Superhero Awards

Can we try an interactive approach....a sort of thought experiment if you will? Take a listen to the music embedded in the video below.  I’ll wait.

Good? Now for the experiment.  Imagine you were to write the story that goes with that music.  Whatever you come up with has a good chance of being better than the plot of the movie this theme goes with.  It starts out kind of lonely...melancholy.  It quickly shifts to being pregnant with great anticipation, building to redemption, then triumph.  

In the movies, Clark Kent’s birth father, Jor-El has two stories.  One of them is portrayed by Marlon Brando who was a cerebral and thoughtful leader who believed his planet was shifting too close to its red-giant sun to survive. His colleagues didn't believe him, so he went rogue and sent his newborn son Kal-El on some type of spacecraft to live on Earth.  He also served as his spiritual mentor during the journey, and then again on Earth once he became fully grown.  The other is portrayed by Russel Crowe and was a superdeedooper action hero who made great strides in a doomed effort to save his race by stealing  something called a Codex (?) and sending it with his newborn son to Earth after an intensely boring series of fights and explosions.  Both of these origins tell a similar story, but set a different tone for the events that would follow and who Kal-El would become. 

It's natural that each generation gets their own version of a superhero instead of being forced to endure the previous generation's.  How those characters and stories change tells us a lot about how we've changed.  And in many cases, I don't like what's been abandoned nor do I much care much for what the abandonment has made room for.  And with that said, the Big Empty Superhero Movie Honorable Mention goes to: 

Superman The Movie (1978)/Superman II (1980)

It's a two-fer sort of.  There is so much continuity between the two movies that they go together.  Important characters are introduced in the first scene of the first movie that contains dialogue. After that, you don't see them again until the sequel, where they become Superman's main antagonists.  These 2 films are huge for Gen X and paved the way for modern superhero movies.  It occurred right in the same time frame that Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were blowing up the box offices and changing everyone's expectations for what kind of amazing adventures you could go on at the movies.  Everybody in our generation saw these movies, and we all saw them around the same time and talked about them at school.  And they were the kind of movies that from the moment the opening credits rolled, you knew you were in for something special and you were going to get your money's worth.  They also were the kind of movies that prompted people to applaud enthusiastically when the closing credits barely started to roll.  Yes, there was a time when people did that, but they had to be pretty excited...it was still somewhat rare even when it was a thing.  

Watching the opening credits to the first movie plays like a special John Williams overture to prepare you for your next 2.5 hours.  But first, it pays tribute to the creation of the character we're about get to know in a new way, with a brief introduction to Superman's first appearance in Action Comics 1, released in June 1938.  But once we hear the cadence of the opening bars of music and see the stylized opening credits, you the viewer are very ready to be entertained.  The music builds on that cadence until the brass takes over at 1:30 just as Director Richard Donners name is animated off the screen.  Those triumphant sounds at that exact moment still give me incredible goose bumps to this day.  

You don't have to watch the whole clip to get the idea, about two minutes is plenty to get you juiced up.  The fact that it lasts so much longer almost makes the audience restless with impatient anticipation.  This is a theme that will play out for much of the movie's first act and is intentional.  As a youngster growing up with the ability to dominate his peers, Kal-El is wisely guided by his Earth parents, the Kent's from Kansas to wait until he understands his purpose for being here.  

"There's one thing I do know son, you are here for a reason, I don't know whose reason, whatever the reason is, maybe it's because, I don't know, it's uh, but I do know one thing.  It's not to score touchdowns."  

Kal-El, named Clark by his adoptive parents is ready to burst from the burden of keeping his abilities hidden.  So a lot of this drawn out anticipation that we feel from the length of the opening credits and the first hour of the movie that we wait to see Superman take flight in action connects us to the psyche of Clark becoming a man, and not wasting his ability on the settling minor personal affairs.  When he's taunted by his peers, of course we want him to teach the jerks a lesson.  But for what?  We can learn from superheroes, and even try to adopt their best human traits where we can.

With all of this praise, the Superman/Superman II saga could be worthy of a top three, even be a category winner.  Alas, there are some big problems.  The clumsy Clark and confident Superman dichotomy serves a purpose, but the Superman persona is still ultimately an ostentatious goody two shoes like Clark was as a teenager.  There's not necessarily anything wrong with that...Superman is ultimately young Clark while finally being allowed to be who he is and for the right reasons.  Adult Clark is a new character.  He is silly, nerdy, lacking in self-confidence, and may not be the kind of person you'd want to have around.  It's not that he's not loveable, but he sort of gives you the impression that he could be a real liability as a friend or in Lois Lane's case, as a boyfriend.  That's not necessarily a problem either.  It serves as a mechanism for keeping his super identity a secret.  Why does it need to be a secret?  It's never explicitly stated, but in the comic book universe, it is very well understood that the easiest vulnerability a hero's enemies can exploit is to do harm to their loved ones and friends.  So yes, Superman must hide when he's not busy doing superwork.  

Where does all of this become a problem?  Lois is lovestruck by Superman and barely notices or cares about Clark.  Superman can't be involved in a relationship....that would compete with his superjob.  He wants Lois to like Clark.  This could be interesting to explore, but to do that right, we'd have to know Lois as well as we know Clark.  We've spent an hour getting to know him.  Lois has one encounter with Superman and she's done like dinner.  Now up to this point, she's been established as an ambitious career woman with a feisty and sometimes aggressive spirt who flirts with recklessness.  But what makes her tick?  Where did she come from?  Who raised her?  What inspires her and who were her idols while growing up?  

It doesn't seem to matter, not even to Superman who never bothers to ask any of these questions while they conduct their interview which is really a cover for a date and morphs into one anyway.  The only thing we learn about Lois is that she's in love, and the writers want us to know that she has a bit of a wild side.  "How big are you........er I mean like how tall?.....well I assume then that ah the ah rest of your bodily functions are normal......putting it delicately, do youuuuuuuuuu.......ahm eat?"

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this as a character.  Does it provide much depth?  Other than how Supe's hunkishness seems to really turn her on, does that really say much about her as a person?  Maybe I'm way off and Margot Kidder is portraying a prototype for what Carrie Bradshaw did for Sex and the City fans years later.  I'd just be interested in knowing whether Lois only likes one version of the same man because one is a stud and neglects the other because he is clingy and unsure of himself.  I also think we could learn more about her just by Superman showing as much interest in her other than a physical attraction as she shows in him.  It really seems to be nothing more than a knight in shining armor story who aims to sweep her off her feet because that's what knights do and the girl is just there waiting to be swept.

In the sequel, Clark grows tired of the dual existence, the clutzy Clark not being good enough for Lois, who is preoccupied with dreams of being with the man whose job will never allow him to be with her.  So he gives it all up for love, to become just Clark.  Not Superman without superpowers, the goofy big glasses wearing Clark, the one that Lois has never shown any interest in.  So that aspect of the two movies doesn't work on its own, and never would if you didn't already know that there is a long history of Lois and Clark having a complicated romantic relationship since 1938.  

Another problem, and this is a big one, is a very unnecessary reliance on a horrible plot device to fix things that comes in the form of reversing time to undo an unspeakable wrong.  Those of you that saw the first movie know exactly what I'm talking about (it involves drawing crayon marks around the earth so fast that the planet starts rotating backwards).  Altering history is not a good superpower for Superman to have.  It completely erases the need for literally anything else that he does or can do, and even erases the need for us to care about the story we spent 2.5 hours watching.  

A third issue that I have, though it isn't necessarily a problem plot-wise, is a missed opportunity to use some creativity in the characters of General Zod, Ursa, and Non, the three super-villains that are Superman's main antagonists in the sequel.  We went to more than a little trouble learning about their background and unique personality traits.  Once they are in the vicinity of the yellow sun that powers our hero, they instantly have an identical powerset to Superman's.  Clark had to grow into his abilities, and could arguably have been affected differently by having been exposed to the Earth's environment and yellow sun his entire life.  This was an opportunity to show some super-diversity and have each of the three villainous Kryptonians be affected by this new atmosphere in distinct ways.  It would make them more interesting, and could provide some depth to them.

Now for those of you who don't know, there are actually two distinctly different versions of Superman II.  Director Richard Donner had already shot 75% of the scenes for Superman II before the first movie hit theaters.  Then all hell broke loose.  All kinds of behind the scenes chaos and personal squabbles that I won't get into here resulted in Donner being kicked off the project to be replaced by Richard Lester.  Since Donner wouldn't share directing credits with Lester, the latter went and reshot enough of the movie to allow him to get directing credit for the whole thing.  Some of Donner's original footage was used, but a lot of it wasn't.  Gene Hackman refused to work with Lester, so all of the scenes with Lex Luthor were shot by Donner.  Also notably absent from the 2nd film is Marlon Brando as Jor-El providing fatherly guidance in the Fortress of Solitude up at the North Pole.  Instead, his mother Lara provides all of the parental wisdom.  Lester wrote Brando out so that he wouldn't have to be paid, so none of the scenes with him in it were used in the sequel.  All of this lost footage stewed in a safe somewhere until 2006 when it was re-discovered.  Superman II was later re-released as a new movie known as "The Donner Cut" which used almost all of the unused footage from the original theatrical version.  The Big Empty Editorial Staff recently watched it while doing research for this post.  It is a similar story, but more mature, less hokey, and a little bit darker in tone.  It's an equally good if not better movie overall.  Yet rather than hypnotize Lois into forgetting that Supe and Clark are one in the same with a superdeedooper hypnotic kiss, Superman instead gets out his super crayon once again and draws super fast circles around the Earth, reversing its orbit once again and this time goes so far back as to make the entire movie to have never happened.  Wow.  Thanks for nothing?  

Ultimately, these are still very good movies....all three of them (if we're including the Donner cut), that have some deep flaws.  The good far outweighs the bad, and they are exactly the kind of thing that are great for getting out popcorn, escaping the real world for a couple of hours, and coming away feeling energized and excited.  The 2013 reboot, Man Of Steel could have been the same thing if the story matched the score that Hans Zimmer wrote.  I watched it when it was new and was so turned off that I never wanted to see it again.  That probably isn't fair.  It's a better movie than that.  It was part of our recent editorial research and I've come to the conclusion that it is also a good, but deeply flawed movie, but for a whole different set of reasons.  The story of Clark's difficult childhood is actually handled really well, far better than in the 1978 version just simply because it unpacks a lot more in a way that emotionally resonates.  When it's time for Superman to emerge, he's forced into his super role almost reluctantly because he's the only hope for saving the world from General Zod and his plans to turn Earth into the new Krypton.  This partly means that he's barely had the time to adjust to his role as a caretaker of humanity so much as just being a super warrior mounting the only means of defense available to the planet.  This abruptly transitions the story into what feels like a completely different movie at the mid-point.  A really long and boring one with lots of stuff that goes boom because stuff that goes boom is awesome if you like it.  But it's also really boring and overwhelming if it serves no other purpose than to assault and overwhelm my senses.  It is filled with the kind of writing that makes it hard to suspend disbelief in spite of the far superior special effects to the 1978/1980 version.  If it says something about the difference in American culture between the 2010s and the 1980s, it appears that the difference is that we are now a culture that:

• Values understanding childhood isolation more (good)
• Believes that adults should value thoughtfulness and reason less and place more emphasis on being stronger and letting the end justify the means (bad)

Bill Maher very recently lampooned the recent trend in Hollywood to make us feel like shit by putting out very good movies about how horrible things are in the world.  

The point that people will watch Kong vs Godzilla to get away from this is hard to dismiss.  Somewhere between the two is a sweet spot that Superman movies used to try to live in.  This shift toward KongZilla type action in Man of Steel and the Avengers movies is the biggest lost opportunity of the superhero genre.  So in our top three, coming soon, I'll focus on what has been done exceptionally well in spite of this trend.

See you soon!