New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | June 29, 2006

Jesse Walker dumps a little Brown Kryptonite into the Man of Steel's punch bowl.

Comments

|6.29.06 @ 1:48PM|#

Dude! I'm eating here!

|6.29.06 @ 2:01PM|#

Superman is a boring character. The most interesting things about Superman are those bits that Eco likes to write about on occasion. He is an icon. The fun is in playing with that status. How do other people interact with an icon? Superman makes Batman more compelling. What keeps an icon up at night? If we buy that Superman is still interested in humanity, we must eventually ask why. Is it just because he has nowhere else to go?

|6.29.06 @ 2:03PM|#

"as do the more lowbrow purveyors of comic books and TV cartoons."

I'd actually say the Superman comic books (at least since the John Byrne reboot post-Crisis) are more highbrow than the Superman films.

Douglas Westerman|6.29.06 @ 2:08PM|#

Jessie, He's much less boring as a teenager, like in Smallville. Adolescent jealousies, hot teen chicks, raging hormones, throw in some superpowers.....I suggest a future remake when he is a teen, along with the dog krypto...not to mention his cousin who also appeared in the comic book, Super Girl! Can you imagine being her squeeze? Watch out! It would be so much fun if they actually made a movie where she is a hot chick......not just some pollyanna do goodie.

|6.29.06 @ 2:08PM|#

Bringing Superman back to life was the single greatest mistake in comic book history. If he had just stayed dead, comics might have been changed forever--and maybe nobody would be writing about how boring he is.

I'd like to see a Death of Superman movie.

|6.29.06 @ 2:21PM|#

Guess I get to be the first to link to Larry Niven's classic Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex essay.

|6.29.06 @ 2:23PM|#

It's an entertaining movie. It certainly isn't boring.

Wrong on both counts. The movie is too damned long (154 min!) and the characters are too damned stiff. I never thought the day would come when I'd look back longingly on Christopher Reeve's and Margot Kidder's performances as good examples of acting, but that day has come. Routh and Bosworth have zero (no, make that negative) chemistry and Spacey's Lex Luthor is a pale shadow of Hackman's much more entertaining work. It's so bad that Brando, now literally back from the dead, looks good by comparison. Much of Singer's stuff is wonderful ("The Usual Suspects," "House, MD") but I'm now wondering if maybe the Bizarro Singer directed this dog. (That's some bad hat, Bryan!)

|6.29.06 @ 2:28PM|#

Why not make Superman gay? After the success of Brokeback Mountain, I bet it would sell tickets. It would add an interesting twist to a pretty tired genre. Clark Kent could be Will to Lois Lane's Grace and Lex Luther could be a frustraited evangelical homophobe.

Jesse Walker|6.29.06 @ 2:28PM|#

The movie is too damned long

I'll give you that much.

Actually, I'll agree with you about this too:

Spacey's Lex Luthor is a pale shadow of Hackman's much more entertaining work

...but did anyone really expect him to be as entertaining as Hackman? He was still fun to watch.

|6.29.06 @ 2:30PM|#

Jesse,

Hackman is one of the great actors of the last 50 years. Although I am not a fan of the 70s Superman movie, following him in any role is well neigh impossible.

|6.29.06 @ 2:41PM|#

but did anyone really expect him to be as entertaining as Hackman?

Actually, I did. I think Spacey is as good an actor as Hackman and (thinking back to "The Usual Suspects" again) I was looking forward to what he and Singer could do here together. Perhaps the fault lay primarily with the direction or the screenplay / story / dialogue; but, sadly, I'd say that insofar as Spacey was fun to watch, and I'll grant you that, it was largely because he stood out by comparison to the rest of the cast.

|6.29.06 @ 2:54PM|#

I think Superman works best in short episodes, like the original series from the 50's (corny, but entertaining on its own terms) or the recent animated series, which is free to do much of what JW writes about in his article, featuring episodes with Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bizarro. My favorite was one that featured an alternative-universe Superman where he is enforcer to Lex Luthor's fascist dictator. The reason Superman does this? The death of Lois makes him want to protect all citizens from harm despite the loss of civil liberties.

|6.29.06 @ 3:24PM|#

Jesse,

One of reasons that Superman became a dull character was the threat of government regulation and the dreaded comics code authority. That, and the usual inoffensive blandness/unchangeability that comes with being a corporate icon like Mickey Mouse.

brian423|6.29.06 @ 3:28PM|#

uknowit,
That sounds suspiciously like Star Wars: Episode III, if you substitute Luthor with Palpatine and Lois with Padme.

|6.29.06 @ 3:35PM|#

How about Superman as an old, retired Superhero, slurping creamed spinach and kvetching about all those damned noisy kids on his lawn? Now that's an adaptation I would flock to if I were more than one person who could actually flock.

|6.29.06 @ 3:45PM|#

Anyone ever checked out the comic book "Red Son" where Superman grows up on a Ukrainian collective farm instead of Kansas and ends up defending international Communism and turning into a totalitarian dictator despite himself? Sounds like an interesting concept, though I've never actually seen the book.

|6.29.06 @ 3:53PM|#

I DID collect Superman comics and think a lot of the Curt Swan/Neal Adams issues from the early 70s had quite good plots (as far as comic book plots go). I prefered the era when Clark Kent got picked up by network news and became a Tom Brokaw-like national news anchor, as opposed to newspaper reporter.

Why directors like Singer never incorporate this period of the series into films is beyond me, especially with newspapers becoming an ever shrinking and boring medium.

And the third Reeve film, while overall boring, did have it's occasional good joke. My favorite was the blonde gun moll that secretly read Nietzche and Sartre in private, but ditched the books whenever Robert Vaughn walked into the room and went into her bimbo routine.

|6.29.06 @ 3:57PM|#

Why not make Superman gay? After the success of Brokeback Mountain, I bet it would sell tickets. It would add an interesting twist to a pretty tired genre.

But who would want to be "bottoms" to the "Man of Steel." That's some anal destruction, there, sonny ...

|6.29.06 @ 3:58PM|#

Vanya,

Whether you make him gay, communist or whatever, Jessee is right it is just a boring tired franchise that needs something really radical to make it interesting again. Ultimately, if you don't go with the gay idea, which I still like, the only interesting thing to do is make him unwittingly a very bad guy who has been currupted by his powers.

|6.29.06 @ 4:11PM|#

And the third Reeve film, while overall boring, did have it's occasional good joke.

It's hard to top the drunken, disheveled, evil Superman breaking bottles by flicking peanuts and the ungrateful Metropolitans turning on him for it.

|6.29.06 @ 4:51PM|#

"How about Superman as an old, retired Superhero, slurping creamed spinach and kvetching about all those damned noisy kids...."

Yeah- and he moves to Buffalo, and has a whole new career as the Man of Shush.

Windypundit|6.29.06 @ 4:55PM|#

Superman is a god among men. Strong, fast, and nearly invulnerable, able to see right through the world around him or to directly examine the structure of bacteria. He can freeze things with his breath, burn them with heat rays from his eyes, or shatter them with a shout. He can fly to distant suns.

Tales of gods are boring, however, unless the gods are interacting with heroic mortals.

I think Superman is more interesting when he's surrounded by other superheros, just as the X-Men are more interesting because they're a team. Don't make Superman, make Justice League. Sups is always a source of conflict there, because he's a real goody-goody with strong moral center, which is frustrating to those around him who face greater obstacles and have to make tradeoffs.

Also, while Superman can do anything he wants, he can't be everywhere at once. Give him a dozen people to protect and a swarm of villians, and he has to make some hard choices. Give him not a single supervillain but a mob 50,000 Metropolis residents driven to an anti-Superman frenzy by some supervillain, and he's got real problems.

|6.29.06 @ 4:56PM|#

Brown Kryptonite = Kraptonite

(I got that from a review of the movie.)

|6.29.06 @ 5:19PM|#

I thought the movie was wretched. Superman cannot fight Lex when around the Kryptonite land mass, but then he picks up the Kryptonite CONTINENT and hurls it into space? WTF? Couldn't the lame writers at least have had him tunnel down past the Kryptonite to give him a barrier and make this at least plausible? The sappy symbolism was wretched, the actress who played Lois was too young and a toothpick, and that kid looked like Damien and acted as well as a kid carved out of rock. The only good part was Spacey, but one laments the decision by Hackman to play Luthor as comedic relief. I mean, Lex rules. Here is a mere man who can fight a demi-god to a standstill by using his brains.
Since there is no way to participate in this thread without already sounding like Comic Book Guy I'll say it "Worst Superman movie ever" (well, yeah, not as bad as number iv)...

|6.29.06 @ 6:17PM|#

So Superman's memorable opponents are never as dull as he is. Lex Luthor is probably the least interesting of the rogue's gallery, a classic pulp-fiction evil genius. You're better off with Brainiac, a "living computer" with a collection of shrunken cities; or Mr. Mxyzptlk, an imp from the Fifth Dimension who's more interested in pranks and chaos than in conquest and crime; or Bizarro Superman, an inverted duplicate of our hero who lives on a cube-shaped planet with upside-down rules.

Hey! You forget Sups' penultimate rival: Darkseid.

BTW, If they want to do a DC superhero movie, why not do a film version of Kingdom Come? That would rock! Clint Eastwood would make a great elderly Batman.

Franklin Harris|6.29.06 @ 6:24PM|#

Superman is boring. Always has been. Always will be. And the only time his stories -- as opposed to the character himself -- were not boring was when DC Comics hired all of the old Captain Marvel writers (people like Otto Binder) to take over the character in the 1950s and 1960s. Binder et. al. gave us new villians, a rainbow of Kryptonite, the Fortress of Solitude and all of the other trappings that were always more interesting that the Man of Steel. There is a certain poetic justice to this, of course, as DC had spent the 1940s trying to sue the far more interesting Captain Marvel out of business.

Robert|6.29.06 @ 6:46PM|#

"Hackman is one of the great actors of the last 50 years."

Yes, but Lyle Talbot was the best Luthor, dripping with superciliousness. But that was more than 50 years.

Tim Cavanaugh|6.29.06 @ 7:29PM|#

Why do so many people seem to have seen this movie already, when it doesn't come out until tomorrow?

Jesse Walker|6.29.06 @ 7:39PM|#

Maybe it opens tomorrow in backwards hamlets like San Francisco, Tim, but here in cosmopolitan Baltimore it opened Tuesday night.

|6.29.06 @ 8:19PM|#

In bizzarro world, the sequel is out already. And it's really popular, so I hate it.

|6.29.06 @ 10:22PM|#

Why not make Superman gay?

Isn't that what they've done on Smallville?

|6.29.06 @ 10:36PM|#

John Byrne made a good point when he "rebooted" Supes in the eighties: "We need to take him down a notch or two; he should have to sweat a bit to get the job done."

I also think something was lost when Lois and Clark married in the comics. As Jules Pfeiffer noted many moons ago, the rather curious menage a trois involving Clark/Lois/Superman was the most interesting thing about the character.

|6.30.06 @ 1:06AM|#

John Byrne made a good point when he "rebooted" Supes in the eighties: "We need to take him down a notch or two; he should have to sweat a bit to get the job done."

And that's no more than taking Superman back to the beginning. He wasn't all-powerful in the early years of the comic books--that only came in the late '40s through early '50s, I believe. Along with all of those colorful characters of the '50s and '60s, the writers gradually made Superman more powerful so they involve him in ever weirder and sillier stories.

Tim Cavanaugh|6.30.06 @ 2:03AM|#

Shows what I know. It is playing already in my one-horse town. So they open big movies on Tuesdays now? I'm all for that: It's a full day earlier than Wednesday. At this rate, someday they'll be opening movies on Friday...

|6.30.06 @ 5:01AM|#

Early Supes wasn't all powerful, true. Once Fox's Wonder Man*, Fawcett's Master Man*, Amazing Man and Sub-Mariner by Bill Everett, the aforementioned Big Red Cheese* and the whole panoply of this new pantheon were on the scene, Kal-L's power level became the subject of a four-color arms race. Nobody was going to outsuper The Man of Tomorrow.

Well, The Spectre might, being the embodiment of God's wrathful justice, but Jerry Siegel thought him up, so that was OK. It is noteworthy that superstrength was not usually a trait of the secondary and tertiary characters from National and All-American. Hourman, that Miraclo™ junkie, and Siegel's version of Eando Binder's Adam Link†, Robotman were superstrong, within limitations. Wonder Woman got a pass from the National lawyers, probably because Princess Diana eschewed certain signature Kryptonian moves. She didn't fly, and wasn't technically bullet-proof, proficiency in catching slugs on her bracelets aside.

I haven't seen SR yet, but may go this afternoon or evening. One trick some DC writers have used to good effect is hampering Clark. Frex, in recent years his body, rather than switching from totally super to totally Terran-normal depending on which flavor of solar radiation he was absorbing, now tends to hold a charge. Should Supes perform super-feats in the abscence of the correct restorative rays, he powers down like an expended battery. He doesn't immediately return to optimum levels, either. In rare cases - The Death of Superman storyline - he exhausts himself to the point of near-fatal vulnerability, even under Ol' Yeller Sol.

So, a smart super-scenarist could have had Lex deliberately taxing Our Hero's reserves, especially if not enough Kryptonite to threaten him was available. Scenes where a recharging Superman could only fight with his June 1938 abilities could have been cool. The additional strength he picked up as he continued to suntan would be analagous to a video game character ascending through various levels. (That ought to keep merchandising happy.)

Don't forget what Mort Weisinger said: "Superman is invulnerable. Even bad scripts can't hurt him!"

Kevin
* All sued or "cease-and-dissist letter'-ed out of existence, eventually.

† The "O" in 'Eando" was Otto Binder, the workhorse writer of the Captain Marvel stable, mentioned above.

Jesse Walker|6.30.06 @ 9:21AM|#

Early Supes wasn't all powerful, true.

In the very first stories, he couldn't even fly -- he just jumped really far.

|6.30.06 @ 9:32AM|#

So they open big movies on Tuesdays now? I'm all for that: It's a full day earlier than Wednesday.

Should someone now tell Mr. Cavanaugh what day it is?

|6.30.06 @ 10:45AM|#

Has anyone here ever heard of an author named Philip Wylie? He wrote a novel titled GLADIATOR that came out in 1938 or 1939, and which involved a character very similar to the early Superman. It was anything but boring.

BuShiva|6.30.06 @ 12:29PM|#

I just have to marvel...

WHO throws Msr. Jarry into a Superman critique?

Sit Ubu, Sit.

Good dog.

Jesse Walker|6.30.06 @ 2:17PM|#

WHO throws Msr. Jarry into a Superman critique?

Well, he did write a novel called The Supermale...

Tom Scudder|7.1.06 @ 6:47AM|#

Y'all are forgetting one important fact:

Superman is a dick.

|7.1.06 @ 10:17PM|#

Superman cannot fight Lex when around the Kryptonite land mass, but then he picks up the Kryptonite CONTINENT and hurls it into space?

You forget Lex was also holding a significant chunk of Kryptonite in his fist when he punched Superman.

The point in hurling the land mass into space is that was difficult, a risk for Superman, which is rare. Normally he could do this without a second thought, instead, since it has kryptonite in its surface, he has to "recharge" from the sun beforehand (they even mention early on that he derives his power from the sun) and he collapses afterward and is nearly dead from it.

|7.3.06 @ 12:40PM|#

I always liked the Superman universe, with all of its Guardians, Green Lanterns, etc. He's an interesting character because of the self-imposed limits on his almost unlimited powers. Got to protect Clark, can't kill my enemies, gotta cut short my vacation to save that cat, can't have sex with Lois without killing her. Rough life, really. I'm surprised Mr. Kent hasn't gone insane.