Superman Week Part 6

After the horrible films in 3, 4, and even the spinoff, Supergirl, the Superman franchise was laid to rest for many years, much like how they did with the Batman franchise. After 19 years, Bryan Ratner left, failing several attempts at trying to bring Superman back, and so did Joseph McGinty "McG" Nichol. Finally, Bryan Singer approached the project, and he was also said to be a childhood friend of Richard Donner. Warner Bros. asked him if he could do another Superman movie, and he accepted, leaving two other films in pre-production, "X-Men: The Last Stand" (which would be directed by Ratner), and the remake of "Logan’s Run." The smart thing Singer did was that he made the 2006 film, "Superman Returns," ignore the events from 3 and 4, and instead made it an alternate sequel to "Superman 2."

The story of this film is that Superman returns to Earth after a five-year search for the survivors of his home planet, Krypton. When he returns, he finds out that Lois Lane, played by Kate Bosworth, now has a son, played by Tristan Lake Leabu, and is now engaged to Richard White, played by James Marsden. Singer followed the casting choice like how Donner did, and chose Brandon Routh to play Clark Kent/Superman, who sort of looked like Christopher Reeves. More high profile actors in the supporting roles were casted, like one of the greatest actors, Kevin Spacey, to play Lex Luthor and another great actor, Frank Langella, as the Daily Planet head, Perry White. Eva Marie Saint plays Martha Kent, Superman's Earth mother.

For this film, Singer brought the entire crew from "X2" to work on it. They even used digitally-enhanced archive footage of the late Marlon Brando to appear as Jor-El in this. "Superman Returns" was positively received and made $391 million worldwide.

Now the big question you’re probably asking is, “How is this film compared to the previous sequels?” In my honest opinion, I think it’s better than 3 and 4, but the first two are still better. The reason why is because for the first half of the film, it really is good. Up until the climax of the film when Superman saves that airplane and has it land safely in the baseball field, it then becomes too predictable. Examples of this include another rip off of the romantic flying sequence from the first film, and how Lex Luthor is using his power to take down Superman and take over Metropolis. If you remember near the end of the movie Lex Luthor makes an island out of Superman’s weakness, kryptonite. That’s the reason why the last half of the film is not really so well, because it borrows heavily from the first film. Also, it makes it look unremarkable.

Of course the dumbest moment of this film is the casting for Superman and Lois. Kate Bosworth and Brandon Routh don’t really look old enough to play the parts. Well, they probably are, but they look like teenagers out of high school that were casted for this film. It’s like they were supposed to be in that horrible Superman sitcom, "Smallville," which I think we can all agree, it was really bad. Thankfully their careers were saved by being in this film instead. Also, their acting didn’t make them suitable for the roles, they just were very bland. Brandon Routh doesn’t really have much dialogue in this film, but he’s not anywhere as memorable as Christopher Reeves was.

Well I can’t really say much about this film because it didn’t really leave an impact on me that I could give a thorough review of it. So I’ll just end it here with this cliffhanger for the finale tomorrow: Will there be a sequel to this film? Or will the people finally realize that this franchise needs a reboot? All of that will be found out in tomorrow’s finale. Up, up and away!