Do you remember where you were the day Warner Bros. dropped the trailer for Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns? Of course you do. You were at your desktop—where else? We didn’t have our miraculous pocket-sized computers back in the early-to-mid aughts. We weren’t permanently yoked to the internet then as we are today. The original iPhone came out in June of 2007; 2006 was, put generously, a less connected time. Red-eyed as the average consumer is in 2026 from overexposure to screens, though, “less connected” sounds like a dream vacation. If you wanted to take a dip in digital waters, you needed to set that as an intention.
Which means that each of us who fell under the thrall of Superman Returns’ captivating first teaser trailer did so before the glow of our iMacs and Dells, not knowing at the time that this was the best we were going to get from the movie prior to and after its premiere in theaters.
Make no mistake: Superman Returns, 20 years on, has aged poorly, perhaps an understatement both in light of the assault allegations made against Singer in 2014 as well as 2017 (and adding to those made against him in 1997), and in consideration of the film’s self-evident slop. Even by modern superhero movie standards, which started on a slow decline after Marvel Studios recalibrated pop filmmaking 2012’s The Avengers and plummeted in the late 2010s, Superman Returns hums with misplaced confidence, as if Singer transferred all the momentum he built up during production on the first two X-Men pictures into IP maintenance rather than storytelling.
The film makes one wise choice: it ignores the existence of Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, and attempts to carve out its own path. But Singer’s screenplay, authored by Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty, supposes a world where Clark Kent, who believe it or not is actually Superman (Brandon Routh) in disguise, zips back home to Earth after undertaking a 5 year mission to locate any other surviving members of his Kryptonian race; having failed his venture, he, well, returns, and finds that the planet has gotten on just fine sans his presence, and also that Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has a child with Richard White (James Marsden). That’s quite a kick to the crotch of one’s red underoos. Fortunately for Clark, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) livens things up with one of his usual half-cooked world domination schemes.
On paper, all of that sure does sound like the stuff of a Superman yarn. For whatever it’s worth, Superman Returns meets the brief in practice as well—it’s just not a terribly good Superman yarn, however hard the team involved tries to fuse action and thrills with the emotional dynamics that make the character interesting in the first place. Frankly, if all that defined Superman came down to his power, he’d be dull. The comics have, over the years and really since the very beginning, focused on the responsibilities that come with his godly capabilities, which has subsequently sustained the character as one of the best, and certainly most profound, that comic books writ large have to offer nearly a century after his creation.
None of that affects Superman Returns, which is gawky, ungainly, and shockingly ponderous, a picture that never takes itself seriously enough and manages not to be any fun at the same time. Maybe that’s a feat worth praising, like walking across a tightrope suspended between two bean bags—a balancing act without risk of impact.
What’s funny, if only in a jaded and bittersweet fashion, is that the movie’s teaser nails the sensation of import and excitement that the movie itself yearns for but lacks the language to express. 19 years separate Superman IV: The Quest for Peace from Superman Returns; if there’s a success story here, it’s couched in the movie’s promotion, and the way the trailer house responsible for cutting the teaser managed to appeal directly to emotion in a minute and a half.
It’s in part the imagery: the sight of young Clark (Stephan Bender) vaulting over fields, the gentle glow of the spacecraft that ferried Clark to Earth as a baby, the slow fade-in on the Daily Planet’s exterior, the gathered masses staring heavenward in awe of Clark, their soaring savior. It’s the sound, too: the music, so clearly inspired by John Williams’ original Krypton theme from the 1978 Richard Donner film, and the monologue by the late Marlon Brando, laden with a mixture of melancholy and gravity. This is a clip that reminds viewers, as it reminds the people of Earth in-story, of what meaning Superman can convey as a character just through the trimmest evocations. What proclaims “hero” better than trumpets’ muted, dutiful fanfare? And who better to emblemize the concept of heroism, and the aesthetic of superheroism, better than Superman?
Superman Returns somehow manages not to hit the notes played in the trailer, which is a frustration and at the same time kind of a bizarre miracle. How, one might reasonably ask, could WB have messed this up? Hiring Singer, once a hack and always a hack, was a good start; it’s as if he learned no lessons from directing the first two X-Men movies for Fox, and opted for the clunkiest plotting-by-numbers outline on a project that deserved a greater attention to detail and determination over pacing. Superman Returns takes us nowhere in 154 minutes. The trailer, however, took us to a place where we could dare to hope for a refreshed character left dormant in the movies for too long.
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