PG, 154 min. (director’s
cut)
Director: Richard Donner
Writers: Mario Puzo, David
Newman, Leslie Newman, Robert Benton, Jerry Siegel (creator), Joe Shuster
(creator)
Starring: Christopher Reeve,
Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty, Marlon Brando, Jackie Cooper, Valerie
Perrine, Marc McClure, Glenn Ford, Phyllis Thaxter, Susannah York, Trevor
Howard, Terence Stamp, Jack O’Halloran, Sarah Douglas, Maria Schell, Harry
Andrews, Jeff East
There is a mindset of
extreme scrutiny that has developed through our pop culture obsessions driving
our generation to consume the influences of our childhood in mass quantities.
Recently the latest in a long line of “Star Trek” franchise vehicles has opened
at the box office to rave reviews by critics and good mainstream audience
reaction. The film’s harshest—and pretty much sole—critics have been those
bringing some sort of history or childhood connection to the events depicted in
the film. Because it isn’t the same presentation of ideas that held emotional
resonance with them as children, they nit pick at all the details of the
picture to prove the validity of their arguments against it, when really their
complaint is that absence of the same emotional resonance they felt as
children. The details of the film hardly matter.
Even as a critic who tries
to defend his opinions in an unbiased nature, I often find myself using the
plot incongruities and little detail flaws to make my point, but even the best
of movies can be taken apart at the seems if you look closely enough at the
details. 1978’s “Superman: The Movie” is a prime example of a movie that got it
right in terms of emotional resonance, but is a total mess if you try to pick
it apart. Ask any fan of the movie about those plot and detail flaws, however,
an they’ll say it’s all part of the charm of the film.
“Superman: The Movie” was
the first movie that got the whole comic book superhero genre right. It stayed
the only one for quite some time. Although, 1989’s “Batman” gave us all hope
they there might be some understanding in Hollywood of what they were
attempting to capture, they never really got it right again until the
mid-aughts with “Spider-Man 2” and “Batman Begins”, 2000’s “X-Men” movie got
most of the broad strokes right, but was a little too ambitious an undertaking
to get all the way there. “Superman”
got it right the first time, though.
I don’t know if director
Richard Donner was a fan or not, but it’s obvious when watching his director’s
cut of the film that he understood just how important the origin story of
Superman is to the iconography of the character. Superman isn’t just a flying
caped crusader for American justice who’s nearly indestructible but can be
weakened by a rock from his own planet. All those things are in here but are
meaningless without that alien background. He comes from a superior race that
allowed their arrogance to lead to their own destruction. He’s humble. He’s
different no matter how much he looks like us because the fact that he is an
alien is undeniable to him. And he’s in America as the ultimate example of our
melting pot of cultures and hope for something better than what we are. He can
lead us to become something better and in doing so hope to be something better
than what his own people ultimately were. Donner has all that in his director’s
cut. Some of that was actually missing from the theatrical cut, although since
Donner had put in the work for it in his ultimate vision, it can be felt even
in the version in which it is not the focus.
Donner was also smart enough
to realize that Superman is a hero who doesn’t work if everything is taken too
seriously. He understands that the comic book superhero genre is fantasy and
can use a little ribbing. He understood the differences between the source
format and the film format. Some things need to change in the transition. Lex
Luther needs different motivations and needs some lackeys to play off of. The
villain can’t just be evil; he must also appeal to a film going audience.
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