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.)

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.