Superman Returned
June 29th, 2006
The term “round-up” hardly seems adequate to describe Gary Farber’s extensive survey of the early reviews of Superman Returns.
It’s a couple of weeks until the film opens here, but I’m finding it difficult to get very excited: the main effect of the avalanche of publicity so far has been that it’s reminded me of how much I love John Williams’ theme from the Christopher Reeve film. The trailers for the new film are nice enough - a certain scene involving a single bullet is the highlight, for my money - but when the most thrilling element in a trailer is the 25 year-old theme music there’s clearly a problem. I don’t doubt that I’ll go to see the film, but as of now I’m much more excited about the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel that opens here the week before Superman Returns.
(For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for a highly accessible current take on Superman in his original medium you could do a lot worse than pick up Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman comic.)
June 30th, 2006 at 1:40 am
“…how much I love John Williams’ theme from the Christopher Reeve film.”
I’ll grant that it’s an aspect of the films that I like.
(I may have, incidentally, given an overly strongly negative impression of my feelings about the first two Donner pictures; I certainly don’t hate them, and as I’ve said, there are aspects and bits I quite like; I’ll still watch parts with enjoyment; I simply have the complaints I’ve made; but it’s also fair to say that I liked them more when they first came out, and they’ve paled greatly in my eyes in the light of better superhero films in recent years.)
It’s interesting, also, I think, given how the films seem to have become subsequently sanctified and beloved, to view how, say, Pauline Kael felt when the first Donner film came out.
June 30th, 2006 at 2:45 am
If I remember correctly I enjoyed the second film more than the first, but since at the time I was completely unfamiliar with the comics I wasn’t at all bothered by the divergences from the better comics. Even now I’m far more of a Marvel fan than a DC follower; my exposure to the comic Superman amounts to about half a dozen sources: a few by Alan Moore (’For the Man Who Has Everything’ and ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and at least one or two other stories by Moore, one of which features Superman encountering Swamp Thing), Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ ‘Kingdom Come’, Morrison and Quitely’s ‘All-Star Superman’, and of course Superman’s supporting role in ‘The Dark Knight Returns.’ So as you can see, I’d have absolutely no business arguing that the film departs from the comics.
I’d imagine that the rosy view fans developed of the Reeve films (at any rate the first two) arose from a sense of relief that Hollywood hadn’t completely botched the transition to the big screen: a bit like the relief many fans felt when the first ‘Star Trek’ film got to the big screen - sure it had flaws, not the least of which were a cliched story and a stately pace, but it wasn’t a complete debacle. (Then ‘The Wrath of Khan’ came along and we found out what a really good Trek feature film looked like.) Then of course there’s been quite a gap since the last Reeve film; absence from the big screen no doubt burnished the series’ reputation, whereas the proliferation of Trek product on the big and small screens drove that franchise into the ground. (It didn’t help that the best post-Roddenberry Trek show - DS9 - was the one least suited to a big screen adaptation, what with it eventually developing a proper story arc and featuring only a couple of characters familiar from TNG, neither of whom would have been deemed capable of carrying a big-screen adaptation.)
June 30th, 2006 at 8:49 am
You’re dead on the money. The film’s advertising has been leaning on the Williams score like a crutch. This is nowhere more evident than in the latest commercial, which swaps out the classic score for some rock crap. As a result, where the Williams score wells up feelings of nostalgia for the character–just like lots of Williams scores do–think about how you feel when you hear the Star Wars theme or the Indy theme, without Williams the commercial is a lot like chewing on cardboard. Pointless and tasteless.
July 4th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
As it happens I’ve just seen the first TV commercial using that sludgy, shapeless rock soundtrack. (The film doesn’t open here for another week and a half - after the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, oddly enough - so we’re well behind the US cycle of advertising.) It really didn’t fit the trailer one bit: I had to fire up iTunes and play the John Williams theme immediately to remind myself of the soundtrack they should have used…