BEFORE: Well, I've avoided this one long enough. Time to see if I was write in the 1980's when I bailed on the Superman series after the 2nd film. I just didn't think Richard Pryor had any right being put in a superhero film, and everything else I saw about this film just seemed equally silly. Linking from "Green Lantern", Ryan Reynolds was in "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" with Fred Willard, who was also in "Silver Streak" with Richard Pryor (last seen in "Another You")
THE PLOT: Synthetic kryptonite laced with tobacco tar splits Superman in two: good Clark Kent and bad Man of Steel.
AFTER: Man, but this is a hot mess of a movie. I hardly know where to begin.
For starters, they should never have let the director of "A Hard Day's Night" and "The Three Musketeers" anywhere near a superhero film. Slapstick and superpowers do not go well together. It's like how my BFF Andy complains every year (and rightfully so) about the Oscars, when they present an award to the director of an animated short about an orphan during wartime, and play him off with the theme from "Looney Tunes". Yes, Superman came from the same medium as cartoon characters, but you're NOT making a cartoon, are you? Superhero films should be more serious business.
Now, about what passes for a plot - an unemployed man takes one computer course and realizes he's a master programmer. Because that could be an actual inherent skill - you don't study for years for that sort of thing. It's also clear that the director didn't understand computers at all, either (more on that later). He gets an entry-level computer job, and after just one paycheck, he starts wondering about those half-cent deductions from his check, and what happens to the other half-cent, and before you know it, he's reprogrammed the payroll computers to give him all the fractions in a large check. Turns out all computers can talk to each other, even before the internet was invented...plus, I think I've seen that fraction of a cent thing in other movies, right? "Hackers" for one, plus "Office Space", which referenced this film.
This brings him to the attention of the company CEO, who, instead of firing him on the spot, puts him to work re-programming all the computers in the world (wait, what?) to help him rip-off the world on a larger scale. Because if he can get all the oil tankers in the world to the middle of the Atlantic, and he can get all of those tankers' captains to follow ONLY the orders from their navigational computers, and not respond to verbal commands or their own common sense, then he will profit somehow. There should be a lesson in supply-and-demand economics in there, but there kinda isn't. Instead we just see all the citizens of Metropolis fighting over one gas pump.
It gets worse - the team of villains use their computing power to create fake kryptonite - because that's what computers are really good at, making synthetic rocks (?) - and instead of killing Superman, it turns him evil, then makes him have a nervous breakdown, then splits him into two beings so he can have a fight with himself in a junkyard. This could be seen as a symbolic crisis of conscience, but the duality is wrong. Superman's struggle is not good vs. evil, it's Superman vs. Clark Kent, man vs. Superman, and neither one is evil.
Then there's a final showdown with the super-computer, which takes up a giant cave in the Grand Canyon, but has a tiny viewscreen with the same graphics as a Commodore 64. And as we all know from the 1980's, if you put too many pieces of computer hardware together, the resulting machine will become self-aware and start turning people into cyborgs to protect itself. It was a weird decade, just look it up, kids. And the "Man of Steel" is really no match for a bunch of wires, as anyone who ever tried to hook up a stereo system can confirm.
It turns out that without a good villain like Lex Luthor, the whole thing tends to unravel. You'd think that with 50 years of Superman comics you could just pick another villain and drop him in there - Bizarro, Brainiac, Metallo, Parasite, just to name a few. So why didn't they? It's easy to see why they pretended like this film never happened when they re-booted the franchise - oh, how I wish I could do the same.
NITPICK POINT: Superman rescues a man from a car that ran over a hydrant and is filling up with water by ripping off the top of the car. Couldn't the guy have just rolled down his window?
Also starring Christopher Reeve (last seen in "Noises Off"), Robert Vaughn (last seen in "The Towering Inferno"), Annette O'Toole (last seen in "It"), Margot Kidder, Jackie Cooper, Pamela Stephenson, Annie Ross.
RATING: 3 out of 10 MX missiles
This was a fun movie for a snotty kid who was unwilling to accept that any movie that features computers should not be held to the same standards of accuracy as a documentary about computers.
ReplyDeleteI particularly remember the scene in which Superman is flying through the canyon towards the Evil Self-Aware Computer. It's tracking him and activating an remotely-operated defense grid, and representing the whole thing as though it were a video game.
"A computer could NEVER to live, interactive graphics of THAT resolution and THAT many colors and with THAT kind of fluidity!" I sneered.
Yes, of course: there are more pixels in a MacOS application icon today than in that entire frame of animation. I remember that incident every time I think about how difficult it is to define "fantastic future technology."