I Could Be Your Hero, Baby

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) and Superman (Brandon Routh) share a quiet moment. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

In the comic-book hero pantheon, Superman has always struck me as a bit of a bore. Sure, the flying and X-ray vision are cool, but the Man of Steel lacks grit. Unlike brooding Batman, horny adolescent Spiderman or the rage-aholic Hulk, Superman is a little too upstanding and square.

The source of this image problem lies mainly in his backstory. Other superheroes fascinate because of their all-too-human origins. Until he was bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker was just a nerd from Queens. Billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne crafted a caveful of gadgets and hit the gym to sculpt his killer bod into superhero proportions. It’s the fantasy of a regular Joe lurking under those tights that’s so compelling. But Superman was born that way – as Kal-El, an alien with limitless power and strength, from the now-dead planet Krypton. It’s Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter, that’s his disguise and alter ego, not the other way around.

In Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman, granite-jawed and Juilliard-educated actor Christopher Reeve injected some needed charisma into the hero, playing the character’s double-life with a poker-faced wit. As muscle-bound Superman, he was all courtly he-man, whisking off Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) for joy rides in the sky. As fumbling, awkward Clark, he made it clear that he was in on the joke: I can’t believe all it takes to fool these morons is a pair of glasses.

With his gymnast’s physique and blue contact lenses, newcomer Brandon Routh could pass for Reeve’s son. And his performance in Superman Returns is an unapologetic recreation of the original, right down to the perfect lock of hair that curls onto his forehead. It’s a safe choice – and not a bad one. He might not have Reeve's classically trained chops, but he still makes a likeable, entirely plausible hero, resisting every impulse to play the role for camp value.

Indeed, from the moment the original John Williams pop-classical score blasts under the opening credits, director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) announces that he is taking the Superman myth seriously. This is no hipster reinvention à la Batman Begins. Back to fine fighting form, Superman Returns is a grand, ambitious and emotionally rich continuation of the franchise that fizzled out in 1987 after its cringingly awful fourth instalment. Singer has even managed to raise the dead. He recycles some original Superman footage of Marlon Brando playing Superman’s father Jor-El (complete with a Cold Miser coif), in one of Brando's goofiest paycheque gigs ever. In the Fortress of Solitude, Jor-El reminds Kal-El that he has been delivered to earth to save it, to offer humans his goodness and light. “I have sent them you, my only son.”

One of a kind: Superman pauses in the Fortress of Solitude. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Remind you of anyone? Singer’s Superman is less Smallville rube than heavenly son. It’s not that the Jewishness of Kal-El – his Moses-like origins, his exile, his vaguely Hebraic name – hasn’t been pointed out before, but never has the big guy been so explicitly cast as a Christ figure. In one melancholy scene, he retreats to space and hangs suspended, looking down at the earth and listening to billions of voices crying out in joy, wonder, pain, anger and fear. He yearns for a normal life, but that’s not what he’s been made for.

As the opening titles explain, Superman disappeared for five years to travel to the remains of Krypton in an unsuccessful search to find other survivors. After a brief visit in Smallville with his adoptive mother Martha (a neat cameo by the still lovely Eva Marie Saint, who played opposite Brando in On the Waterfront), he returns to Metropolis and his old job as a reporter for the Daily Planet. In his absence, a heartbroken Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has moved on with a vengeance. She has an asthmatic moppet of a son, Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu), and a hunky live-in boyfriend named Richard (James Marsden). She’s also picked up a Pulitzer Prize for a column entitled “Why the world doesn’t need Superman.” Ouch!

Time and pique haven’t increased Lois’s powers of perception. She still can’t see that co-worker Clark Kent, who she believes has been on holiday, is the same guy as Superman. Nor does she make the connection between their coinciding reappearances. For no sooner has Clark found his old desk, than he’s tossing off his glasses to stop a crashing airplane, which he lands on a baseball diamond as gently as if he were cradling a baby. It’s a crisply paced, heart-stopping sequence that can’t help but reference 9/11.

Assigned to the Superman beat, Lois falls for him again, despite her best intentions of staying true to good-guy Richard. “He’s a pilot. He takes me out flying all the time,” she snips to Superman. “Like this?” he replies, cuddling her in his arms as they soar over the city. For a mortal, Marsden’s rueful and daring Richard is no slouch – I kept waiting for him to remind everyone that he once played Cyclops — making him an almost equal competitor for Lois’s heart. But Bosworth’s Lois is too buttoned-up to make her compelling enough to fight over. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the real relationship here is the very tentative and tender one between Superman and Lois’s son, Jason, who was born, coincidentally, not long after the Man of Steel skipped out of Metropolis.

Love to hate him: the villainous Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey). Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Lex Luthor is also back, fresh from a five-year prison stint. He’s filthy rich thanks to a brief, deathbed marriage to a wealthy heiress (Noel Neill, who was Lois Lane in the 1940s film serials and the 1950s TV series) and he’s got world domination on his mind.  Kevin Spacey plays the bald-headed baddie with an elegant menace – a vast improvement on the hamminess of Gene Hackman’s original. And as his moll, Parker Posey fleshes out a bimbo role with entertainingly absurd details – in one scene, she munches olive after olive out of an oversized martini glass. After stealing the secret of Krypton’s special crystals, Luthor plans to use them to create a new monster continent. Compared to the usual comic book evil plots – like, say, blowing up the planet – Luthor’s real-estate grab seems a little drab, but it’s certainly timely. Spacey reportedly based the role on Enron’s Kenneth Lay, a new-millennium villain if there ever was one. It’s chilling in its own way, because as Luthor puts it, it’s nothing personal, he “just wants his cut.”

But it does get personal when it comes to Superman. Luthor has a kryptonite shiv and a gang of henchmen waiting to make a 98-pound weakling out of the Caped Crusader. And when he does get taken down, it’s with low-tech, balletic violence. With his two X-Men films, Singer proved his dexterity with colossal battles and special effects. In this movie, it’s the quieter moments that dazzle. Early in the film, a lonely Clark uses his X-ray vision to track Lois as she rises in an elevator. Near the end, there’s Superman’s mythic and spectacularly silent fall to earth after his powers have been destroyed. In between, Singer captures the silly but unnerving sight of one of Luthor’s henchmen playing Heart and Soul on the piano with Jason; and throughout, there’s the voluptuous beauty of the painterly light hitting the art deco sets.

By adhering faithfully to the Superman myth, Singer has pulled off what seemed to be an impossible feat. He’s revealed new depths in one of the most iconic pop culture characters of all time. Superman’s a bore no more.

Superman Returns opens June 28.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.