Sorry, I’m back on this topic again.
No, I’m not sorry.
Last week, Ali and I saw a screening of Superman: The Movie at Alamo Drafthouse. I was excited to see the movie in a theater because I’ve never seen it on the big screen. I also love Alamo Drafthouse because instead of showing you lame commercials before movies they show you clips, videos, and montages relating to the feature that you are about to watch.
We saw a Max Fleischer cartoon from the 40’s, various clips of Superman sketches and skits from around the world, and more. They are a theater company that loves movies, and it shows. Plus their service and food is always great.
It was cool to see the opening credits on the big screen, and hear John Williams amazing score booming from the speakers. I was giddy from the start.
Superman: The Movie isn’t perfect. It’s campy, and terribly dated. Lex Luthor was the villain of the movie, and he had a crazy scheme to drop a missile on the San Andreas Fault to push the Californian coast off into the Pacific and create a new west coast, with land he bought dirt cheap. Extremely corny. No arguments here.
But the thing that Superman: The Movie got right, the thing that MAN OF STEEL missed completely is what it means to be Superman.
Superman is a beacon of hope. He is an ideal for us to strive for. They said all these things in the MAN OF STEEL trailers and got me really excited for the movie only to break my heart on opening night.
Rewatching Superman: The Movie was so much fun. Every time Superman did something or saved someone Christopher Reeve did it with a wink and a smile. It fit the time. That wouldn’t play in a modern movie, and I don’t expect it to. I expected the character to be updated a bit, but not completely rewritten from the ground up. Which is basically what the makers of MAN OF STEEL did. They created a new character with a similar backstory to Superman and put him in an oddly muted version of his suit.
I’m not saying that Superman: The Movie is perfect, or even what I wanted MAN OF STEEL to be. I just wanted MAN OF STEEL to understand who Superman is, like Superman: The Movie did.
MAN OF STEEL polarized viewers. People love it, or hate it. The most hardcore Superman fans that I have talked to hated it because it totally misses who Superman is. Avid film lovers and movie critics hated it because it’s a mess of a film. Casual movie goers loved it.
The sequel may be decent, but I really can’t see how with David Goyer and Zach Snyder still involved. Especially since it seems that they are stuffing in more and more characters into this movie. First it was Batman, then Wonder Woman, and the rumors on possible future casting keep coming.
I’m not looking forward to the sequel at all, and every bit of news that comes out about the sequel makes me less and less interested in it. I’m also done with this topic for a while. Until the sequel’s trailers come out, that is.
Probably.