Friday, June 23, 2006

Review: "Superman Returns"

The movie, “Superman Returns,” is scheduled to debut this month across the country.
But the story has been out for weeks (at least) in the novelization by Marv Wolfman.
“The movie is never the same as the book,” my wife, Linda, points out, but at least we have the general gist of the story to think about before we plunk down our money at the show.
“Superman Returns” does not make the same mistake other comic book movies make — retelling the hero’s origin. We had that in 1951 when “The Adventures of Superman” (now available on DVD) told Superman’s Kryptonian beginnings in its first episode. Then, in the 1970s, the move,” Superman” told the story over again. The only redeeming part of that movie was that it explained how the Fortress of Solitude grew from a crystal.
In “Superman Returns,” we learn how he is duped into building a spaceship to carry him to the location of Krypton before it was destroyed by internal explosions when he was a baby. (He has no super powers under the sun that warmed Krypton.) His parents placed him in a crystal spaceship (Kryptonians were big into grow-your-own-crystals technology) and sent him to Earth, a primitive planet with a yellow sun, much younger than Krypton's sun.
When Superman arrives at Krypton, 2 1/2 years later, he finds what is left of it to be a dead world. He flies his spaceship past buildings where Kryptonian furniture can still be seen, though no living beings exist.
Soon he is overcome by kryptonite radiation and has to tell his spaceship, “Get me away from here — fast!”
The trip back to Earth takes another 2 1/2 years.
When he gets home, he finds Earth’s inhabitants did not put their lives on hold just because the big guy was out of town. His adopted mother, Martha Kent, is courting a neighbor man and plans to move to Montana. Lois Lane has moved in with Perry White’s nephew and they have a 5-year-old son.
The only person who seems unchanged is Superman’s old nemesis, Lex Luthor, who has discovered Kryptonian crystalline secrets.
Thanks (?) to kryptonite, Luthor makes Superman physically inferior to himself in order to wreak revenge on the guy dressed in red and blue.
The book was entirely satisfying. I hope the movie lives up to it.

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