and trailers I had been thrilled. When the first full-fledged trailers came out I was left open-mouthed. “This is going to be a great movie” seemed to be the buzz everywhere. I had watched X-Men and enjoyed it, and had later watched X2 and been absolutely blown away. X2 remains one of the best comic-book adaptations on screen, and I include Sin City and Spiderman 2 in the comparison. The other great adaptation is V for Vendetta. Sin City was a faithful adaptation but was hardly a movie. It was, in the director's own words, a comic-book put on film. Anyway, I found it a bit boring although its art direction was brilliant. I had found Spiderman too juvenile and Tobey Maguire's acting equally juvenile when I had first watched it (when I was more juvenile too) but the movie had redeemed itself with a brilliant last shot when Peter Parker walks away with his boyish jaw set from a doubly grieving Mary Jane in the cemetry because being Spiderman, he can't afford to get involved with anyone, even if she be the love of his life. The Green Goblin with the permanent hideous grin was laughable, but the movie was for younger audiences than say, Batman Begins which was targeted at a much more mature audience and which was dark and brooding. I liked Spiderman 2 because it was funny, sad, full of action and had its emotional moments, featured better acting and a better storyline and an infinitely better super-villain in Doc Ock. It was a great package.

All these movies were entertaining and Singer's unfortunately is not, which is criminal after all the pre-release hype and publicity.

The following is a random list of the things that were wrong with the movie:

1. Apparently the crew camped in Sydney or somewhere and transplanted five feet high corn for acres and built a barn and a house that resembled the original Kent farm in every way and of course spent a whole lot of time and money doing all of it. But what did the movie do with it? Kent crashes home, his foster mother puts him to sleep, he wakes up magically rejuvenated, alert, impeccably shaved and combed and goes to stand outside. His eyes glaze over and he thinks back to the time when he jumped like a toad on serious performance-enhancing steroids around his corn farm and discovered he could lie suspended in air, without his glasses to boot. The young Clark falls through the roof and covers his face at the moment of impact and lo and behold! He's still. In the air. And then he stares at his hands and his feet just to make sure he really is afloat on nothing and then he stares at his glasses for a full minute and we peer back through his glasses at Superboy. All of this takes a minute and a half of Superman's flashback time, and coupled with a night shot of his mother driving to see which alien spacecraft has crash-landed in her life yet again, is all they built the whole friggin' farm for. The night shot could have been done just about anywhere and the Superman-discovers-to-fly sequence could have been imported from the original Superman or better still, left alone. The trailers misled us because we thought we'd see Supe's back story but that is not the case.

2. Minor spoiler, although I knew this before I saw the movie and almost everyone else does too.
Is it ever made clear that Supe's relationship with Lois Lane goes into the super-physical realm? Has he slept with her in any comic book? Lois Lane lives in with her boyfriend and has a five-year old son. The son kills mommy's attacker by crushing him under a flying piano. He's Superson. The obvious interpretation is that Superman has made love to Lois. In fact, there is a particularly witty sequence (and there aren't many of them in this movie) in which Lois, on being asked to do a feature on Superman by her editor (who is absolutely no match to Spiderman's counterpart) says “I've done Superman”, quickly correcting herself to “I've covered Superman”.
Having established that their relationship did indeed span the physical realm, one is forced to ask whether it is physically possible for Superman to love without hurting her? After all, he is the Man of Steel, is he not? It is an intriguing question that I'm sure has been asked and perhaps, answered before. (Lois was of course hurt when Supe flew away to search for Krypton, but that was different, and besides she got a Pullitzer out of that.)
Another thought and one that I think is more original: Isn't Lois Lane now the only person in the world who knows whether Superman wears underwear under his blue tights or not, or whether the red one his only piece? Also, when he is in office, since he always wears his costume to work (including the cape?) how does he pee if he has to take a leak? Tough questions those, and ones whose answers can earn another Pulitzer for LL.

3. This is a pertinent question only for Indians celebrating the steady march of our compatriots to Hollywood. Why is Kal Penn in the movie? Is he the token 'brown' guy? No one else as far as I can remember is remotely non-white except the villain's technical right-hand man, and he's mute. It's almost like it's an inside joke. He doesn't say a word throughout the movie and then gets crushed under Kryptonite with other henchmen in a completely inglorious manner. It crashes down, they become dust. Lex and Kitty closely escape in the long standing tradition of super-villains and their molls.
Now that we are on Indians in Hollywood, why is Aishwarya Rai in any movie (Holly or Bolly) at all since she refuses to act although she's not completely incapable of it? I find it silly when people claim Aishwarya Rai is stupid. How can a woman who hasn't given two hits in her acting career in two film industries over the last decade still have a stupendously successful career if she's not intelligent? Manipulative perhaps, but stupid certainly not. This is almost immediately followed by praise for the intelligence of Sushmita Sen. Now there are many issues in this analysis that deserve discussion and one of them is that we often confuse articulation with intelligence. They aren't completely unrelated but sometimes stupid people speak great English and intelligent people give poor interviews. That, however, is not to say that Sushmita Sen is unintelligent, or indeed, that Aishwarya Rai necessarily interviews poorly.

4. Superman's theme charges you up like an Energizer bunny. I've been humming it, whistling it, singing it since yesterday. It's beautiful the way it starts off slowly, building up to a crescendo and then an expansive, grand tune befitting the stature of Superman. Sort of like the Bond theme. Sadly and inexplicably, the same theme music that the trailers employed so effectively has been nearly dispensed with in the movie.

5. There are bound to be comparisons with Spiderman, so let's compare Spiderman's upside-down kiss-in-the-rain-by-smitten-damsel with its Superman equivalent – when Superman takes his ex on an aerial tour of Metropolis. The Spiderman kiss had passion, warmth and promise. It became an iconic scene. Superman's love sequences are depressingly cold.
Lois goes up to the roof to smoke. Superman blows away the light. She tries again, Superman blows it away again. Subtle message on how Superman disapproves of smoking having hopefully permeated to kids, he says he wants to show her something. She takes off her shoes revealing pretty painted nails, gets on Superman's feet, he takes her up, amid corny dialogues like “Richard takes me up all the time”, “Not like this”, “Oh! (clinging to Superman). I forgot how warm you were”, Superman tells her he can hear voices that are crying out for a saviour and hence the world does indeed need Superman, never mind the Pulitzer committee that concurs with LL on Why the World Doesn't Need Superman.
In Spiderman, Spidey rescues MJ and swings with her holding on tight, first afraid, then secure, and drops her safely. His exuberance when he goes away with a loud “Whoopppeeee!” is infectious.
Superman simply glides back with LL and puts her back on the roof. Awkward should-we-shouldn't-we non-kiss is followed by Superman silently gliding away. It's almost irritating how Superman is so unspectacular, so quiet when he's landing or flying away. Even when he falls in the end from the sky having saved the world again from the evil designs of Lex, he falls with a gentle thud that makes you want to scream in the theatre just so there's be some excitement, some noise. What's this nonsense with understating everything? Bring on the bloody fireworks and the big guns. This is Superman! Everything should be super, larger than life, exhilarating, adrenalin-pumping. Almost nothing is.

6. Not only is there no sex, there is very little action. Unforgivably for a movie that dares to call itself "Superman", long portions of the movie are tedious, silent building-up pieces with no action to relieve the tedium. In LOTR, the comparatively boring but extremely important Frodo and Sam story moves in parallel with the exciting war sequences, achieving a clever mix whereby the action stands out because of the preceding silences and the quieter story stands out among the surrounding chaos. Like RGV in Sarkar (I wanted to link my review on rediffblogs here, but couldn't. The frustrations heaped on me by rediff are a running theme in my posts, so let me add by saying that rediff probably has the worst and the most imbecilic archiving system imaginalble.), Bryan Singer takes understatement to a whole new level by not showing potentially exciting scenes not because he can't show them but because Superman's story is big enough to be understated. Unfortunately that doesn't work. I went to watch a barrage of action and I was amazed to be confronted with scenes of museums and libraries and toy trains and whatnot. Superman was conspicuous by his absence.

7. The movie could have expanded boundaries and it instead chose to remain confined to the unidimensional interpretation of Superman. Perhaps Superman's story is just too fantastic for adults to appreciate but frankly it's faintly irritating to have to see Superman confront seemingly impossible crises and then overcome them with ridiculous ease. I felt like an idiot when, after having concluded that Superman would have to do something really special to reverse Lex Luther's latest doing – that of creating a mini-Krypton on the ocean floor near Metropolis' coast, Superman bored into the ocean bed and simply lifted the whole goddamn city-state out and then flew up with it to throw it into (presumably) the sun or perhaps into orbit, so that now Earth has two moons.
I know Superman is not about the plot or the story, and picking holes (even if they are planet-size) in its plot isn't in keeping with the super-spirit, but really, how is the script/story written? Random day in the life of the Superman scriptwriters follows.

People come together to brainstorm.
Boss: Alright, so who's come up with the most fantastically impossible evil scheme that Lex Luther can hatch?
One guy raises his hand.
Hand-raiser: Lex gets a crystal from the Cave of Silence (this by the way also gives us the chance to show our technical wizardry and satisfy fanboys by recycling Marlon Brando's Jor-El footage), gets a piece of Kryptonite from a museum, fuses them together, fires it in the ocean, and starts the crystallization of a continent-sized piece of land that displaces the water enough to completely submerge all of America, not to mention a lot of the rest of the world, killing billions in the process.
Applause follows stunned silence.
Boss: Alright, so what can Superman do about this new continent threatening billions of people, the future of the world and of the Daily Planet, and the American Way of Life?.
No one is able to think of a way out of this gigantic mess, and a perplexed silence follows the Boss's challenge. Then he shows just why he's the boss.
Boss (nonchalantly): Why, Superman will just lift the whole continent clean off the ocean floor and shove it out of Earth's atmosphere. After all, he once circled around the Earth fast enough to turn time back because Lois had died. And he neutralized the Sun-man in Part IV (although we're ignoring Parts III and IV) by carrying the moon to effect an unscheduled eclipse. We're only following in that grand tradition. Get to work then!
Much appreciative chatter and the apprentices get working.

People say you shouldn't think too much when you watch a film. I don't normally, and I enjoy my X-Men and Armageddon, but I can't scoop my brain out and keep it in my lap, no?

8. On the plus side, the casting isn't as bad as the reviews made it sound. Since the role of Superman requires the actor playing him to look the part more than act it brilliantly, Brandon Routh fits the bill. While no one can quite convince you that a man one-hundredth the size of an airplane can bring it to a mid-air standstill from a free fall thousands of feet above even if he does where his underwear out in addition to a red rubber cape, Routh makes a sincere effort. With help from Singer and his team, he might even have succeeded. He's not a great actor, but the acting is a bonus over the special effects and the breath-taking action sequences that you go to watch Superman for, and Superman fails to deliver on fundamental counts.
Kate Bosworth is pretty good. She's pretty, she's suitably sentimental, strong or snappy when the occasion demands. Again, she's not good enough for you to be unable to imagine another actress playing the role, but she does well enough.
Kevin Spacey is sadly wasted. He does what he can but he's given these pregnant silences through which you wait for a devastating witticism and it just doesn't come. He is an actor with such great comic timing of a sarcastic and malicious quality that it seems a shame to simply make him bald and let him be. It's like having Paresh Rawal in your movie and giving him PJ's to get the laughs from when he can do so much better, which is what happens all the time.

To end the tirade, I believe Bryan Singer is blessed with a fine sense of what is exciting in a movie and what isn't, so I'm sure even he must have realized when he saw the first cuts of his movie it wasn't going to be great. The X-Men movies don't put as great a burden on Singer's shoulders as the LOTR movies did on Peter Jackson's. Peter Jackson was able to follow his stupendous feat of adapting LOTR to film by remaking King Kong fabulously. King Kong wasn't as successful as it deserved to be but it was a worthy follow-up to LOTR. Superman Returns, however, does not do justice to the director who made the X-Men movies. It does not just lack some kind of a mysterious X-factor, it's simply a boring movie. Atlas indeed yawned.