SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Not having seen SUPERMAN RETURNS since its theatrical premiere, I wanted to like it. By chance its 2006 appearance was sandwiched between the two best fantasy-films in Singer's directorial repertoire, 2003's X2 and 2013's JACK THE GIANT SLAYER. Singer passed on directing the third X-film in order to do RETURNS, and ended up helming SLAYER when a sequel to the under-performing RETURNS did not materialize. 

I recognized on my first viewing what many other viewers did; that the movie was too intent on duplicating the appeal of Richard Donner's two SUPERMAN films. The most noticeable element was certainly the master plan of Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), who again showed aspirations to being a "land baron," which was a lame scheme to begin with and was no better the second time around. 

I did not know on that first viewing, though, that some elements of RETURNS were almost certainly set up to buttress that sequel that never arrived. At the end of RETURNS Superman flings Luthor's artificial island into space. In the hypothetical second film, this would have attracted the attention of a being who is at least believed to be a Kryptonian. Had this contingency been realized, Singer's two Super-films would have displayed two levels of consciously planned symmetry. On the first level, the second film would have allowed the hero to meet a possible Kryptonian (who was actually going to be Brainiac), one of the people Superman went searching for prior to the action of RETURNS. On the other level, Singer's two films would have emulated the template of Donner's two films, where the first is focused upon Superman's effect on humanity and the second on his renunciation of the cruel nature of three surviving Kryptonians.

All that background explains some of Singer's creative choices. But of course we only have one Super-film by Singer, and it has to be judged on its own terms.

Since Singer had chosen to position RETURNS as his sequel to the two Donner films, the only way Singer could duplicate the effect of Superman's advent on Earth was essentially to have the hero go away and come back. So prior to the film, Superman (Brandon Routh) decided five years ago to investigate astronomers' reckoning of Krypton's former location, and he simply left Earth without telling anyone except his widowed mother Martha Kent (Eva Marie Saint) about his mission. In particular, he didn't broach the subject of his leavetaking with Lois Lane, who is presumably not discontinuous with the Lois he made love to in SUPERMAN II. (Presumably she does not remember the lovemaking because of the memory-wiping kiss at the end of SUPERMAN II, though this creates more problems than it solves.) 

In the comics it was a familiar trope for Superman to hunger after knowledge of the world he'd lost, but that hunger is not much more than a pang in the Donner films. As early as possible in the film, Singer and his writers needed to make the hero's passion for his past seem real, important enough to put aside his desire to protect his adopted world. But when Superman returns to the Kent farmland, he crashes a crystalline ship (implicitly built for him by the Fortress of Solitude computers) and receives succor from Martha. (A deleted scene showed the hero on the barren surface of long-dead Krypton.) The conversation between Martha and her son is crucial to convince the viewer that Superman had good reason for his junket-- and the scripters utterly blow the moment. (Singer even portentously delays the conversation with an irrelevant flashback to Clark Kent's youth, when he was first testing his powers-- one of the more tedious Donner quotations.) The Clark-Martha conversation includes a line in which Martha suggests that the mission's failure doesn't absolutely prove that her son is the last Kryptonian, which looks more and more like setup for the hypothetical next film.

Luthor, meanwhile, has been freed from prison after the same five years of Superman's absence, which freedom is blamed on Superman's unavailability to testify. (So there wasn't enough evidence of the two missiles and their point of origin, to keep the arch-fiend locked away?) Apparently drawing on memories of his earlier trip to the Fortress (his hench-girl Kitty remarks that he seems to have been there before), Luthor  and his entourage find their way to the Arctic fortress. He learns everything he wants to know from the incredibly cooperative Fortress A.I. (voiced by the late Marlon Brando). His first experiment with these new powers causes chaos throughout Metropolis, and almost causes the crash of two aircraft, one of which is carrying-- Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth).

I'll hop over the hero's rescue of the planes (Singer, trying to top the helicopter rescue-scene from the 1978 Donner film) to the big change in the Lois-Clark-Superman triangle. Clark is no longer part of the picture-- indeed, Lois barely acknowledges their former friendship when Clark returns to the Daily Planet. Further, Lois had two new males in her life, her son Jason (Tristan Lake) and a long-term boyfriend, Richard White (James Marsden). Jason calls Richard "daddy," although Lois and Richard are not married, so of course Clark jumps to the obvious conclusion. 

By the movie's end Lois finally has reason to believe that Jason may actually be the by-blow of her night with Superman, though up to that point she may think Jason might be Richard's offspring. But for that to be credible, then Superman must have left Earth shortly after the events of SUPERMAN II, and Lois must have been seduced by Richard before she was "showing." The script is also inconsistent on how much Lois remembers of her romance with Superman, though one must take for granted that the "memory-wiping kiss" took away her recollections of the hero's double identity. 

And this brings me to the movie's second big problem. If viewers don't get a clear sense of what Lois remembers about Superman, how can they gauge what Lois feels about his long absence and his sudden return? Bosworth plays Lois's feelings as ambiguously as possible; clearly she has some feeling for the hero but she's managed to paper it over. I guess since she doesn't remember sleeping with Superman, and since initially she has no evidence that her somewhat sickly kid has super-powers, one must assume that she never really questions her kid's paternity by Richard. But it's still kind of an emotional mess, and Superman's sole rationale for not broaching his mission to Lois-- that saying goodbye was "too difficult"-- seems like nothing but a scripter's contrivance.

Oddly, the one thing Singer gets right about Lois is her bulldog tenacity. She actually advances the plot more than the hero does, stubbornly investigating the puzzle of the power failure, until she and Jason cross paths with Luthor and his gang. If it weren't for Lois's snooping, Superman presumably would have been too busy pulling cats out of trees to monitor Luthor's activities.

As Singer himself later admitted, RETURNS is short on bracing action-scenes, which may have contributed to its box office under-performance. Even before detaining Lois and Jason, Luthor anticipates Kryptonian interference and uses a stash of a certain green rock to render the hero helpless. This leads to an overlong scene of Luthor and his hoods beating on the Man of Steel and consigning him to the ocean. Here too, Lois literally comes to the hero's rescue, and her intervention makes it possible for him to save Earth from the villain's crystal-created artificial island.

Though some critics thought that Singer was following some of the Christ-parallels of the Donner films, most of these are very generic. After Lois tells the hero that the world doesn't need a savior, he responds that "every day I hear people crying for one." This sentiment is not borne out by the script, except at the ending when Superman exhausts himself expelling the island and almost perishes, thus bringing forth world-wide grief and near-mourning. RETURNS doesn't really engage with Superman as a soteriological figure, being too concerned with melodramatic moments-- most of which don't work because the character's relationships are badly defined. Luthor doesn't do any better with his myth-reference, comparing himself to Prometheus in stealing "fire from the gods," when of course he's closer to Zeus, using that fire to tyrannize mortals.

Routh and Bosworth are good despite their underwritten roles. Spacey delivers a decent Luthor who succeeds at being less comic than the Donner version, though the script fails to capture the villain's conceit and self-justifications. Parker Posey, whose Kitty riffs on the Eve Teschmacher character from Donner, is actually a little more fleshed out than the original model. Posey certainly scores a few more decent acting-moments than either Frank Langella or Sam Huntington, whose Perry White and Jimmy Olsen are just there to fill spaces. Noel Neill and Jack Larson from THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN are given adequate cameo roles.

Though Singer got a good number of things wrong with the X-MEN franchise, in his first two X-movies he showed a much better capacity for producing snappy, amusing moments of action and melodrama. In contrast, SUPERMAN RETURNS is a grab-bag of ideas that mostly misfire. The film's perceived box-office shortfall, particularly coming on the heels of the more successful BATMAN BEGINS of the previous year, provides one of many examples of the Cowled Crusader's tendency to exceed his caped predecessor in the pop culture wars.

ADDENDUM: Some additional meditations in response to an online post:

here's a possible save that I don't think the RETURNS writers considered. So at some point before Lois starts having symptoms of pregnancy, Superman gets a bug up his rear about finding out if Krypton is really quite sincerely dead. So he leaves, unable to broach the matter to Lois, since he does remember what she meant to him. THEN-- as she begins realizing that she has someone's bun in her oven, the hypnotic conditioning breaks down-- just enough that she knows she did the deed with Superman, but nothing else. If THAT was the case, she wouldn't have to meet Richard during those nine months and to be deluded that he might be the real father. She might go through tons of doubts about what kind of super-spawn she'd conceive. Then she gives birth to a kid who seems human in every way, and by five years' age, he actually seems a rather sickly kid. 

So maybe she thinks, "Okay, Kryptonian super-gene was recessive, so I've got a normal kid." However, her having partial memory would put a new spin on her line to Jason in Jason's first scene, that he wants to "grow up strong like his daddy." That could have a double meaning for Lois but not for Jason. The boy seems to regard Richard as his dad, and even though Richard and Lois aren't married that may not register on his kid-mind, as long as they're living together like a regular mom and dad. I honestly could not tell if they were or not, by the one scene where the three of them are having dinner at someone's apartment with Jimmy. That's the scene where Lois sneaks to the rooftop, has an extended dialogue with Superman, goes back to the apartment and is quizzed by Richard about whether she snuck off for a cigarette break. My initial impression was that Lois and Richard did live together but I need to look at the scene again. (Correction: the eating-scene is at the Planet, so it proves nothing about the co-habitation arrangements of Lois and Richard. However, it was pointed out to me that in the infamous "X-ray vision" scene, Superman scans Lois's house, and not only is Richard there, his plane is docked nearby, so clearly Jason regards Richard as his dad because he lives with Jason and Lois.)

I still think Bosworth's Lois doesn't act like a woman who got left by a "deadbeat dad," or even a "love em and leave em Kryptonian," but that's possibly not the actor's fault.