One of the rumours emanating from the set of the long-awaited Superman Returns was this: when Brandon Routh, the new Superman, tried on the relevant super-suit for his role, it was discovered that he was more generously endowed downstairs than had been anticipated. Hence a plan had to be made, and that involved more sternly restrictive materials to be used in those red underpants that Superman wears over his blue bodysuit, and/or the taping down of Routh’s dangly bits so that they wouldn’t show too obviously on screen.
If so, it’s ironic in that Superman Returns needs to be a Superman with balls. The 1978 Superman: The Movie, with Christopher Reeve in the title role, was enormously successful, but was followed by three sequels of precipitously declining quality. Since then, Warner Brothers have been trying to get the Superman franchise back on track, with many potential directors and stars coming and going. Nicolas Cage was even up for the role at one time, for heaven’s sake.
Finally, with Bryan Singer at the helm, Superman could truly return. Singer was responsible for the first two X-Men movies, which were intelligent, hit versions of the comic books. But the X-Men comics (begun in the 1960s and revived in the 1980s) had a rich multicultural outlook and a complexity Singer and his scriptwriters could play with and extend. Superman, by contrast, would have been harder to recast for the 21st century. After all, he goes back to the very beginnings of comic-book superheroes in the 1930s, hence some of his old-fashioned stiffness and lack of personality. He was always both more and less than human.
Given that, Singer and scriptwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris have done extremely well in Superman Returns. The superhero has been away for five years, seeking his origins in foreign galaxies and trying to forget the disaster of Superman IV in 1987. Now he’s back, but in the meantime his inamorata Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has moved on, got a new love and had a child. His arch-enemy Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has been released from jail and, naturally, has plans for global destruction and domination as nefarious as ever.
The Lois Lane situation adds some spice to the Superman story, giving us what is in essence a love triangle (as well as a fatherhood issue). There is some interesting and subtle interplay between Superman (or, rather, his “mild-mannered” alter ego, Clark Kent) and Lois’s new partner, who is rather piquantly played by James Marsden, himself a superhero when he’s in an X-Men movie. This love triangle introduces some emotional tension and serves efficiently to remove any dilemmas about sex from the story, which keeps the movie within the right age limits for American audiences. But, unlike the unconsummated agony that is the central romantic relationship in the Spider-Man movies — which feels like the tortures of two immature teenagers who can’t get it together — the romantic problem in Superman Returns is distinctly adult.
Bosworth is a bit too much of a Barbie doll to give Lois Lane the quirkiness of Margot Kidder in the previous films, but she doesn’t distract too much. Spacey as Lex Luthor lacks Gene Hackman’s easy, sometimes queasy humour (which gave Superman II its best moments), but he’s right for the role in other respects: he has an otherworldly calm you can imagine belonging to a psychotic supervillain and, of course, a vocal delivery that is distinctly … well, spacey.
If Routh as Superman is somewhat less wooden than Reeve, that’s because he’s more plastic. He seems more pliable and elegant as a flyer — Reeve often looked as though he were strapped to a plank, which he probably was. This advance is probably down to vastly improved special-effects technology, but Routh is plastic, too, in the sense that he seems to be the perfect human embodiment of a Ken doll or Superman action figure.
That doesn’t matter much because in such a movie you need characters who can be drawn in broad strokes. Here, the strokes are confident and make sense, though there is space for some complexity too: this Superman is more obviously Christ-like as well as more self-questioning and vulnerable. The character-building episodes provide the right kind of change of pace between action sequences, without being too sappy. The action itself is fast and fun. Singer has managed to make the usual Superman superheroics (which require much catching of falling objects) feel fresh, and the computer-generated imagery is superb. Superman’s flying is, as I said, worlds better than in the older movies.
Still, one can’t help wondering, when Superman is gliding high above the clouds, what precisely is the expression on Routh’s face: serene power or genital discomfort bravely borne?