Throughout this film, one of the things that kept coming into my head was "Lex Luthor could never get away with doing that to the ocean. Aquaman wouldn't allow it, for one, and the Green Lantern could..." So that tells you where I'm coming from in reviewing the film.

So, on with it. I saw it at 11 pm in the stadium seat theater at Liberty Tree Mall along with about only 10 other people, all kids, and a mouse that was running around the front of the theater nibbling on popcorn. I smuggled in a Diet Coke.

Anyway.

Bryan Singer is known among comic geek circles for not being a comics fan, but understanding that you shouldn't mess with "the basics" because, after all, the basics are why it's a bankable property to begin with. That formula of "faithful plus new stuff" worked really well for the first two X-Men films, and he'd probably say he's doing the same thing with Superman Returns, but he isn't.

He doesn't pay much attention to any of the work that has been done in the Superman comics since the 1986 revamp by John Byrne, nor  the ideas that have come out of Smallville (which is generally not that great of a show, but has some good ideas). Also, that cartoon in the 1990s with Tim Daly and Dana Delany doing the voices was a really good update of the character. But none of that is here either.

So if he's going to ignore all of the interesting ideas about the character and his world from the last 20 years, you'd think he'd come up with some of his own. But no. Instead, he makes pretty much a straight remake of the 1978 film directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve - except with much better special effects, a much younger (too young, if you think about the time that's supposed to have passed in her career and relationship with Superman) and hotter Lois Lane, and one major and totally unnecessary twist that's going to come back to haunt them in subsequent sequels. 

(To be clear, this is not literally a remake, but it just seems that way. The story actually takes place after Superman II. The wretched Superman III and IV have been dropped from the continuity altogether, much in the same way that the story of  Batman Begins wisely throws out every previous version of Batman ever committed to screen).

On the plus side, Singer and the producers didn't succumb to the temptation to make Superman "darker and edgier" (apparently, a lot of those ideas were kicked around Time Warner over the last 16 years [Editor's note: it seems to have been pulled down, but a while ago, a friend sent me a link to a video on YouTube wherein Kevin Smith talked for about twenty minutes about his abortive involvement with a darker and edgier Superman project; it seems Producer/moron Jon Peters told Smith that the two of them were going to make a great Superman movie because they, like Superman, were "from the street"]). Superman isn't supposed to be a bad-ass like the Batman or Wolverine. But on the other hand nobody wants to read or see the return of the Comics Code-friendly, stick-up-the-ass 1950's "big blue boy scout" version popularized by George Reeves and Superdickery.com.

So as far as that goes, the Reeve/Donner model isn't a bad one to chose. Those films, like this one, are focused on Superman's humanity, as played out in his relationship with Lois Lane, as well as the loneliness that comes from being both a literal immigrant from another world, and a nerdy guy from the sticks trying to make it in the big city. This film gets that bit right because it's imitating the earlier films that got it right.  

Superman is not the problem. Where latching onto the older films, and ignoring of the post-Byrne comics/animation/Smallville stuff, leads it astray is with its unimaginative treatment of Lex Luthor, and that makes the whole project a missed opportunity.

Spacey plays it just fine and Parker Posey is great as the sidekick, but this is the same character as the Gene Hackman version in the Donner films. Spacey's version is a bit less funny, a bit more insane and a lot meaner, but in the end he's just a really smart criminal with crazy schemes to grab land. No background. No understanding of the motivation. No connection to any big iconic idea of what evil "means." None of that. Luthor is just another mad scientist trying to steal Superman's mojo. 

This is a significant miss, I think, because unlike any other superhero, Superman is the most God-like and as such, needs a villain who most closely resembles the devil. And, to use the cliché, the devil is beautiful. Therefore, in the recent comics (recent meaning 20 years now), Luthor isn't just a brilliant villain but also a charismatic demagogue, capitalist, futurist and politician very much in the "people love him because he makes the trains run on time" mold. This is a much, much more interesting and modern vision of villainy to juxtapose against our Hero. 

For a great example of how this works, see Jeph Loeb and Tim Sales' A Superman for All Seasons. Here, we see that Superman is one of the only people in any position of power who see Luthor for what he really is. The good-versus-evil dynamic set up is more, ummm...topical, I guess.

Luthor represents power, technology, conformity, efficiency, futurism and ultimately, dystopia. Superman represents the basic decent mid-American values of Smallville and his adoptive parents - not merely some vague namby-pamby crap about "Truth, Justice and the American Way,"*  but stuff that real people care about, like honesty, standing-up for the little guy, compassion and all of that hippy pinko shit that only two Jewish kids from Cleveland in the 1930s could have possibly associated with superheroism. 

But as I said, I see this more as a missed opportunity than a critical failure and as such, only comic geeks like me are likely to notice. Most people, especially kids the same age I was when I was enthralled by the 1978 movie, should love it. 

And despite my complaints, overall, I thought it was actually pretty good. Certainly, it's emotionally satisfying - lots of good poignant scenes of Metropolitans looking up in the sky, the moment when Superman sees Lois for the first time in five years, etc. I even felt some eye moisture welling up a few times.

The acting is solid. Newcomer Brandon Routh does a pretty dead-on impersonation of Christopher Reeve, whose portrayal deserves its pop cultural status as the definitive screen version of the character, so that works well. As I suggested, Kate Bosworth is really too young to really be Lois Lane, but she does a decent enough job of it despite that, and all female characters in comic books are almost always impossibly young, pretty and thin, so she fits that description, if nothing else. Frank Langella and Sam Huntingdon are well cast as Perry White and Jimmy Olsen, respectively.

But in the end, it comes up just a bit short. In terms of doing justice to superhero material, it's several miles ahead of Daredevil but not as good as Batman Begins or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. The sequels, if they can get a handle on this twist that I mentioned, have potential. If I were in charge, Braniac would be my next villain. You can't play Brainiac as a buffoon.

  (Speaking of Spider-man, the trailer for Spider-man 3 is among the trailers running with Superman Returns and it looks really, really sweet - the symbiote, the black costume, Venom (presumably), Sandman, Gwen Stacy - it all looks very, very cool.)

*(Apparently a lot of conservatives - the usual suspects, I guess - are bitter that this film drops the "American way" bit from the "truth and justice" line. Of course, that was dropped by DC a long time ago. It's my belief that the people who are complaining about Superman's supposed abandonment of Traditional American Values deserve to be beat up by Green Lantern, Thundra or possibly....Ghost Rider).