kennelco film diary

(2006) dir. Bryan Singer
viewed: 07/15/06 at Metreon, San Francisco, CA

I was pretty cynical about this version of Superman, it must be said.  They’d been trying to put one together for almost a decade — maybe longer.  It was a Hollywood franchise that got passed by with all the new hipness and technical developments that the industry had gone through.  Superman, for Chrissakes!  He’s an icon.  Let’s reinvent him and keep the marketing rights delivering for years and years to come.  Basically, I saw this as a merchandizing dream and the fact that it hadn’t gotten off the ground was basically because they realized that they hadn’t found something relevant and marketable enough to put together.  Let’s face it.  They remade Planet of the Apes (2001), which had zero relevance.  Why make a Superman movie other than the merchandizing possibilities?

Superman is an icon of the 20th Century.  Does he mean anything in the 21st Century?  With Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay the reimagining of Superman as a Jewish immigrant and the whole contextualizing of the narrative in terms of historical perspective push it even further into the 20th Century.  It’s interesting.  It’s significant, but what does it mean for this post-9/11 world?  For the world of technology and globalization and corporations and whatever the heck the world is these days?

Anyways, I wondered a lot about this.  Obviously, Bryan Singer has some street cred having concocted the X-men franchise and having brought that to the fore.  He skipped out on that franchise and it quickly went to hell.  Maybe Singer, of all people, could reinvent the franchise and the genre once again.  Tim Burton is very 1980’s these days in terms of his reimagining.  That Batman stuff is pretty passe.  All design and style.  No frickin’ substance.  Christopher Nolan has laid the way with his Batman Begins (2005) for the future of comic book action films.  What is the new film going to be?

Okay, enough of my preamble of supposition and conjecture.  The film itself is pretty good.  Brandan Routh looks good, though young, as Superman.  Kevin Spacey is more than adequate as Lex Luthor.  Kate Bosworth…well, let’s just say that she was in the movie, too.  She wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but she really didn’t quite look right.  And I’m not pining for Margot Kidder here.  I just think they needed a slightly more mature actress to play the role.  Maybe that’s true of Superman himself too.  Routh looks great.  Quite a hunk.  Kinda Christian Bale-ish if you ask me, minus the ability to be dark.

I saw this film in IMAX format due to timing issues more than anything.  There were 3-D glasses that you had to take on and off, which was pretty annoying.  It was a mistake.  It’s better to just watch a film than to have to think about other things while you are watching it.  IMAX screens are cool for display overall.  The hugeness of the images really delivers some power.  But 3-D is kitsch and fun and cool, but it’s distracting.

The film has this weird connection to the films of the 1970’s and 1980’s.  The credit sequence is a kooky pastiche of the 1980’s style text scripts against these very modern computer designed graphics of planets exploding.  And of course Singer brings Marlon Brando back from the dead to deliver some lines.  It works okay.  It’s just a little strange.  I mean it’s a post-post-post-post-post modernist world or something, isn’t it? So I guess somehow all this stuff makes sense.

The action sequences are strong though the overall narrative is a little suspect.  It’s not bad.  I do think that Kate Bosworth was the movie’s biggest mistake.  She is constantly distracting in her youthfulness, supposedly being a mother of a (how old is that fucking kid anyways — he looks like he’s 8 or something and he needs to go to Supercuts like nobody’s business) a “5″ year old and a Pulitzer Award winner and yet she is still stupid and girly like a 19 year old.  Bosworth is better than I would imagine, but she still looks weird.

Overall, it’s not a bad movie.  It’s probably one of the more entertaining summer movies of 2006, which is only to say that it’s been a bad year for these types of films.  But it’s better than bad.  I enjoyed it enough.  Though I still kept wondering why they made this film other than the marketing possibilities, though.  The film does address this significantly in that Lois Lane’s prize-winning article was called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” when the film is all about how it does.  And he’s quite Christlike in his pseudo-death and resurrection and everything. 

And I have to say that if this is Singer’s point, that we need a Christ-like hero to come and rescue us from the current global realities and so forth, then this thing is a bigger load of crap or scarier than anything than I can think of.