Superman Returns

Comic book adaptations have been fairly rife over the last couple of years, and Superman is arguably comic's most iconic character. This goes some way to explaining why Bryan Singer's sequel of sorts has been treated very much like the second coming. Spiralling budgets, massive pre-release hype, casting secrecy rivalling lunar landing confidentiality and a head-to-head release with a certain movie about Pirates, mean that Superman Returns has a great deal to live up to.

A new Superman film has been in the offing for what seems like, well, forever. Passed back and forth between directors, production studios and scriptwriters, DC's flagship had become a cinematic yo-yo. When Bret Ratner bailed (ironically going on to direct X-Men The Last Stand) Bryan Singer stepped in to take the helm. Fan boys were delighted, after all this was the guy who had saved X-Men. So does this incarnation do enough to stop the hordes dribbling on their keyboards?

First up, Singer's story treads very closely to Richard Donner's 1978 celluloid invention; the sense of innocence remains and the 2006 vehicle also carries the same sense of fantasy. Of course this is the crux - in believing a man can fly and stop a plane hurtling to the ground, breathe ice onto a raging gas inferno or lift an entire continent on his (very broad shoulders) - the audience has to accept a wholesome hero and the feats he performs. This level of acceptance will inevitably categorize the level of enjoyment taken from the picture.

In a nutshell, the Man of Steel has been on a voyage of self-discovery, searching for his home planet Krypton he finds it exploded to smithereens. Five years later he returns to Earth, old flame Lois Lane has found herself a new fella, has a kid and has also written a Pulitzer Prize winning article detailing how the world doesn't need Superman anyway. Understandably the chap in tights is a little confused. To make matters worse, barmy but intelligent super crook Lex Luthor is out of jail again.

Of the performers in this re-dux, Brandon Routh favours best in a make or break role that could still yet be an albatross. Bearing an uncanny physical resemblance, his nuanced and studied performance remains true to Christopher Reeves original and adds a slight touch of melancholy to the hero haunted by love and a sense of duty. Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane is perfunctory rather than feisty and Parker Posey's tart with a heart is in keeping with Luthor's choice of female companion. Kevin Spacey meanwhile just about manages to stay on the right side of pantomime with an OTT Lex Luthor, the flighty megalomaniac who tinkers with krypton crystals in order to `grow' vast land masses (flooding the US in the process).

Kevin Smith raised a particular question in his movie Mallrats concerning Superman/Clarks paternal capabilities. Without wanting to give anything away, it's a question that annoyingly goes unanswered. The audience is left to assume a vast amount of possibilities in the personal world of Supe's, not least what went on during his five-year absence.

Singer, so often dependable and so often brilliant, is clearly head over heels in love with the man in blue; and boy does it show. Throughout two thirds of the 134-minute running time, audiences are treated to a study of isolation, rejection and responsibility as opposed to the summer slam they wanted to see. The three main set pieces (the plane free fall, the continent birth and Superman carrying the weight of the world) are well crafted but its Singer's strict adherence to a personal story that's at the fore. There are a number of incredibly dark scenes in what is effectively a family movie. A knackered Superman's fall from the stratosphere, a Kryptonite afflicted hero getting seven shades kicked out of him and an edgy Lois, son and goon scene are perfect examples of how Singer wants tone over extravagance, heart over action.

Although a tad long, Superman Returns is not a bad movie by any means. Sincere, thoughtful and hinting at modern cultural parallels, Singer crafts a paean to better, safer times. Romantic, playful and visually stunning, Superman Returns is a worthy successor to Donner's much-loved template. It's just not perhaps the movie people were expecting.

It would be tempting to dismiss Superman Returns with a cursory he shouldn't have bothered. Certainly for all the noble intentions it's the most misconceived blockbuster in years, at times misjudging its audience more than any mega-budget film since Speed 2. On paper it sounds so promising - ignoring the last two Superman films and following on from Superman II as if they never happened, throwing Marlon Brando back in the mix via archive footage and bringing the Man of Steel back to Earth after an absence of several years during which people have begun to question whether they even need him anymore. And after Bryan Singer's success with the first two X-Men films, he'd seem the perfect director. Yet the end result is one of the most disappointingly dull and relentlessly glum movies of the century, and certainly one of the grottiest looking major studio films ever. It's at once one of those films that manages to look both expensive and cheap. You can see where money has been spent, but it never really counts. If anything it looks like a busted, bloated miniseries, all buildup but precious little payoff. What we get instead is endless brooding.

Yet the relentlessly oppressive look of the film is merely a symptom of a far greater malaise. Where Donner mixed sorrow with joy and exuberance, Singer just gives us naval gazing as his Superman spends far more of the movie brooding, brooding and then brooding some more, not even finding any satisfaction in the few feats of heroism he performs. Indeed, they should have changed the tagline to 'You'll believe a man can brood' as he mopes his way through much of the agonisingly long 154 oh so very long minutes. He hardly even flies - he just hovers around wallowing in wistful self-pity forever before we finally get half an hour of decent action before its back to the misery (albeit somewhat more effective than the dreary first half).

The film is often genuinely monotonous in the dictionary sense of the word. There's no sense of pace or narrative economy, no joy of discovery, no eagerness to see what happens next, just an unexciting trudge through the superhero's angst as he endlessly hovers around. Worse, this is a film with no sense of wonder at all.

Where the Donner films worked was their ability to juggle loss, emotion, a sense of wonder and joy and exuberance - with Reeve you got the impression that Superman enjoyed using his powers to do good, but here it's nothing but a cross to bear in a series of even-more-bleedin'-obvious-than-The-Passion-of-the-Christ metaphors. Look, there's Supes being crucified; look, there's Supes being scourged; and look - on the Third day the tomb is empty and he has risen!

Yet for all the time spent on would-be character building scenes, even by the half hour point we know surprisingly little and care less about the characters, so that when Superman finally goes into action in a well-conceived but strangely unexciting shuttle rescue it carries no real weight. Only Kevin Spacey seems to be bringing anything to the party, his Lex Luthor dominating the film far more than should be good for it as he sets about his latest real estate scam at great length. On the side of good, Brandon Routh fares better as Clark Kent than as Superman, his weak voice combining with a poor sound mix to make the Man of Steel sound distinctly wimpier than the mild-mannered reporter. Kate Bosworth does her best with Lois Lane, but the character goes through the film with such a huge chip on her shoulder it's impossible to warm to her despite her best efforts. Hell, you know a film's in trouble when James Marsden makes the most impression!

And it all looks so grotty all the time, with the limitations of the video photography robbing even close-ups of detail (some shots of Superman's face look more like a Final Fantasy computer simulation than a real person), limiting the color scheme (Superman's costume usually looks turquoise or green here) and seemingly limiting the action to clumsy tight shots that limit the film's scale. Even basic no-brainer shots are simply botched - hard to believe but even the would-be iconic shot of Clark ripping off his shirt to reveal - well, just a little bit of blue vest actually - flops because the shot misses the iconic `S' logo entirely as if the film was framed for fullframe TV instead of widescreen.

Nor are the well-intentioned nods to the Donner films successful. The Brando footage, after the first scene, seem more gimmick than anything else, with lines thrown in almost at random to no effect whatsoever. It even rehashes huge chunks of other characters' dialogue from the first film, showing up just how short some of the players fall (Routh seems almost apologetic when delivering the `flying is still statistically speaking the safest way to travel' bit while Parker Posey does her best with Valerie Perrine's cast-off wisecracks).

Although they're talking about adding more action for the proposed sequel, that's really not the solution - the 1978 film probably had less action than this, but it counted because we were involved with and liked the characters: you wanted him to rescue Lois from the helicopter, whereas this time round you couldn't care less if the surly cow burned up in the shuttle scene or not (as an introduction to her as well it's incredibly poor). What this needs is characters we like and can root for, not bigger set pieces. As it stands, Hell, even Fantastic Four was a more successful superhero flick than this. It's as if someone decided to film Lois Lane's editorial `Why the World Doesn't Need Superman.' Looks like Supe's fatal flaw isn't Kryptonite, it's Bryan Singer. Still, it could have been worse: it could have been Brett Ratner...

The transfer of the feature is okay, but the limitations of the original digital photography are often very apparent, meaning that it frequently looks worse than the first two films made more than a quarter of a century ago! No extras on this single-disc edition, but while the extras on the 2-disc set are good and at least highlight the sincere intentions behind this misfire it's hard to muster up the enthusiasm to watch them throughout after seeing the film, especially since the expensive Krypton prologue is NOT included in the deleted scenes, being held back for a future special edition (ultimately turning up on the Blu-ray boxed set of all the Superman films) in what seems a particularly cynically commercial move.

got superman on blu ray and i was a little disappointed. not so much of a different than a standard dvd.but better on blu ray. the HD transfer is poor and should have been better the sound is ok on DD 5.1 but the pcm 5.1 should have been better if only there was one a big shame.i we recommend this movie but don't expect too much