Superman did not have to be reinvented to be modernized. There was an attempt at continuity with the original Christopher Reeve movies in 2006 called Superman Returns. Though the actor was new, the character was the same and it was meant to be the next chapter in that storyline. It wasn't a flop, yet it does get an unfair amount of hate. What they did wrong was treat it as a soft-reboot, a concept that needs to die. A soft-reboot is a continuation of a story that then tells the same story. Think Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a continuation where a young hot shot from a desert planet discovers their ability to use the force, travels with Han Solo on the Millennium Falcon, and helps to destroy the bad guy's super weapon that destroys planets. Sound familiar? Sounds like I already saw it 39 years ago. Superman Returns was about a world overwhelmed with bad elements and nobody to stop it until Superman crash lands on Martha Kent’s farm, takes flight for the first time to save Lois Lane from an aviation related disaster, take her on a date flying around Manhattan, and stop Lex Luthor from a scheme to generate great wealth through an extremely destructive real estate scheme. What it got right was it kept the musical score and the tone of the previous movies and enhanced the effects in the right ways to improve on the visual appearance of the older movies. What it should have done was keep those elements and retell the origin story from the beginning with some new interesting wrinkles. Let the story be new but evolutionary instead of new and revolutionary. Introduce the story with some modern technology that enhances the ability to tell an already good story, and make sure the cast portraying the two main characters who also share an unrealized romantic interest in each other have some real chemistry and spark in their interaction like Reeve and Kidder did. This would have been great.
Christopher Nolan did this with his Batman trilogy. In 2005, Batman Begins told the story of how and why Bruce Wayne became the caped crusader, and dove deeply into the symbolism of bats in his alter ego, and his relationship difficulty with a woman that he clearly feels very deeply for but can’t act on it and she knows it. Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 didn’t need to be continued in soft reboot format to keep the audience. A full on reboot with good writing that maintained the integrity of the character was more than sufficient to create a product far superior to the previous one. Maybe the comics covered Batman’s origins and motivations well too, but I haven’t read nearly enough comics to know. So thank you Christopher Nolan for pulling me completely into this universe without trying to reinvent the character. It also set the stage for the Big Empty Superhero award winner, its first sequel The Dark Knight.
In this trilogy, things that get broken stay broken, and people are vulnerable. They aren’t just collateral damage. Michael Caine as Alfred delivers an outstanding performance portraying his complicated relationship with Bruce. Thrust into a role as a surrogate father but still also his servant, he constantly struggles with his desire to protect Bruce knowing that the best way to protect him is to help him survive the consequences of doing things he thinks Bruce should stop doing. His deep affection for the boy he raised causes him to struggle with supporting his vigilantism for fear that it will kill him.
This series never lets you forget that fighting crime has serious consequences, but The Dark Knight also never lets you forget that everyone is always vulnerable. Through this entire second chapter, the portrayal of the Joker makes you feel his sinister and psychotic presence in every single scene whether he’s in it or not. Never have I seen a performance like Heath Ledger’s do a dance with a story so symbiotic that you are afraid for the safety of every single person in every scene. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a scene of Commissioner Gordon answering the front door at his home. All I can think about while watching that is that the only thing between Gordon’s family and a homicidal maniac is a wooden door and a deadbolt. And up to this point, the good guys have always been several steps behind the Joker, doing everything they can to outsmart him only to find that they did exactly what he needed them to do for his plan to succeed.
Knowing his character lets your imagination go wild with what may be coming next when you see something like this:
This is a movie that makes you appreciate that you need a superhero, and yet you still don’t know if it’s going to be enough. And the sad truth that you aren’t spared from is sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, people have to deal with the tragic consequences of it.
We are struggling as a society today to make sense of the senseless things that we are seeing on our TV screens and on the internet every day, and some days the chaos changes from hour to hour.
The Dark Knight is a movie that not only understands this, it also helps the audience understand it a little bit better too, and gives a glimmer of hope we can somehow unlock the secret to that.
Bruce is tested, tempted, goaded, and dared to make a choice to cross a line he never would before or risk losing the community he cares for to total chaos, and yet he refuses to believe he can’t find a way. But how can the city of Gotham go toward the light when pinning its only hope on a Dark Knight? The people may have to make a choice to save themselves instead, letting the torch be passed from the superhero to the people he wants to protect. For people can only truly be free when they stop looking for a hero to save them.
Epilogue
I’ve spent a great deal of time on Superman for this part of the project when he doesn’t receive any of the top three awards. He’s a difficult character to work with and keep fresh and interesting, so anyone who writes a story about him has a bigger challenge than they do with any other character of this genre. But it’s important that anyone who puts him in the movies try to do so without straying from what attracted people to him in the first place. The original themes were filled with virtues not just embodied in one character, but in the world, and Superman existed to reinforce and uphold those virtues. Virtues like journalistic integrity, good faith law enforcement, and protecting the innocent were all things that described not the character himself, but the notion of “Truth, Justice and the American Way” that Superman defended both when he wore a cape and a trench coat and glasses. At least that’s what he used to be. This generation now knows him as the cinematic love child of Jason Bourne, the Jesus portrayed in The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Incredible Hulk. The world he inhabits isn’t worthy of anything better, save ~3-5 characters, and we have yet to see him actually do anything to make it any better. The only saves he’s made would be better described as stop-losses, and the last appearance he’s made indicates the world we know that is already not very likable becomes a total loss in the future. As a baby, his birth mother bids him farewell from Krypton with the words “go make a better world than this one.” His earth father fills him with lessons and lectures, really good ones BTW about not just using his ability, but how it will define the kind of man he will become and implores him to understand the importance of that. Amy Adam’s portrayal of Lois Lane is one of the best i’ve seen in the movies ever because for the first time, we see her doing some real and courageous journalism on two separate occasions. Alas, it doesn’t last as she morphs into a scream machine in need of constant saving once Clark begins donning the big S.
What makes this so unforgivable is that the writers seem to be aware of what Superman is supposed to stand for and even give the audience all kinds of nuggets to indicate that’s where they are taking the character. They go to great length to provide him with a great deal of depth and human emotion, and give a real interest in the role that Lois plays in becoming special to him. Then they abandon all of that to make him into an angry punching machine, and nothing more ever again. It’s the kind of disappointment one might get by seeing a very gifted athlete with straight A’s graduate high school and throw their life away to gambling and drugs. That is the story of this script. Brilliantly promising, only to throw it away for cheap gratification.
I rewatched Superman Returns for the first time since 2006 after finishing this category, just to see if I’d like it better than the last time. Recall that was an attempt to continue the story where Superman II left off in 1980. I must say that while it isn’t a great movie, it was refreshing to see what felt like an old friend that had gone missing, and not because that was the plot of the first act. I could do a whole post on comparing Superman Returns to Man of Steel and the follow ups, but it’s already been done much better than I could do it. So I’ll end this by pointing to a review that is spot on and leave it there.
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