Brandon at Random Reviews

Whenever I talk about my enjoyment of Superman, people are often taken aback by the notion that my comic book love extends beyond Batman. In fact I love DC and Marvel comics quite a bit across the board, I am not bound to only one character just because he happens to be my favorite. I get that there have been missteps in all comic book franchises both major and minor, but I still like to diversify my superhero love portfolio. Growing up, it all started for me with Batman. But my heart grew to include Superman (Supes) and Spider-Man (Spidey) and all the rest in due time. I’ll try and make this reasonably brief considering it’s 4 movies (with one re-cut version).

There is quite a story behind the making of these Superman movies from 1978-1987 and I’ll get into that in a bit but let’s start with the basics. We’ve got Christopher Reeve as the titular Superman/Clark Kent. I have to say his acting might be unparalleled in any other superhero movie in terms of range and the playing of the two roles as two entirely different characters to great effect. Margot Kidder portrays a spunky Lois Lane full of moxie who is often stuck in the damsel in distress position in these films. Gene Hackman brings a unique take on the character of Lex Luthor (good humored unique, not like quirky/weird/awful Jesse Eisenberg unique). I like Gene, but I do want to see a take on Lex Luthor in a movie like the one I know from the 90s animated series where the character is serious 99.9% of the time and just straight up evil and not relatable. Also in the first two movies (well the first and original director’s cut sequel) Jor-El is portrayed by the one and only Marlon Brando, who I gather was a real bag of shit to work with despite being a great actor.

John Williams’ score, as always with the movies he does, merits more praise and mention than any other film composer’s work. As the movies progressed, we heard less actual Williams and more imitation Williams than anything but his work still stands out as masterful and sets the tone for many a scene and fills my heart with childlike wonder. Just had to make sure I mentioned the greatest film composer ever while I was reviewing these.

Now the first two movies were shot either at the same time or one immediately after the other by director Richard Donner. This helped create the feel of one long continuous story that took away the sequel feel from the 2nd installment. However, executive producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind did not care for some of Richard Donner’s direction choices, particularly the ones that were causing the movies to be the most expensive ever made. So more than mid-way through production of Superman II, the Salkinds elected to fire Donner and hire Richard Lester (Lester had gained notoriety directing such comedy films as “Hard Day’s Night”). This was an unfortunate move by the Salkinds because Donner had shot more than 50% of the sequel and refused to share credit with Lester, so Lester had to re-shoot or shoot alternate scenes for a great deal of the film in order for him to get directing credit. A recurring theme in this review will be to illustrate that the Salkinds were dumbshits.

So, back to the review. To start, we have “Superman” from 1978. We get a perfect origin story, despite what a shame it is that it takes up like 45 minutes of the 144 minute flick. The performances are all spot on. The Lex Luthor plot is simplistic, but is exactly what it needs to be. There’s so much time, over 45 minutes as I mentioned, until we see Supes and we don’t even see him portrayed by Reeve until almost the 70 minute mark. But that’s on par with Batman Begins so I’ll allow it. We get to see the world’s first glimpse of this mysterious Superman. We also get a built in set up for the sequel right in the beginning of the movie. All the supporting cast is excellent here, with a special shout out to Valerie Perrine who I’ve had a crush on since the first time I ever saw this. This film is about as good of an origin story as Superman will ever get.

Superman (1978) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Now, in the immediate follow up movie Superman II you have two cuts. One is the Richard Lester theatrical cut which is okay, the other is The Richard Donner Cut (TRDC) that was released in conjunction with “Superman Returns” in the 2000s. Although TRDC can be rough around the edges at times since it’s got spots where they just didn’t have final cut level footage to work with, it is a vastly superior film. Although we still have Hackman’s Lex present in this film, the real villain is Terence Stamp portraying General Zod along with Ursa and Non who make up 3 formerly incarcerated Kryptonians doomed in the first movie to the phantom zone. Most of our cast returns from the first movie and we get a much more large scale doom-ish plot that feels more devastating for the world than the somewhat simple scheme of Luthor’s in the original. I love this fucking movie, even if it’s just the theatrical cut. Especially given what’s coming.

Superman II ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Now is where it all goes to shit. Superman III. Richard Lester, the comedic director hired to take over after Donner was fired in II, brought some…special…sensibilities to the third film. There was a bunch of silly shit going on right off the bat that continues throughout the movie. The most egregious choices Lester made was to cast Richard Pryor as something of a primary antagonist. Or not. This movie really couldn’t decide if it wanted Pryor to be a bad guy or not. We also see a severe downgrade in villain with Robert Vaughn, who plays generic evil rich guy that uses the confusing accidental genius he discovered in Pryor’s character to do his bidding. Don’t try to make sense of it. Margot Kidder clearly wanted nothing to do with this movie so she is in it for literally only a few minutes as we fall into a useless plot of Clark going back to his hometown of Smallville and rekindling an old love interest in Lana Lang, portrayed adorably by Annette O’Toole. The movie forces all of the seemingly unconnected parts to work together as Supes at one point is exposed to a special kind of Kryptonite and becomes evil. He then separates into good and bad iterations of himself and has an amazing junkyard fight…with himself. Most of the casts of the two previous movies did not return due to their allegiance to Richard Donner. And the result was capital A Awful.

Superman III ⭐️

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the executive producers (the Salkinds) sold the rights to the Superman films to bad movie powerhouse studio Cannon Films and they went cheap and they didn’t care how anything looked, which was their style. Oh, and it was called Superman IV: The Quest for Peace by the way. I don’t know about who all was only here because they were under contract or just needed the money, but man, I can’t believe any of the bigger names were here voluntarily. The villain is Lex Luthor, portrayed by Hackman, he creates a super man named Nuclear Man whose power goes away when he’s not in direct view of the sun? Also, Jon Cryer plays Lex’s dipshit nephew Lenny and it is a next level cringe performance. The word is the Christopher Reeve wrote the original cut of this movie and it was much longer and very well-received by test audiences. When Cannon caught wind of this they thought they had a hit on their hands and cut it down to like 90 minutes. They also apparently took out all of anything that made it good. Margot Kidder did return and was a key player for a real sitcom style scene where Superman and Clark Kent attend the same dinner party, Supes’ date is Lois, Kent’s date is this chick who took over the Daily Planet with her dad. Who gives a shit? It’s so fucking bad guys.

Superman IV:The Quest for Peace 1/2

I would say if you’re going to revisit these Superman movies or see them for the very first time, it’s safe to just watch I & II and leave the rest out of the equation. The first two showed us how great and well-made super hero movies could really be. These films are all available on HBO Max. You’ll cheer, you’ll smile, you’ll be dumbfounded in both good and bad ways. Check out I&II for sure, check out III&IV at your own risk.