David watches all the Superman movies they haven't before for Miracle Monday
Top illustration by Even 'Doc' Shaner
By the time you're all reading this, Good Miracle Monday! The Superman holiday for the real Superman freaks like me, as revealed in Elliot S! Maggin's titular novel (which you can now order a reissuing of directly from him, along with his previous Last Son of Krypton!). Today also marks the end of a vacation I've been taking for my birthday, so having meant for years to get around to some of these, I figured I could get a feature out of watching all the Superman movies I haven't seen yet.
(Note: I had this idea before reading the chapter of What We Can Know About Thunderman that's just Alan Moore reviewing all the Superman movies and TV shows; I'm afraid nothing I write here will be as good as "[The moustache situation] might have still been somehow salvageable had a thrift-conscious and priority-blind [Warner Bros.] not entrusted the necessary digital retouching to someone who was plainly barely competent, and who left both [Henry Cavill] and [Superman] looking, indeed, like the notoriously botched 'Monkey Christ'. At least here, at the bitter end of the character's trajectory into physical being, [Superman] had finally gained some kind of resemblance to a religious figure. Can we stop now?")
Honestly, the extent of my recent cape burnout is such that it's even touched the affection for my old favorite, with the only extant Superman project doing anything for me being Christopher Priest and Carlo Pagulayan's terrific miniseries Superman: Lost. And the trouble with being this deep in the tank is there's very little I'm at all interested in with the character I haven't read yet, with most of the remainder being collected in formats that are ✨prohibitively expensive.✨
I'm not really that torn up about it; I don't need the steady stream I used to when I have other reading occupying my time, like the last few volumes of the Soul Society arc of Bleach at the time of writing this alongside working my way piecemeal through the Hellblazer by Garth Ennis Omnibus. I can accept that even as Superman remains my autistic special interest, my relationship with that is going to change with time. My autistic special interest it remains though, and given My Adventures With Superman as my next proper pick-me-up still remains a bit off in the distance, and the aforementioned timing, this seems as good a time as any for filling a few cultural gaps. First a few pocket reviews on those I've seen thus far, though with most it's been awhile so don't expect anything too elaborate:
Superman (1978) - I've written in the past on how this was an entertaining-if-disjointed movie that made a number of very sensible decisions, those decisions in the long term probably resulting in the ruination of the character by forever associating him with self-consciously simplistic nostalgia as the core narrative drive. While they ultimately mended fences, maybe Jerry Siegel's righteous curse on the production ultimately bore fruit? A more recent thought of mine though is that '78 functioned as the precursor to the modern legacy franchise revival film, building as it does on preexisting knowledge and affection for the character, and moreover is the version of that movie the worst kind of nerd clamors for, albeit executed to perfection: plot and character depth placed fully in the backseat in favor of spectacle, hitting the maximum number of recognizable 'lore' beats, and aggressive affirmation of your childhood favorites' moral primacy. It's simultaneously well-done, and the reboot every contemporary similar effort is slightly too respectable to be and is thus lambasted for failing to live up to. Christopher Reeve and Johns Williams themselves are obviously unimpeachable as representing platonic ideals for the character, but it is what it is.
Superman II: I weigh 'but MY Superman would NEVER do that!' less heavily as the years go by when evaluating a story; maybe 'mine' wouldn't, but maybe this story on its own has an understandable take, or maybe it's just a single part I don't like in something I can otherwise enjoy. But the sake of my sanity I gotta draw the line somewhere and nah, this ain't Superman, this guy's an asshole and what's worse they're making Christopher Reeve do this stuff. Stamp goes hard though, you assume KNEEL BEFORE ZOD is one of those moments that's exaggerated in your memory and then you watch the clip and it's actually more berserk.
The various unproduced Superman films between 1987 and 2006: I've read what there is to read for a few of these. Cary Bates' Superman V/Superman Reborn script was a solid if unremarkable attempted capstone to Reeve and Kidder's tenure, whereas Ilya Salkind's original Superman III (a treatment rather than a full script), JJ Abrams' Superman: Flyby, and Andrew Kevin Walker and Akiva Goldsman's Batman vs. Superman: Asylum are all flavors of gibbering madness that'll instantly take you from 'why has Hollywood never been able to make Superman work?' to 'oh my god we've gotten off so lightly'. While I haven't read the script for Superman Lives, I do highly recommend the documentary on it The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?, and absolutely fascinating look at what seems to have been an absolutely fascinating project. Kudos as well to Paul B. Frieling's recent animated tribute below!
Superman: Brainiac Attacks: My recollection is this was hideous, but that may be collateral damage from the unfathomably terrible take on Lex Luthor as portrayed by Powers Boothe pinch-hitting for Clancy Brown. Maybe the rest of it was secretly fine? I suppose I'll never know.
Superman Returns: I do have thoughts and feelings on Superman Returns but in the face of 'this was the one with multiple accused pedophiles involved' I trust you'll all understand they scarcely feel worth mentioning.
Superman: Doomsday: Definition of Fine despite the final blow of the big battle being Superman suplexing Doomsday from space so hard they both die, but James Marsden is a dang good Lex who wins points for - in no small feat - being the all-time most homoerotic take on the character.
All-Star Superman: Can't lie, aside from Anthony LaPaglia maintaining the streak of quality Luthors this was a pretty piddling effort all around without even measuring it against the source material. I distinctly recall James Denton discussing playing his take on Superman as subdued and repressed and thinking "yeah, that would explain how that happened."
Superman vs. The Elite: I somewhat respect that Kelly tried to add some nuance to his original premise by having Superman and Manchester Black initially get along before the ideological split becomes apparent, but in any medium this is still despite my childhood love for it a fundamentally whiny, insecure story with a glaring grammatical error in its big climactic speech to boot. I have however come to appreciate with time that Superman defeats a bunch of eXtreme 90s heroes by means of what's essentially a Silver Age hoax, and in the long run this still got us Superman and The Authority so I'd say it was all worth it in the end.
Man of Steel/Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice/Justice League: I've written about these at length alongside my Whowatch cohost Sean Dillon and our mutual pal Ritesh Babu on this very newsletter - alongside their inspiration in John Boorman's Excalibur and the planned Justice League sequels - in our series The Stone, The Spear, and The Superman. Suffice it to say that removed from the pressures of definitiveness I feel time has been more kind than not to them, and to my own shock the Ultimate Edition of BvS is probably the closest we've had to a straight-take good Superman movie.
The Death of Superman: Friends, if there's one thing this Monday that'll let you believe in miracles, let it be that Peter Tomasi of all people wrote a banger like this. Okay 'banger' might be a bit much but this is definitely closer to the actual version of this fight you want than either the original comic or BvS delivered, wrapped around a tight little Lois and Clark core. By the standards it had to live up to on pretty much every front, an unmitigated triumph!
Reign of the Supermen: This is certainly the direct plot continuation of The Death of Superman.
Superman: Man of Tomorrow: At the time of release I called this the overall best Superman movie; even given I didn't mean it as much of a compliment, I was grossly overreacting to it being one where Clark goes through a coherent arc for once that isn't also about him in the New 52 suit fighting Doomsday. But this one's at least respectably put together for what it is in a way most of its contemporaries simply aren't. Or at least that's what I remembered, I just rewatched a couple clips from it and maybe this was, uh, bad and I was totally wrong. If nothing else this doing what it did the way it did it and then Invincible dropping about half a year later didn't do it any favors.
Justice League X RWBY: Super Heroes and Huntsmen, Part One: An honorable mention counted despite being a team-up because it just now came out. It's exactly what you'd expect of an anime DTV that's also a DC DTV, which is to say not very good compared to the source material in either case. But y'know what I'm the one person on Earth who wanted this and I can't complain they didn't assign the one person on Earth who put serious thought into how this should work (i.e. also me) on it, so I enjoyed it for the freak occurrence it was that at least did solid work with one unexpected character dynamic. As for the Superman of it all, the redesign kicks, it put him parallel the character I wanted him explicitly parallel to, I had a good chuckle at fans throwing a fit over one totally innocuous moment, and he does a Superman wink later at one point, so thumbs up.
Into the thick of it! I'll be watching one of these per night and you'll get my immediate after-the-fact reactions. I'll be skipping 1984's Supergirl for two reasons:
It turns out Superman Unbound originally came out on my birthday, and if I start tonight - May 3rd - and cut Supergirl I'll now be watching that on my birthday this year for its 10th anniversary!
I have heard it is quite bad, whereas I have heard the other two not-strictly-Superman movies I've added are quite good. Based on this very important qualifier, I have decided those make the cut while this doesn't.
Superman and the Mole Men: Easily the one I was most excited for, and now for sure the one to beat. A corny 50s B-horror movie which happens to have Superman in it - and I do not mean that as a complaint - they didn't exactly have flight figured out yet, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a bullet actually bounce off of his chest. George Reeves remains the best to ever do it and the banter with Phyllis Coates is off the charts (even if I'm not fond of him getting put over as cleverer, but 1950s, wasn't exactly expecting otherwise, I'm just glad it's recognizably Lois at all with a couple quality moments). While his disguise is practically nonexistent, there's a neat wrinkle where the snarky, clever, forthright Clark who ducks away at danger is understandably seen as a self-righteous blowhard by Lois, so vibes-wise it feels believable people don't see it when Superman's the one who can back up the big talk; there's even a neat moment here where he forgets himself and fails when he tries to put Superman authoritativeness on Clark. And technically with the focus on the two of them this is the Lois-and-Clark reporter movie people say they want! It's just that instead of Saving America they're dealing with mole people.
That's the thing really; since this was a trial run for the show rather than The Superman Movie there was no impetus for it to be a sweeping definitive take, so it could 'just' be a schlocky red scare social allegory that happens to have a furious moral authority who's bulletproof and thus allows it to conclude as melancholy rather than outright tragic. And even in that context it builds to the lightly radical premise of Superman defending the embodiment of America's fears from the people of the nation, giving it a more legitimate claim to being About Something than the average Important Superman text. And I have to note as well this had the most visceral depiction of 'super strength' I've ever seen: Superman lifting a mountain is delightful but abstract. Superman lifting a car you can wrap your head around. But Superman casually wading through an enraged mob, snatching the guns out of 50s tough guys' hands while they're fuming and fighting and trying to in any way impede him and there's just nothing they can do? Actively jarring, an entirely different sense of 'this person isn't strong the way normal people are strong', and it brought some of the magic back.
Did what I hoped it would, which was remind me how great The Adventures of Superman was. The perfect-for-what-it-is product of the in retrospect vanishingly brief interval between everyone basically figuring out how Superman works, and everyone going way up their asses about how Superman works.
Superman III: Oh, Superman III, I was really banking on you to be the hidden gem of the bunch and I ultimately couldn't get through you in a single sitting. The problem isn't even that it's actively bad - there's a lot of good material in here mixed in with the mediocre, and this may be my favorite of Reeve's performances in the part as he has to lend an authentic humanity to the Clark persona the first two movies typically didn't - but the whole thing comes across as airless and meandering, a slapdash ménage of gags and emotional threads and high concepts looking for a story they all belong in. It's a cheapo downgrade installment in its franchise (you can SURE tell how bad they wanted Lex back for this one) and what's worse is it knows it, when with a script that tied everything together thematically and provided some forward momentum it may well have overcome its initial circumstances to be something special.
Unsurprisingly the EVIL Superman stuff has aged best - you can tell he's EVIL Superman because his costume is so desaturated it looks like regular modern Superman - mostly because it's less interested in the concept as a horror story than a pathetic tragedy. EVIL Superman just sucks real bad and hates himself for it, but can't find the strength to course-correct until a kid's belief in him so overwhelms him with shame he has to split in two and fight himself in a junkyard. The scene in question is less Clark vs. Superman than the ordinary good man - the one Annette O'Toole's smitten with for doing his best to help out - against all the petty shit he normally represses making up "a normal person", and only when the former overcomes the latter can he become Superman proper again. It's ultimately a sideshow that in no way saves the movie as a whole, despite nice touches like 'Superman' never wanting to land the killing blow on 'Clark' himself but instead always trying to have a machine or blunt object do it before turning away in subdued shame. But I suspect Reeve's depiction of a Superman made deeply pitiful for the loss of his fortitude inspired some of Morrison's work with the character down the line, whose own various EVIL Supermen tend to land closer to 'this guy is a total loser who may or may not be getting cucked by Owlman at this very moment' than the apocalypse most other writers characterize that situation as.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace: Fuck. Oh fuck. If there's one thing I didn't imagine and certainly didn't want to come out of this as it was a Superman IV apologist, but it kinda got me there. There's one scene with the return of the goddamn amnesia kiss that's the worst in all four movies and only doesn't sink this because it isn't load-bearing narratively, there're some corny moments, the effects are...inconsistent (some of it's actually fine-looking, some of it is as bad as you've seen and heard), Nuclear Man's a nothing lesser-MCU scrub baddie, but I dunno on balance this one was pretty fun? If III felt like it was scrambling for an identity now that it was no longer the biggest non-Star Wars thing in the world, IV is totally comfortable in its own skin as a matinee schlockfest with some earnest heart carried by Reeve, Kidder, and Hackman. And I thought it did a lovely job in that capacity with everybody doing solid work on frequently enjoyable material, with more than a handful of sequences that properly bring it emotionally.
Forget the budget honestly, 90% of my often minor issues with the movie could've been solved with minor recuts and a script pass. This thing was neeeeeeeeever gonna be one of the greats, I can't say I'm surprised this killed the franchise, but it's a shame even the people involved felt bad about it because frankly I think Christopher Reeve had nothing to be ashamed of even if I know it fell far short of his original vision. It's no Batman and Robin in terms of 'everybody shut up this is GOOD actually', and it's certainly no Superman and the Mole Men, but what a pleasant surprise I found this. God, maybe I'll have to double back and do Supergirl after all if I'm already this far afield of the common consensus and my initial suspicions can be this far off? Y'know what, new plan, I'll reshuffle the not-fully-Superman ones to go at the end, so up next after a day's break is:
Superman: Unbound: Trash. Listing its handful of decent aspects would be giving it too much credit; enumerating its failings would be paying it too much attention. A soft fart in a crowded room, a quickly-forgotten wrinkled nose and nothing more. Fortunately though I also watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and that was excellent, he still wouldn't be my directorial choice but on the writing front I feel more secure than ever that Gunn'll bring it for Superman: Legacy. And happy birthday to me, watching the clip in question from this evening it looks like Gunn isn't joking that Krypto's gonna be in this baby too.
Superman: Red Son: A pair of proclamations:
1. Yes, of course J.M. DeMatteis is a better writer than Mark Millar.
2. There is no Millar work he could adapt that he wouldn’t make substantially worse. The dude just doesn’t get it. Hell, that’s not even a knock on him, but there’s a thing to get with those and it’s not what he’s in the business of.
The thing about Red Son the comic, to me, is I don't think Mark really cares that much about the nominal premise. Obviously it's what prompted him to make the book, but where his imagination runs away with him is the history of Superman up to that point - act one he's an urban savior who ultimately fights an atomic monster and becomes a national symbol, act two he's battling supervillains with his buddies and saving the world until everything goes wrong in the wake of a battle with Batman, act three he has to contend with Old Superman storytelling and President Luthor and all those big 'must there be a Superman?' questions - reframed as a decades-spanning duel between him and Lex as global leaders with the political pieces at hand. It's him doing a big dopey superhero thing with his characteristic at-least-one-big-idea-every-few-pages compression, and as this was back when he was interested in storytelling and human emotion, as well as being about a set of characters he cares about and knows how to handle properly, he does an enjoyable job with it.
DeMatteis however is not a dorky crazy-idea-superhero-comics guy. He's a respectable writer who tries to skim this down to its respectable surface-level 'Cold War through the lens of this popular American iconography' pitch, but in the form of a cheapo hour-and-a-half decompressed DC DTV movie for the kind of people who buy all of those. As such it's not awful but not very good either. Props to the art style however, 'what if the DCAU had Dave Johnson-looking characters in it' works a lot better than their usual approach of 'let's do Dave Johnson, but bad'.
Supergirl: At 45ish minutes in and as a non-Superman film I'm invoking my executive right to bail on this, which lemme tell you is no Quest For Peace. It's a shame as I think the movie looks pretty great, there's some wonderful set design and Supergirl's first flight (well, her first full flight, as opposed to her first takeoff where you can see the wire) is one of my favorite hero-discovering-their-power sequences in any movie ever, reveling in the casual delight of the power in a way that felt 'real' in a very different way from most takes. But any time anybody other than Peter O'Toole opens their mouths? Instantly downhill, this thing can only envy Superman III's focused intent and sober self-seriousness. Well past the point where there's any reason to think it'll get any better, and as I understand it scrapped all Superman connections altogether I'll also be bypassing Steel (1997) now that I've remembered that exists too.
Hollywoodland: For those unfamiliar, a fictionalized drama on the mystery surrounding George Reeves' death, and an engaging, thoroughly dadcore film picking apart egos, exploitations, and self-perceived failures on a road with no satisfying destination for any of the dejected players involved. Ben Affleck does a wonderful job balancing sublime charisma with a bleeding need to be saved from his life's oncoming trajectory, Diane Lane conveys a convincing desperation to feed and be fed by this man's love, and Adrien Brody's an incredibly entertaining sleazy piece of shit who can in the end only take away from the film's events, if not the strength to be a superman, the understanding that his kid deserves to have someone to look up in the sky at. Also Bob Hoskins plays a real bastard in it, it's great.
Special note to the first shot of Affleck in the Superman suit - with the initial soft focus on the cape doing the job of conveying the 'mythic' weight of the moment the audience expects, before landing on a shot of an unflattering angle from beneath highlighting his gut so we can see what he sees with this ridiculous getup - and his line after faceplanting in the first flight test "I'd like to thank the academy, and all the fine people of Galesburg, Illinois who made me who I am today", which cracked me up with the reminder I attended college in his hometown. Fun fact, my dad was delighted to find a TV set once owned by Jack Larson in the neighborhood, only to discover it was a beloved local radio host instead of the former Jimmy Olsen; we learned the much bigger connection later. You'd think that'd be the only thing anyone there would ever talk about, but I suppose most people have different priorities from my family.
DC League of Super-Pets: I want more to say about the final entry here, but all I really got is 'well that was pretty cute'. Nice little kids movie, some eye-popping inclusions in the voice cast, the core Krypto & Superman dynamic was fun. Probably the best take on Metropolis in any medium, at least up there with Steve Rude's. And boy is that final post-credits scene of a certain moment in time.
With all said and done: did I come away from this showcase with any new thoughts for Superman: Legacy?
Hell no, my two favorites here besides Hollywoodland were the cheapest ones and one of them was IV, nobody should listen to me on this. Good Miracle Monday!
Next time (besides the Whowatches): No capes this time. Instead, swords. Hell yes.