...it's a rare summer blockbuster, one that that uses its special effects to support the story, rather than the other way around. I knew going in that this had to be an effects-heavy movie: after all, it's about an invincible superhero who flies and shoots heat rays out of his eyes. But the thing is, I finally believed it. No more thinking about the wires yanking the actor out of frame as he flies away or how badly the post-production people merged his image onto the background he's supposedly flying past. This is the movie where it finally looks like Superman can fly. And stop bullets. With his eyeball. Ew.But more importantly, there's a story here. Unlike X3 (which disappointed me because it relied on effects in lieu of a story), Superman Returns has a plot. While the story may not have gone quite as deep into the characters' heads as I might have liked, I understood what the motivation was for everything that happened... and it wasn't just as an excuse to set up the next action sequence. Bryan Singer, as has been much-covered already, is a devoted fan of the first two Christopher Reeve-era films, and to anyone even passingly familiar with those movies, that's very obvious in Superman Returns. The action picks up 5 years after Superman II ended, and aside from reusing footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, there are plenty of visual nods to both movies, as well as a tinge of Gene Hackman in Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor and Brandon Routh's performance eerily echoing Reeve at some moments. But this is very much its own movie. Spacey is a much more menacing Lex than Hackman ever was, and Routh is more centered and focused than Reeve, playing Clark as more of an insecure geek than a clownish oaf, and Superman as a hero confident in his powers (and suitably helpless when they're taken away).
Despite all the hype and endless promotional tie-ins, this movie's something special. Towards the end, there's a moment where Superman temporarily loses his powers and falls to Earth from the edge of space. Since it had already been established earlier in the film that the sun's rays can heal him, a little kid sitting a few rows behind me started half-whispering, "Come on, sun, save him. Come on, sun, save him!" And as I listened to that kid, I realized I had forgotten to breathe because I was busy thinking the exact same thing. Not many movies can do that to me anymore, so it's a pretty gratifying experience when one still can.
No comments:
Post a Comment