Yoko, my beloved, has a different take. She points out that SR is not really about Superman (and his Returning and such); no, it's really about Lois Lane.
What follows contains spoilers (or not, if you watched the trailers, but still), so I hope I got that spoiler-tag fixed a while back. For safety's sake, here's a bunch of filler.
SR takes place five years after Superman has suddenly split to go investigate the ruins of Krypton, spectacularly blown up in the first ten minutes or so of the film. Superman comes back to discover that Lois has a kid and a not-husband, James Marsden (who really, really would have looked better with Cyclops' visor on, but that would have been an utterly different movie). The crux of the story from that point forward is not how does Clark get Lois back (I mean, c'mon, how dickish would Superman have to be to steal her from the guy who helped her put her life back together after Superman disappeared?), but whether Lois should really want to get back together with Superman in the first place. The story is compounded by the issue of whose kid Lois had in the first place. Does she know?
More importantly, does James Marsden know? Because if he does, then +100 points for House Marsden, man! It takes a real hero to love and cherish beyond the issue of your beloved's issue, so to speak. And if he does know, then the story is even more complex: how should he react to Supes showing back up again? Should he accept help from the so-called superhero who dropped the lovely Miss Lane without a word to go starhopping? Or should it be fisticuffs or kryptonite sabres at 20 yards?
The thing is, we just don't know if they know (up until Lane Jr. crushes a dude with a piano on Lex Luthor's boat). But armed with this subtext, we can approach the movie from a different perspective, a more adult perspective. Instead of being light-hearted boy meets girl, boy beats up villain, boy gets girl, we get a more modern, more realisitic, more mature movie.
In the end, of course, Superman is an alien, a perfect being, and so his reaction is the high ground, so to speak, flying away into the night, leaving Lois and James to muddle through the rest as only human beings can do, and leaving us, the audience, to wonder what might have happened if they'd had actors who might actually have been capable of pulling this fascinating story off.
Now excuse me while I go run around the house in a red cape one more time before bed.
2 comments:
All i can say is that Kurtz better get back to the funny, because that Shecky arc was painfully lame, and what he's done since has been flat.
This is, in fact, the only PVPonline I've linked to, much for the reasons you've mentioned.
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