I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I watched the first Superman movie again earlier in the year for the first time in a long time and finally realised how great it was, and ever since I saw the trailer for this one and heard the old John Williams themes and the Marlon Brando stuff. I have to admit, though, I was scared about Brandon Routh the moment I saw the promo pics of him – perhaps even more scared than I was of Kate Bosworth – for me it had nothing to do with the slightly different suit … he just looked plain wrong. But he has some of Christopher Reeves Clark/Superman mannerisms completely down … the Clark stuff more than anything, there are times when it’s almost uncanny. I still don’t take too well to Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane – I always wanted to see Courtney Cox taking over from Margot Kidder but I can see now they were going for younger etc. I can just about live with Bosworth I guess. It requires a certain suspension of disbelief to view this as a chronological flowing-on from Superman II as it is, but it’s possible to do so.

The visual effects are, of course, impeccable – I personally loved a fairly simple shot (effects-wise) in which Clark follows Lois as she leaves him and gets in an elevator, following her through a series of doors, then up through the ceiling etc with his x-ray vision. Alfred Hitchcock would’ve been proud of that one. There are some nice tricks too, like a Titanic style pre-vis where we first see what we think might be a dodgy airplane effect, only to then have the camera pull away from a computer monitor; and Lex Luthor’s model city, destroyed when he tests one of the Krypton crystals, definitely resembling the slightly primitive effects of the first movies.

I kinda knew John Ottman’s score would be great and I feel like I’ve mentioned it a thousand times in other reviews this year. To re-cap – I loved what he did with John Carpenter’s themes for Halloween H20, and I’ve loved many of his other scores like The Usual Suspects ... plus, it’s always more fun when he edits as well, as he did for The Usual Suspects and he does here.

The ending is very meh, though. The problem is that this movie writes itself into a pretty immaculate corner – the kind you can’t realistically write yourself out of unless your character happens to be Jesus. So, as you may have heard, they basically make the Man of Steel the Son of God. By the way, this brings me to a fairly bad beating he gets on Lex Luthor’s new continent – beware letting the really little ones see this ‘cos it’s pretty nasty, I mean they may as well go all the way Passion of the Christ style on him.

It’s way better than it could’ve been in the other incarnations its had throughout its lengthy development, and way better than I expected – hell, the titles sequence alone gave me goosebumps and the whole plane sequence made me gasp like I haven’t since the big head-on collision in Matrix Reloaded – but it’s not quite as good as the original. I hope they make more, because I think it’ll get better as they go … just as long as they don’t use the Superkid too much … sigh.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 5:10 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.