Superman Returns

There’s a sublime sequence in Superman Returns in which the Man of Steel hangs motionless in the stratosphere (or perhaps even higher: his cape undulates gently above his head, free of the pull of gravity). As the darkened side of the Earth turns beneath his feet, he scans its surface with his superhearing, and the chaotic stream of sound fragments he pulls in somehow augments the almost religious tranquility of the scene.

Suddenly a crisis below sends him speeding back down to Earth like a missile, but not before you have a chance to think, Oh man, if only he were really up there.

As good as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and its sequel were, they never made us yearn for the security of living in a world where the web-slinger actually existed. But director Bryan Singer (X-Men) invests his revival of the first and greatest superhero property with just that level of conviction.

Tipping his hat both to the Christopher Reeve films and to Max Fleischer’s apocalyptic Technicolor cartoons of the ’40s, Singer steers clear of revisionism and gives us a traditional Superman in a quasi-contemporary setting. If you subtracted cell phones and a few other markers of modernity, this could easily be 1950.

“You’ll believe a man can fly!” promised the tagline for Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978), but we didn’t really, because the special effects it used to get Christopher Reeve off the ground weren’t much more convincing than those in the 1950s TV series starring George Reeves. The computer-generated flying effects in Superman Returns, on the other hand, require no suspension of disbelief, and the film is worth seeing just for the way it revels in the universal fantasy of bodily flight.

Singer and his effects team have also invested a lot of thought into working out the Newtonian details of Superman’s powers . Take, for example, the breathtaking sequence in which Superman narrowly prevents a plummeting, wingless jumbo jet from wiping out a crowded stadium. Positioning himself at the nose of the falling aircraft, he decelerates it as gently as he can in the space remaining between it and the pitcher’s mound, but the counterforce he provides sends a gorgeously rendered ripple of shock up the length of the fuselage. The seeming realism of the effect completely alters the emotional tenor of the scene.

The film begins with Superman (Routh) returning to Earth from a five-year space voyage. Showing up as Clark Kent at his old job at the Daily Planet, the prodigal superhero is distraught to find that Lois Lane (Bosworth) has a boyfriend and a kid. He continues mooning after her until he’s distracted by his archenemy Lex Luthor (Spacey, enjoying himself immensely), who’s up to no good with alien technology stolen from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

The specifics of Luthor’s scheme are best left for the viewer to discover, but it goes without saying that Superman’s loved ones will be put in danger and that his powers will be compromised by kryptonite. Less predictable is the way the conflict between Luthor and Superman culminates in a tacit reenactment of the passion of Christ, with the Man of Steel standing in for the Son of Man. Pop-culture purists are already criticizing Singer for tampering with the source material and/or pandering to evangelical audiences, but it seems pretty clear that the director (who’s Jewish) simply couldn’t resist tapping the Gospels for mythic resonance. It remains to be seen how evangelicals will feel about this, but Singer’s film reminds us with an excerpt from Marlon Brando’s performance in Superman: The Movie that Donner struck the same chord nearly as loudly in 1978. Of course, folks on both sides of the culture wars were much less touchy about that sort of thing back in that far-off, peaceable year.

Dir. Bryan Singer. 2006. PG-13. 2hrs 30mins. Brandon Routh, Frank Langella, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, Parker Posey.

Superman Returns is in theaters now.