Superman Returns

Just to throw a little more at the "look right for the part" debate, check this out. All the Superman's through the years.



Routh is the fucking spitting image of Reeve.

and Dean Cain looks like a knob. Believe it or not!

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by knkwzrd

Spoiler:

What gave Lex the idea that anyone would want to buy a house ON A GIANT SHARD OF BARREN MAGICAL GREEN SPACE GLASS? It's not exactly prime real estate. Flimsiest evil ploy of all time.

Originally Posted by JazzFlight

Spoiler:

The other goofy thing is the idea that somehow he'll own this land and be able to sell it. Um... what sort of super weapon does he have at his disposal to make people actually fear him? Once the land appears, any government can just come in and kill/capture Lex. They're not going to put up with any "I own this land" shit.

Did either of you actually watch the movie?

Spoiler:

Ofcourse no one is going to go out and buy up lakelots on his shitty land. However when he manages to flood a third of the world, people are not exactly going to have a choice. They will NEED that land. Governments will have to buy land simply to keep their people alive. It's not out of choice, but necessity.

He very, very clearly stated that he will have weapons far more advanced than anything man has created. He's managed to create his own continent with a space rock. A spack rock from a civilzation thousands of years more advanced than we are. Since those same crystals (with the Fortress of Solitude) contain all the known information on Krypton (including their defense systems), he has easy access to weapons we can't even dream of. He's fully prepared to go to war with the world over this.

That out of the way, I felt it was nothing less than fantastic. They managed to get every single aspect of the Superman mythos completely fucking dead on. They just got it all so RIGHT. His interaction with Lois. His choices to help humanity. The Clark/Superman dynamic.

Routh plays an absolute amazing Christopher Reeve playing Superman playing Clark Kent. There were moments when I honestly thought it was Chris again. He's most definately built a career on this performance. Bosworth was alright. Much better than I expected, but I still feel she was a little young for Lois. Marsden was great as always. Huntington played a PERFECT Jimmy Olsen. Such a man-crush on both Supes and Kent, but too naive to peice them together. Langella was great, pretty much the anti-Jameson. The "Great Cesear's Ghost" made the fanboy in me get all giddy.

Spacey was a good Luthor. Not quite as good as I had hoped, but still great. Leagues ahead of Hackman, but I still wish he was a little less campy and alot more menacing.

Spoiler:

The whole "Son of the Last Son of Krypton" thing worked out much better than I thought. I knew about it going in, and was dead set against it, but Singer handled it great. The scene where Superman gives him his father's speech was amazing.

The effects were great, I imagine this is what Donner was hoping for but wasn't possible back in the 70s.

The entire airplane scene is one of the best things I have ever seen. It was like watching a comic. Hell pretty much every "action" scene was great. Pretty much every flying scene was great. The shot of him in space before the robbery, the landing on Luthor's island, and the end shot of him in space will stick in my mind for quite some time.

I don't know how someone could find this film boring at all. It had just the right amount of action to keep it from being nothing more than Superman punching henchmen. Apparently some people are a little miffed that a comic book tried to tell an actual story. I mean the nerve of them having a romance. It's not like the entire Superman legacy can be boiled down to his choice to help the people of earth and his love for Lois Lane. Damn those central driving forces behind well established characters!

It is possibly the best comic book movie yet. Batman Begins in a close second, and Spider-Man (1) in third. This will not be the last time that I see it before it leaves the theater.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Foshi

This comment contains an infinite amount of lies.

Batman Begins is the best super hero movie by far. This movie brought Batman back from the brink of destruction by telling a story that hadn't been told before. Superman Returns doesn't even come close to being better than it. Even if you are a big fan of Supes you have to see the movie for what it is. It was full of cheese, bad dialougue, bad acting, romantic fluff, and repetative and weak action scenes. I still see potential in the franchise though. Like I said before I consider it to be like the original X-Men movie or the original Spider-Man movie. The sequels to those where far better than the original and I see the same thing happening for Superman.

For reasons I have already mentioned Spider-Man shouldn't even be on the list unless it's Spider-Man 2. When you say best comic book movie and not best super hero movie you forget to mention Sin City which was incredible.

I'm 100 times the Batman fan as I am the Superman fan. Batman is my guy. Superman doesn't even rank in my top 5. However as much as I loved Begins (and that was ALOT), I think I may have liked Superman more.

Spider-Man was a huge disappointment. Yeah it had a couple of good scenes, but overall it was just "meh". It felt like I had already seen it. The train fight was immensly cool, which they then managed to fuck up with the dumbest sequence I've ever seen. Spider-Jesus and the "Don't worry Spider-Man! We won't tell anybody!"

Don't talk about cheesy acting and dialouge and then bring up the first X-Men. Was it great, oh god yes, but it too had it's moments. Toad's and lightening, people.

I really want to know what action scenes were weak. Like seriously, because I sure as shit don't know.

And yes, you're right. I should have said best superhero movie to narrow it down. Although I don't agree that Sin City was better, it was a great movie.

Simply put, Superman was so great because I haven't had that much fun at a movie in years. And really, that's exactly what comics are supposed to be.

Spoiler:

This is kind of out of place, but I forgot to mention it in my first post. One thing that I absolutely adored was how they actually acknowledged the existence of other characters. I mean, they made no mention of Daredevil or the Fantastic Four or the X-Men (or the other 60% of Marvel Universe that is based out of New York) in the Spidey movies. It doesn't have to take much. Maybe just a TV in the background talking about "Dr.Richards" or the Statue of Liberty incident. Maybe a newspaper with the Hulk's latest rampage on it. It's little details like this that help immerse the audience in not only this movie, but the entire Universe in which it's set. It connects everything. When the news report was listing off the places he had been sighted and mentioned "Gotham", I nearly jumped out of my seat. Perry White also made a quick mention to "killer clowns" which, atleast to me, only made me think of a certain Batman villian.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by knkwzrd

Spoiler:

Presumably, everyone who was living on the land that became suddenly and completely underwater would have died. No one would have been displaced, there would just be a lot of dead folks. Doesn't he say sometime in the movie that "Billions will die"?

Spoiler:

Even if everyone who was on said land died, eventually people will start having more people. The population will eventually recover and people are going to have a third of the world less to live in. Room is going to become scarce, and people will be forced to move to his land.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by -Happy-

Spoiler:

Seriously, though, how exactly are they going to pay him? Gold? Jewelry? Because we know that currency is just about going to be as useful as shit on a plate. Those people are going to be ass-broke when they come onto his magic island, and what is he going to be buying with all the valuables?
Is he going to lord it all over the poor people and spend all day laughing at them and doing absolutely nothing with it? Seeing as to how Superman broke parts of the crystal island off when he rolled around, whatever weapons Lex would make would be pretty useless as thay would have been brittle, right? p.s. Weapons or not, you still need men. You can't be prepared to face the world with just the 4 of them.

As I understood it, he was simply going to sell peices of the land off to other random countries. He won't really lord over shit. He owns the property and is simply letting other countries own a part of it for a price.

And while the didnt really explain the whole weapons thing, I would assume that a society that is as advanced as Krypton would have weapons that would be able to stand up to being punched through.

And I'm sure that he would have problem recruiting a small army of thugs. He never has had that problem in the comics.

Originally Posted by -Happy-

Let me get this out of the way. I'm a DC fan and I basically follow alot of Superman. Somebody asked earlier if it was possible to just enjoy the movie for what it was, instead of arguing about continuity and plot holes: The answer is no. Why? It bugs the hell out of me because I know otherwise.

Some random thoughts here. I thought this was a great movie to showcase some great cinematography, along with a maturing of Superman's character. Surprisingly, while the potrayal of some of the characters for the movie were spot on, I was hoping for a little more maturity from the writing. The main plot was horrible. Probably an insult to Superman. Lex Luthor is supposed to be Superman's arch-enemy and what does he do? Try to get rich. That's pretty...lame for somebody who deals with galactic level threats. Now that technology has caught up to the movies, I had wished they would make a "proper" villain for him. There are many in the past that have given him a shitload of trouble. Manchester Black, Doomsday, Mongul, and General Zod are some of the names off the top of my head. In fact, sometimes the writer makes him so powerful that it's hard to create villains that can keep up with him. He spends half the comic musing about the morality and the humanity of it all. The Superman in the movies is less powerful, so I don't think a villain will be a problem for him. Maybe I'm a sucker for titanic battles, but I hope that will not be what will be missing from the Superman franchise in the future.

It seems Lex Luthor will be a recurring villain in the next movie. Great. A little backstory here: In the comics, Lex Luthor is a basically an evil Batman. Somebody who can do everything. From finance to martial artistry. He's been potrayed from a mad scientist to a xenophobic, ruthless businessman to the President of the United States. Personally, I like the businessman one, who is also a techno-futurist in the vein of Tony Stark (The Billionaire Industrialist from Marvel Comics who is also Iron Man). He owns Lexcorp which in turn makes him incredibly rich which in turn allows him to bring to bear his massive resources (Third biggest corporation in the world behind Waynetech and ahead of Sivana Industries) to make life as difficult as possible for Superman. Instead he seems to have fallen to a new low as a genius who can't even make a decent bit of money legally. He's potrayed in the movie as a bit of a bumbling fool as well, which is really a shame.

I do agree that movie Lex holds no candle to comic Lex. Comic Lex would have your father fired, your mother arrested, your dog put down, and your school closed for looking at him wrong. Movie Lex would send Parker Posey and Kumar after you.

However you really cannot fault this movie for that. That was well established back in 78 with the Donner films. I do agree that Lex should have been more ruthless (let some of that Se7en Spacey come out to play), but I don't fault Singer for it.

Originally Posted by -Happy-

Spoiler:

I had really hope this rumor would not be true. When I found out it was, I kept thinking of this article "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" and it really threw me off.

Superman was de-powered and did the hibbidydibbidy with Lois in Superman II.

Originally Posted by -Happy-

Yes, yes, I know that the Superman movies are supposed to be disconnected from the comic, but wouldn't it be great not to have thrown away years of character building so that Superman wouldn't have to deal with what is, in essence, simple bank robbery?

I'm assuming you're talking about the "eyeball" scene. If not, let me know. But I don't see why he wouldn't deal with this. It's never been above him to stop a petty crime if he sees it being committed, and it certainly has never been above him to save the lives of police officers.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

Spoiler:

His girlfriend kills him and makes out with another in X3, while he's engaged to a woman who didn't bear his son in this movie

Spoiler:

He gets fucked over in The Notebook too.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?