Superman: The Movie

Now that I finished the original four Batman movies, we’re moving on to the original Superman series! I’ve never seen these movies before, so thankfully I won’t be ruining entrenched memories like I did with the original Burton Batman films. The Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB ratings on Superman 1 are high, so I have some expectations, but then again the movie is almost 50 years old.

I’m trying to review this as if the movie came out today, which is hard when everything about the film screams antique. A lot of the key actors do good work – Brando, Reeve, and Hackman in particular. The writing, on the other hand, is unnecessarily silly for a movie that is trying to be mostly serious. It is also a tough task to create a movie that covers his original planet of Krypton, his childhood in Smallville, his training in the Fortress of Solitude, his introduction to life in Metropolis and his relationship to Lois Lane, the establishment of Superman, then add in an introduction to Lex Luthor all prior to getting to the main plot of the movie. Most of the original scenes are in the fine-to-good range, but the problem comes when they try to figure out how to have Lex Luthor and Superman interact.

The solution of having Lex Luthor somehow know absolutely everything about Superman’s strengths and weaknesses based off of nothing more than one published interview was ridiculous. Most of the action once Luthor’s plan starts to come into play is so silly that it undoes any of the good work created through the start of the film. This movie unfortunately becomes better to laugh at than to view as intended.