Superman Returns

Wow. If you've never seen Superman Returns, stop now, run, and make a note to never see that steaming pile of crap ever. And I thought Superman IV was bad.

This film takes itself way too seriously which is hard to do given the subject matter. There is no humor in the movie at all, they went fully for drama but fall flat on their face. Their is inherently no drama in the character of Superman. Instead of focusing on the action and humor side of things they try pathos. Not an easy task given an stoic invincible alien as a main character.

The plot boils down to this: Superman returns from space, Lex Luthor goes to Superman's Fortress of solitude and steals some crystals and knowledge of how to use them, he then steals some kryptonite, throws the kryptonite and crystals into the ocean and builds an kryptonite/crystal island slowly, fails to kill Superman when any moron could have, Superman throws island into space slowly. The End. I just saved you two and a half hours of your life.

Sure other pointless things happen-- albeit very slowly. The only action in the movies, aside from the slow scene of superman throwing the island into space slowly and then slowly falling back to the earth (which strangely results in a large impact crater even though he is only 225 pounds), revolves around plot points invented to fill time and to get Superman to do something. It happens in the same way as in a lot of other sci-fi movies, Armageddon springs to mind, where bad things happen for absolutely no reason (or even worse against logic). A Space Shuttle malfunctions slowly and drags a plane along with it slowly, a robbery happens slowly, the Daily Prophet globe falls slowly: all as a pretext so we can see Superman do something. This is a necessity since during the other over two hours nothing happens: no action, no plot, no character development (you know exactly who everyone is within 10 seconds of their appearance). This all leads to no fun.

You may have noticed the repetition of the word 'slow' in the above paragraphs. This is done on purpose as even when things happen they take in some weird relativistic space-- time slows down for the viewer. That's some good direction there, "Something is happening so lets slow everything down as to suck all excitement out of it. I don't want anything to get in the way of the pathos."

There are too many stupid things in the movie to list out so I will refrain, as you should refrain from watching it.

Look, up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's a steaming pile of crap!

n.b. A quick check on IMDb gives the following bit of trivia: "Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth and Kevin Spacey signed on without having read the script"... that explains a bit of it.