Superman Returns (Widescreen Edition)
by Bryan Singer
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DVD details
Actor: Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, Parker PoseyDirector: Bryan Singer
Brand: DC Comics
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language); German (Original Language); Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Widescreen, 2.40:1
Running Time: 154 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-11-28
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Model: 72351
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- He's back. A hero for our millennium. And not a moment too soon, because during the five years (much longer in movie-fan years!) Superman sought his home planet, things changed on his adopted planet. Nations moved on without him. Lois Lane now has a son, a fiance and a Pulitzer for "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." And Lex Luthor has a plan that will destroy millions - no, billions - of lives
DVD Reviews of Superman Returns (Widescreen Edition)
DVD Review: Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?
Summary: 1 Stars
This could have been a great film, it wished to be. It only lacked the light to show the way. It also lacked an actor strong enough to anchor it.
The Plot: Pitching itself as "the Superman 3 that should have been", scientists have spotted what appeared to be the remnants of his home world Krypton, prompting Superman (exit tall, dark, effortlessly heroic Christopher Reeve, enter tall, dark, metro sexual newcomer Brandon Routh) to leave Earth, without bothering to tell anyone, not even his would be lover and co-worker Lois Lane (exit Margot Kidder, enter Kate Bosworth), to see for himself what was floating around out there. Now he has returned to Earth after his 5 year space odyssey to learn more about Krypton has failed. The world has moved on, Lois has moved on, now a mother(!) with a nice guy fiancé, Richard White (James Marsden), nephew of their boss Perry (Frank Langella), and having written a Pulitzer prize winning article "Why the World Does't Need Superman", a thinly veiled rant of hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned. As Clark Kent, our protagonist gets his job back at the Daily Planet and then makes his grand return as Superman, triumphantly saving a jet to the hearty welcome of a grateful baseball stadium. But Lex Luthor (exit Gene Hackman, enter Kevin Spacey) is on the loose, and he's got revenge on his mind as well as a plan to create a new continent with the crystal technology he stole from Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Will Superman be able to thwart him?
The story of how the first round of Superman films were eventually destroyed by off screen mishandling, proving that even Superman cannot overpower Hollywood stupidity, is now the stuff of legend, as is the story of Warner Brothers quest to bring Superman back into movie theaters, a quest that spanned almost 20 years and countless writers, directors, and actors. It's an evil story my friends, and the fact that WB still relies on Superman and Batman to bring in the audiences, for no better reason than the fact that they are Superman and Batman, when DC Comics is loaded with other deep, richly intriguing heroes, ranging from Wonder Woman to Aquaman, from Green Lantern to Flash, from Captain Marvel to the Martian Manhunter, is mind-boggling as well as disheartening. After goth-master Tim Burton, TV maestro JJ Abrams, fan boy champion Kevin Smith, and the much maligned Brett Ratner among others all tried and failed to bring about a story based upon the Death of Superman storyline from the early 90s, Bryan Singer, director of X-Men 1 and 2, came along, and pitched the idea to Warner Brothers of a kind of semi-sequel to the first two Superman films directed by Richard Donner and R. Lester, including the use of archive footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, the crystallized look of Krypton and the Fortress of Solitude, and using John Williams Superman score, as opposed to starting over with a new continuity like "Batman Begins".
It was a bold, ambitious idea, and the final result is a valiant effort by a man who claims to have always loved, admired and identified with Superman, based more on his love for the TV series that starred George Reeves and the original Donner film than on the actual comics. But it just doesn't work. For starters, the demographic friendly leads, 26 year old Brandon Routh and 23 year old Kate Bosworth, are too young to believably pass themselves off as a Superman who has been missing for 5 years and a Lois Lane who is supposed to be an accomplished reporter turned single mother. Apparently Singer became so fixated on the idea of casting an unknown in the role of Superman, one of many moves that mimicked the approach of Donner all those years ago, that if Superman were to have been missing for any length of time, he should look old enough to have been missing and also look old enough to have the experience of a great hero under his belt. Jim Caviezel, at the ripe old age of 37, would have fit these requirements perfectly - already tall, dark and heroically handsome while also experienced enough as both an actor and as a human being to dig deep into the conflicting feelings within Superman. But Singer, blinded by hubris from his success with the X-Men films, and succumbing to the idea of actors young to enough to have multiple sequels belted out of them, decided to have his cake and eat it too by casting some young guy no one had ever heard of, and matching him with an equally young leading lady. Adding insult to injury, Singer and his idiot costume designer Louise Migenbach, butchered Superman's costume, darkening the red parts to maroon/burgundy shrinking and raising the "S" insignia and giving the costume an overall rubbery look. After all Migenbach's rantings of what a brilliant job she did updating the costume and bitching about how she always hated the suit's classic color scheme and all those speeches about how Superman should look as though he stepped right out of our collective conscience, Singer's Superman looks more like a high school jock in a bad Halloween costume. Donner's film didn't have nearly as big a budget as Singer's, and Donner didn't have nearly as advanced technology as Singer has, and Donner's people were still able to turn out a suit that looked exactly like the one in the comics, and it looked damn good too (the same can also be said of the Dean Cain TV series).
Another problem is the very idea of clinging to the continuity of the earlier films. Let me just say right now that I know the Donner films were not perfect - they tended to suffer from unnecessary camp humor, best personified by Hackman's slumming stand up comedian approach to Lex Luthor, the slow-witted portrayal of Lois Lane, and the fumbling bumbling Clark Kent who wouldn't last five minutes at a burger joint, let alone a metropolitan newspaper. Also, the idea, while interesting, doesn't work because these earlier films are almost 30 years old, making them a bit outdated and probably don't rank as high with the modern audience as they do with Singer. I enjoy those films as much as anyone else, but if you're going to do new Superman films, you might as well give them their own continuity, their own sense of history away from their predecessors. Christopher Nolan recognized that what had worked for Batman during the Burton era no longer worked, and took the necessary steps to breathe life back into the franchise by creating a new continuity with its own sensibilities reflecting changes in both modern cinema and the modern comics. To squander all the potential that could be found and used from the comics in favor of using the old films, a sequel to another man's interpretation, is very misguided, not to mention lazy and uncreative, right down to virtually recreating the same sequences from the Donner film with a little tweaking, like the romantic flight between Superman and Lois, minus the voice over narration, add in Lois taking off her high heels as a symbolism for taking off her clothes for a lovemaking session. While the film never sinks to the painful depths of banality that the Star Wars prequels, Matrix sequels, King Arthur, and all the non-X-Men/Spider-Man films sank too, there's an overall feeling of been there, done that, and Singer's slick, sleek style isn't enough to cover for it. Good intentions he may have had, but this time Singer bit off more than he could chew; perhaps it's time he abandoned the world of pop spectacle film-making and went back to directing films grounded in reality like "The Usual Suspects".
Adding insult to injury, the very idea of seeing what happens when a hero as important as Superman disappears and then returns could have made for a fascinating film (the idea was also explored in the "Kingdom Come" miniseries), or chronicling Superman's years in space examining the remnants of Krypton, just as "Superman 3" could have given serious exploration to what would happen if Superman went evil or how "Superman 4" could have explored what happens when a hero tackles a political issue of global importance (nuclear warfare). But the film never bothers to give much examination to its own idea - Superman saves the jet and the world falls in love with him all over again as he goes back to doing good deeds, with only Lois clinging to her burning resentment for Superman leaving in the first place and Luthor plotting to get even, never mind the fact that Superman leaving without telling anyone goes against his character. No real examination is given to the individual reactions of the other citizens in the world; they just go on about life as if Superman had never left in the first place. The introduction of Lois's kid and fiancé was also pretty tacky, and Superman, though clearly annoyed, did not display much bitterness or resentment towards his newfound rival (but then again, Superman always did handle his angst better than Spider-Man); very little examination is given to our title character's inner turmoil, his guilt over realizing his own mistakes, etc. We can only imagine how he would respond to the negative reactions of characters who are not Lois or Luthor. Or how he would have responded to coming back to the world and finding that another hero, say Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel, had replaced him as the Guardian of the Earth, the responses of others from this.
Given the thankless task of being the new screen embodiment of the world's most famous hero, Brandon Routh, chosen for no better reason than the fact that he's young, unknown, inexpensive and in the eyes of some vaguely resembles Chris Reeve (he's actually two years younger than Tom Welling, who plays the teenager Clark on "Smallville"), gives an admirable effort, but despite all his sincerity, he never inhabits the role the same way Reeve did and lacks the heroic aura of Reeve(though Routh's never quite as annoying as Hayden Christensen was as Anakin in the SW prequels). After a while you desperately want to like him, but Routh's clearly in over his head, most notably in his scenes with Ma Kent (Eva Marie Saint) where he tells her that what he found out there was "a graveyard... I'm all that's left", and at the end when he tells Lois's kid, who turns out to be Superman's illegitimate son, the same speech that Jor-El gave to the infant Superman in the first film. As stated above, Routh's boyish youth prevents us from really believing that he was missing for five years and had prior experience as Superman. Reeve was also young, but damn it, Reeve looked like a man, whereas Routh is bound to the uber-boyish looks that so many young actors are punished with these days; perhaps if he were 5 or 10 years older, or maybe if the film wasn't mindlessly lashed to the earlier films, Routh's efforts would not appear to be in vain. It's so easy to imagine the aforementioned Jim Caviezel in the same role and bringing in the necessary depth and gravitas to Superman's plights. The washed out costume doesn't do Routh any favors either.
But if Routh comes up short in some areas, he's not nearly as bad in his role as Kate Bosworth is in hers. As stated above, Bosworth is simply too young to be the veteran reporter Lois Lane, or the mother of a five year old boy for that matter (unless we assume she had the kid when she was 17 or 18), and she's such a lightweight that everyone overshadows her.
As the fiancé Richard White, James Marsden, so woefully underused as Cyclops in the X-Men trilogy, displays a gallant, heroic charm that makes it easier to root for him than the title character. Frank Langella and Sam Huntingten are good as Perry White and Jimmy Olsen respectively, and Kevin Spacey, as expected, is an improvement over the Lex given to us by Gene Hackman (himself a fine actor who simply chose the wrong approach), but suffers from a few instances where he is forced to resurrect the campy approach. Luthor's henchman are an embarrassment though - Kitty Kowalski is even more pointless than Eve Teschmacher of the earlier film, and that's saying something, especially considering how bad they made Parker Posey look (she probably would have made a better Lois Lane than Bosworth at any rate).
Superman deserved better. If this film is remembered as a flop in light of the more popular response to "Batman Begins"- but will probably be remembered more as a lukewarm/modest success - people will say it's because Batman's a better character than Superman or that people identify more with Batman than with Superman, but that's not the real problem. "Batman Begins" had a better idea, better writing, better directing, better casting and it shows.
But if it's of any consolation, this film is still better than Catwoman.
Description of Superman Returns (Widescreen Edition)
He's back. A hero for our millennium. And not a moment too soon, because during the five years (much longer in movie-fan years!) Superman sought his home planet, things changed on his adopted planet. Nations moved on without him. Lois Lane now has a son, a fiance and a Pulitzer for "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." And Lex Luthor has a plan that will destroy millions - no, billions - of lives.
- Product Measures: 0.5 x 5.5 x 7.5
If Richard Donner's 1978 feature film Superman: The Movie made us believe a man could fly, Bryan Singer's 2006 follow-up, Superman Returns, lets us remember that a superhero movie can make our spirits soar. Superman (played by newcomer Brandon Routh) comes back to Earth after a futile five-year search for his destroyed home planet of Krypton. As alter ego Clark Kent, he's eager to return to his job at the Daily Planet and to see Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Lois, however, has moved on: she now has a fiancé (James Marsden), a son (Tristan Leabu), and a Pulitzer Prize for her article entitled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." On top of this emotional curveball, his old archrival Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is plotting the biggest land grab in history.
Singer, who made a strong impression among comic-book fans for his work on the X-Men franchise and directed Spacey in The Usual Suspects, brings both a fresh eye and a sense of respect to the world's oldest superhero. He borrows John Williams's great theme music and Marlon Brando's voice as Jor-El, and the story (penned by Singer's X-Men collaborators Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris) is a sort-of-sequel to the first two films in the franchise (choosing to ignore that the third and fourth movies ever happened). The humorous and romantic elements give the movie a heart, Singer's art-deco Metropolis is often breathtaking, and the special effects are elegant and spectacular, particularly an early airplane-disaster set-piece. Of the cast, Routh is excellent as the dual Superman/Clark, Spacey is both droll and vicious as Luthor, and Parker Posey gets the best lines as Luthor's moll Kitty. But at 23, Bosworth seems too young for the five-years-past-grizzled Lois. It's nice to see Noel Neill, Jack Larson (both from the classic Adventures of Superman TV series), and Eva Marie-Saint on the screen as well. Superman Returns is one of those projects that was in development for seemingly forever, but it was worth the wait -- it's the most enjoyable superhero movie since Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles. --David Horiuchi
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