Superman Returns Full Of Holes

I’m not in the habit or reviewing movies, but I just saw Superman and need to vent. If you have not seen this movie and intend to do so, please do not read on as I give it all away. I usually have no problem dispelling my disbelief when I go to see a movie. However, some movies just insult even my most unimportant and unintelligent sensibilities. Superman is one of those movies that drives me nuts! Here’s a brief run down of all that’s wrong with the movie (and the poorly written script):

Lex Luther
In the movie Lex Luther somehow finds superman’s unguarded all powerful crystals (how does he find them and why are they unguarded?) and (after playing the Superman instructional video) decides to make his own continent by dropping them (like alka-seltzer) in the ocean off the coast of the United Sates. While Lex Luther understands the value of owning real estate, he apparently doesn’t see the problem with owning land that looks like parts of the moon since the land this process makes looks post-nuclear. He should have at least had a landscaper in his crew of three (yes three) bad guys. Also, as far as I can tell, when he decides to make his land mass he has just one helicopter (and a multi-gazillion-dollar disposable yacht that he abandons to be destroyed). Why not develop all the futuristic weapons that these crystals can supposedly provide (I bet they would be weapons with jagged edges) before you start making noise? Oddly he makes a new land mass in the ocean which ripples NYC and no one shows up to investigate! I knew our intelligence was bad but come on. Aside from these annoyances, while there’s mayhem all over the world Lex Luther and his cliche (oh it’s so sad when Superman get’s hurt) idiotic girlfriend use an out of control car to attract (distract) superman so they can easily steal the (rather common?) chunk of kryptonite that is coincidentally a story in the newspaper just when Lex needs it. Of all the (simultaneous) disasters in the world how did they know Superman would go for the loopy girl in an out of control car trick? After walking in to the museum and politely stealing the kyrptonite (did they really just kill the lights, break the glass and walk out?), he mixes it with the crystals and shoots it in to the ocean to make a sort of a Superman weakening land mass. Lex fails to kill Superman when he shows up and gets de-powered (I was waiting for the chain saw but instead he stabs Superman with a small piece of kryptonite and lets him float away in to non-kryptonite water with a small shard of krypto-meteor stuck in his side). Lex later entrusts the remaining super powerful crystals to the lap of his I’m-so-upset-this stuff-is-happening girlfriend who promptly dumps them out, and he and her finally end up on a (Gilligan’s) deserted Island the size of my back yard (good thing she took a sun umbrella on the helicopter). I also want to know what kind of he-almost-previously-annihilated-the-world-bad-guy has a double life sentence and gets off on appeal because a (post trial?) witness (here Superman) doesn’t show up - as an attorney it boggles my mind that Hollywood can’t at least get some paralegal to make up some plausible procedural explanation in a two hundred million dollar movie. In short Lex Luther and his jagged story line are hard to swallow.

Lois
We first see Lois aboard an airplane which is acting as the mule for a new space shuttle. I’m thinking the writers thought that they needed to have Superman save Lois and that they needed some exciting and spectacular vehicle to save her in. Ah, Boat? No, kind of boring.
Train? Eh, too mild. Airplane? Not bad, but..I got it! An airplane with a space shuttle launching on it’s roof. Cool! Over all, this Lois is beautiful (about time) and a little vulnerable - giving her character some sympathetic qualities that the prior portrayals failed to muster. As far as the love story (which is basically paramount here) we get the same old he-flies-her-around-town-in-the-moonlight cliche that is so tired even sappy romantics must have been bored.

Superman
The big guy! The back story here is that Superman leaves for two years to see if his home planet is still out there when (earth?) astronomers think they may have seen it. My first thought was, Superman flies in outer space and he thinks our astronomers can figure out if his planet is out there? Why didn’t he just fly out to the hubble telescope himself with his super eyes and take a look? Did he need to fly to the door step of Krypton or could he see it was gone when he was half-way there? During the movie Superman learns that the crystals are gone, that the electrical power grid has been blacked out, and that a meteor was stolen from the museum, and yet he never seems to put two and two together - sort of wondering around waiting for things to happen before he reacts. Despite his super vision he can’t see the green glowing material in Lex’s new land mass and flies right in like some sort of pizza delivery guy. Neither a thinking man nor a proactive force are you Superman? Included in this movie is the out-played he’s-a-boy-running super-fast-through-the-corn-fields-and-jumping-on-barns starter kit. What the heck? Two hundred million plus dollars and they bring us back to the corn fields to watch super-boy barn hopping? I’ll just say, I’m available to write scripts if anyone needs me.

Unlike the Spiderman movies were each plot point and event in the movie has a rational relationship to the characters and the story, this movie fails to remain connected. With it’s very simplistic plot, it’s basically just a sappy love story wrapped in a few eye catching action scenes.