"Superman Returns" was terrible, part 1

SPOILERS ABOUND!
But the movie sucks anyway... so, don't worry about getting spoiled.

I just got around to watching this movie. Yeah, I know it’s pretty old by now (by “when you should have reviewed it” standards, I mean), but I have an aversion to Superman. I think he’s a twat.

While Superman is gone for five years, Lex Luthor is apparently let out of prison on a technicality (which mostly seems to revolve around the idea that Superman didn’t show up to court one day). You’d think with the whole “launching missiles at the west coast” thing of Superman I and “aiding in taking the country hostage” thing in Superman II he’d be locked up for quite some time regardless of whether Superman was able to be a witness.



At least in Superman II it was said that Lex escaped prison with the help of his girlfriend at the time. The most confusing thing about that scenario was that the girl was the same one from Superman I, which, if we all remember the movie, (I barely do), Lex launched a NUCLEAR WEAPON at her hometown, causing her to help Superman in the first place. Now, I know a lot of women who stay with shitty guys, but that’s a bit too much. Getting slapped is one thing, launching a nuclear weapon at your family and friends is another.

But, I have found two interesting cases of this type of thing happening:




Anyway, Lex gets out on the technicality or something in Sueprman Returns and goes to the Fortress of Solitude which, because of Superman II, Superman knows he’s found. One thing that Superman has forgotten to do is to put a security system somewhere on, in, or around his invaluable fortress that espouses the vast technological knowledge of various alien planets. That makes it less of a “fortress” and more of a “public park”.



Frankly, knowing how forgetful (or neglectful) he is, it makes more sense why he wears his underwear outside of his pants.



Lex takes some Fortress crystals back to Metropolis and decide it’d be a good idea to throw them in water, because… why not? Did anyone else notice that Lex Luthor’s train dolls scream, by the way? If the movie wasn’t corny enough, we have screaming dolls on Lex’s crazy-man train set.



Meanwhile, Superman saves a plane and asks the passengers to not let this whole almost dying thing put them off of flying because “statistically speaking, it’s the safest way to travel”. It almost sounds like whoever wrote for the monstrosity that was Batman and Robin came out of hiding to write for Superman.



One of my favorite gaps in the movie is that no one seems to ask where Clark Kent was for five years. Well, fuck him. I know that if I left a place for five years and came back, people may have some questions about where I was. Oh, yeah… that happened when I went to college and came back. Of course, there were no questions asked since Clark put in his two weeks before flying off to his homeworld of KryyyyyyiiiiIIIII mean, seeing llamas (literally, I think this was the only bit of information about what Clark told people he was doing).


Foolproof alibi.

Somewhere in this clusterfuck of not the plot, Lois is said to have a child. The child, (who I think actually lives in the vents of the Daily Planet building because he’s never anywhere else) has asthma, rickets, gout, peanut allergies, epilepsy, an affinity for strange men in large vans, agoraphobia, xenophobia, depression, and hysterical pregnancy. But, since it’s rubbed in our face that there’s no way that it’s Superman’s kid even though it was jut pointed out that they did, in fact, fuck right before he left, I suppose I’ll go out on a limb and say that I think it’s Superman’s kid and the disorder that the child really is struck by is Munchausen’s Syndrome.



I should mention that I looked at the timer around this point and noticed that 50 minutes of the movie had passed. For comparison, let’s look at the first 50 minutes of The Dark Knight:

Batman is hunting down the mob, who is contacted by Joker who has been stealing their money in order to attract their attention. Joker negotiates with the mobsters that he will kill Batman for a price. In order to find Batman to kill him, Joker threatens to kill public figures every day that Batman doesn’t reveal himself. The judge hearing the mob trials and the police commissioner are killed while Harvey Dent, the new district attorney, is targeted.

It's full of plot-y goodness. What do we know about the main plot of Superman Returns in this 50 minutes?

Lex Luthor stole some crystals from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Why? Power or money maybe.

See? It's as plain and uninspired as Amish sex.



Apparently, around this time, the plot starts to happen some more. Luthor breaks into the Metropolis Natural History Museum and apparently has to turn off some lights and punch a pane of glass in order to grab a priceless alien meteorite. I guess the museum took the “Fortress of Solitude” method of security.



Lois makes sure to be a good role model by doing some good old fashioned trespassing with him while on the clock. She finds some wigs which, of course, points to Lex Luthor! After this scene, the kid says to Lex Luthor “you’re bald” which gives him the prestigious “Most Observant Person in Metropolis” award.


The previous recipient of “The Most Observant Person in Metropolis”

Lex Luthor falls for the old “explaining my plan” cliché instead of just killing the kid and Lois. He apparently needs them alive because………………….. his henchman needs to play piano with the kid. It’s worth noting that the henchman only plays piano with the kid in order to not hear the fax machine. Seriously, he has no motivation to do it at all.

Just so there’s no confusion, Lex’s plan involves sinking and destroying large portions of land so that he can make money off of the land he owns (a lot like Superman I).

After Lois faxes the coordinates that Lex said very loudly for all to hear, they arrive at the Daily Planet where Jimmy has no clue what they are, and Perry thinks that the two numbers followed by the words “HELP ME” are lotto numbers.


After buying this at Payless Shoes, Perry locked this mysterious box in his closet, trying to figure out what could possibly be inside.

This type of astute observational skill is the same reason that the following two things happen after Lex throws the land-making crystals into the ocean:
- Lex does not ask anyone to move the boat, even though his plan involves making a continent.
- Lex’s girlfriend says “Lex, [the ocean] is not like a train set.”
I know the last statement is complicated, so here’s a picture for those of you from Metropolis:



Anyway, the kid ends up killing the henchman that’s keeping them hostage by throwing a piano on him. So, this means two things: the kid is Superman’s son and the kid is a murderer. It’s nice to see that Lex made him flinch with a kryptonite rod two inches away from him, but the kryptonite landmass that’s growing under him actually seems to give him powers (until they are locked in another room or about to drown in a boat).



Instead of Superboy breaking out of the aforementioned room, Richard takes his seaplane, flies through stormy weather, lands on a choppy ocean (which he says he can’t even take off on, but does late *spoiler alert!*), finds his way onto a yacht from the seaplane landed in the choppy ocean, and finds Lois and Superboy in the kitchen pantry of a boat filled with armed guards all within the course of a few minutes.

A spike of the kryptonite island rips the boat in half, which Superman effortlessly hoists into the air (mere feet from the giant 40 foot spike of kryptonite) and saves Lois, Richard, and Superboy.

Superman finds his way onto the island (quickly locating Lex Luthor) and then walks up to him all badass like until Lex Luthor punches him in the chest and Superman acts like he just got punched by Agent fucking Smith.

Of course, when Richard is up in the air, Lois decides that her child hasn’t had the fear of God put in him enough so she demands that they turn back because that Pulitzer sense she has is tingling and she surmises that Superman may be too dumb to not step on the kryptonite island (or to get off of it when he starts to sweat and notice that he’s in pain, as if Luthor didn’t use kryptonite in the first movie).

Lex’s girlfriend starts to have second thoughts (as they always do) since she wasn’t aware that he was willing to kill billions of people even though he’s Lex motherfucking Luthor. She seemed to be surprised when he was in the middle of his “murder Superman” plan, which makes me worry for Metropolis’ neighborhood watch programs.



Another supervillain cliché! Lex stabs Superman in the kidney with a kryptonite shiv and then decides to wander away instead of actually killing him. I mean, I suppose he could get away with “I want to watch you die” and standing there, but to tell me that he’s not even a man that’s going to stand back and take satisfaction in his work? Pssh. Whatever, Superman falls about 150 feet into the jagged rocks and sea below. Since he just got his shit rocked by Kevin Spacey, I imagine that would have killed him.

Of course it didn’t, because Superman lives in a land of rubber band reality that can stretch and bend as the writers see fit!



The best example of this type of reality is where Superman is lifting up the island made entirely out of Kryptonite. And don’t give me that “he photosynthesized right before” shit, because he was having trouble lifting a plane in the first scene of the movie while it was in the sky, during a cloudless day. He was in the sun for ten seconds and now he can lift 1000 tons of kryptonite into the stratosphere? Even if I did buy that (I don’t), don’t tell me that it made him go unconscious and he still survived reentry. Oh, wait… he did? Maybe during the fall, he wasn’t being exposed to kryptonite so he was able to, luckily, recharge on the way down. Oh, there was kryptonite inside of him?

At this point, I had concluded that the plot holes weren’t accidental, but completely intentional.


The writer of Superman Returns next to the physical manifestation of his idea of a linear plot.

As Superman was being rushed into the ER, I wondered if this movie would end up anything like Alien Autopsy.


I sure hope so!

Lois Lane walks into the hospital, unopposed, since, as we all know, they’ll let reporters into your hospital room. They’re just like friends and family! If you don’t have any friends or family, the first reporter in is your next of kin, legally speaking.

Anyway, Lois leaves the hospital and was asked questions by a bunch of reporters. The only way it would have been more meta is if she asked them questions back.

Lex flies his helicopter from the Jersey shore allllllll the way to some small island in the middle of the Pacific. Good for the smartest criminal in the world, not flying to the mainland.

Superman has a pedophile moment.

Fin!

The plot of "Avatar" in pictures