Superman Returns

It seemed to me like the movie made a great effort to be endearing, but given the amount of time (or lack thereof) that was given to dialogue, I'm suprised so many people, including myself, found it to be endearing.

It's not all that surprising, I guess. In your average film, you need the dialogue to become adjusted to the characters. To learn where they lie and what drives them. Not so with this movie, where we know pretty much everyone and how they'll react to any given situation.

So it seems like a lot of the burden that fell on this movie was to make it something that we haven't seen before. The scriptwriters thought the best way to accomplish that was to make enticing action scenes, things that are made interesting by virtue of the special effects used and the visual flare that came out of them.

That is, indeed, what I think the movie accomplished the best. Not the special effects, and not the action sequences, but the visual flare and feel of the film. So many scenes had so little dialogue, but the resulting imagery and atmosphere of the shots seemed to make up for whatever was missing between the characters themselves. The use of light and shadow, of lighting and post-production effects like the scene when Superman gets beaten up, and the colors are all washed out-- all of these things combined made for an intense and beautiful cinema experience. So many of the scenes, it seemed to me, could be posters hung up in a fan's room. There was just so much room in the screenplay for visual feasting.

But I suppose that's where the film fell short as well. Because while it was able to bring out that emotive quality using only visual cues, it left almost nothing to the imagination. One-dimensional is the word Ebert uses, and I think that is accurate, but I think it also discounts a lot of the film's strength, which is to make you feel that these are the characters which, for all intents and purposes, have never left us. Though the actors who play them may change, there is a sense of security in knowing that Superman, the character, has not. It is directly related to who Superman is that he never change; never grow truly bitter or recalcitrant, because if he does, it means he is fallible in a way that kryptonite cannot compare with.

Overall, I think the movie is taking more abuse than it deserves. I'd give it three stars. Good, but I can't say I prefer it to Spider-Man 2 or Batman Begins.

Jam it back in, in the dark.