Perhaps you’ve heard about a little movie that’s opening this week called “Man of Steel” with a character you might have heard of called Superman. The small, under-the-radar, kitchen sink drama follows the adventures of one Superman as he struggles with the kind of identity issues familiar to many x-ray sighted, preternaturally strong orphan aliens gifted with the power of flight, and saves humankind from a terrible peril. Our review will be coming later today, and while we’re not going to include “Man of Steel” in our rating of the Superman films right now, come back next week when more of us have seen it and you can argue over its correct placement.
Part of what makes Superman so compelling is how, all the way back in the 1930s, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel basically cannily repackaged a whole host of ancient myths and archetypes into a brightly-colored, exciting new format — the comic strip — and how in the years since, the Superman story has essentially ingrained itself into our collective pop culture experience to the point of becoming itself one of those very myths. But if the Superman story now exists in a kind of timeless, unassailable position in the hive mind, the films it inspired don’t necessarily share that honor. Often reflecting the times they were made in, in rather obvious and distracting ways (computers! nuclear paranoia!), not all the movie incarnations come close to embodying what’s so endlessly engaging about the Superman story. Here’s how we reckon the existing theatrical releases stack up against each other, in reverse order of quality.
Worst: “Superman IV: The Quest For Peace”
This is probably the nadir of Superman movies this far for so, so many reasons, but chief among them has to be simply the shoddiness and cheapness of the whole endeavor. With original producers the Salkinds having sold the rights to Cannon Films, a low-budget outfit at heart, production costs were cut from the outset, with Christopher Reeve recalling, about the scene outside the United Nations building which was shot for budgetary reasons in Milton Keynes, England, that “[we were] hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments…Even if the story had been brilliant, I don’t think that we could ever have lived up to the audience’s expectations with this approach.” And sheesh is the story ever not brilliant. Reeve is game, and Gene Hackman returns as Lex Luthor after his principled absence from the third film, but the supporting cast are horribly underwritten, from Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) to hardheaded businesswoman Lacy (Mariel Hemingway) who’s seemingly turned from her ruthless tabloid ways by a single glimpse of Clark Kent.
Worst, it’s all in service of a dull, preachy plot about nuclear proliferation that builds to undoubtedly the single lamest foe our onscreen Supes has ever faced in Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow, voiced by Gene Hackman). While ostensibly supposed to be a kind of inverse (almost Bizarro) Superman, borne of the Kryptonian’s DNA and forged in the radiation of the sun, in fact Nuclear Man is hampered by the absolute worst Achilles heel: he shuts down completely when not standing in direct sunlight. So, yeah, Superman with his laser beams and super-strength and flight and everything is a teensy bit under-matched when his foe can be defeated by shade, or, you know, going inside. Which makes it all the more ridiculous that Supes has to move the moon to cause an eclipse in order to best him.
It’s basically a huge d’oh of a movie from beginning to end, and to think that there exists somewhere a rumored additional 45 minutes of footage, featuring a second Nuclear Man (actually the first chronologically, and even weaker than the one who remains) that was cut out because of poisonous test screenings… the mind boggles. And don’t get us started on the awfulness of Jon Cryer as Luthor’s nephew (who actually refers to Superman as “the Dude of Steel!”), or the sudden obsession Nuclear Man develops with Lacy or… we could go on. Interesting aside though, part of Reeve’s deal in donning the cape a fourth time was that Cannon would finance his next project. The result, “Street Smart” may not have troubled the box office in any big way, but it’s an interesting little film that did a great job of launching Morgan Freeman to stardom and to a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In all other ways, ‘The Quest for Peace’ is a failure, and director Sidney J. Furie, with the exception of the Diana Ross Billie Holiday Biopic “Lady Sings the Blues,” has the kind of back catalog of titles that make you wonder if you’ve strayed into a parallel universe — everything sounds like a movie you’ve heard of, but isn’t it.
Choice quote: Superman: “You’ve broken all the laws of man, Luthor. Now it looks as though you’ve broken all the laws of nature, too. I can only assume you must have hidden a device of some kind on one of the missiles I hurled into the sun.”