I was excited to come back to Superman II after 20 years apart, and really expected to like it. I loved it as a kid, and remembered all sorts of great things about it. In the past few years, I've heard it spoken of very highly, especially after Christopher Reeves died.

Unfortunately, the movie sucked.

It's not without its good points: Reeves really was great as Superman; in particular, the sequence when he, accepting that Lois knows who he is, transforms from Clark Kent to Superman without changing costume (or even moving much) is a great little piece of acting. Terrence Stamp is also fantastic as General Zod-- instead of chewing scenery and stomping around, he's just diffident and bored, which is a lot more menacing. And even though there's not a lot for him to do, Gene Hackman's Luthor is as fun as I remembered.

And, to praise something other than the acting, the opening scene, wherein Superman stops French terrorists from nuking Paris, is pure superheroic fun.

OK, that's it. That's pretty much all that I enjoyed. Let's move on to the bad.

I have a host of smaller problems, which I suppose we'll deal with first. The pacing feels off to me; it could be an artifact of attention spans shortening since 1980, but to me Superman II just sort of meanders around when it really should be showing more hustle. There are irritating-but-not-critical problems with the Kryptonians' powers (all of which are reasonably forgivable, except for the weird bit where Superman rips the S insignia off of his chest and throws it at Non, who gets wrapped up in it. Huh?). In what may be another case of cultural shift since 1980, Lois comes off as an irritating, chain-smoking harpy.

But these are minor problems, really, next to the San Andreas Fault that sits in the middle of the screenplay. It pains me to say this, but, when you get down to it, the central plot of this movie makes no goddamned sense.

The whole thing revolves around Superman's decision to renounce his powers so that he can live with Lois. First problem: we're never given a compelling reason that he has to give up his powers. He's told that he has no choice by a hologram of his mother, but are we to believe that Superman's such a mama's boy that he can't stand up to an image of a dead woman? But OK. For the sake of plot tension, we accept that Superman can't just continue to rock the dual identities with Lois in on the secret. He then starts getting ready to go into the red-light chamber and gets a big lecture from holographic mom about how this change is permanent and irreversible and the consequences will be terrible blah blah blah. He nods, goes in and...

...and he loses a fistfight right away, walks back to the Fortress of Solitude, and immediately gets his powers back. In a 2+ hour movie, Superman is powerless for maybe twenty minutes. While I think we're supposed to see Zod and crew wrecking the world as a consequence of Superman's choice, the movie has them doing most of their work while Big Blue is still fully powered, just out of touch because he's hanging out with Lois. The only concrete consequence we see is Clark Kent getting punched out by a hick, and, well, that's not exactly epic. And then the choice is undone instantly.

The whole thing falls apart because Superman's central dilemma is totally contrived, and it takes virtually no time for us to see that his choice is totally meaningless. Bad, bad storytelling, and no amount of charisma in the hero (and villain) can overcome it.