Tue, June 27, 2006
Up and Away—4:02 PM
The "New Yorker" has re-published Pauline Kael's original review of Richard Donner's Superman back in 1978, and it's not pretty.
I happen to agree with Kael for the most part (although Joe and I disagree with her about the Hackman/Beatty comic scenes). It's easy to understand why Superman was a pivotal film, and why people like Bryan Singer really look up to it. But those reasons are a few set pieces, and the brilliant character work of Christopher Reeve. Taken as a whole, the movie is fraught with problems.
(But I've already been over all that. I was pleased to see a recent interview with Singer in which he, too, expressed shame over that whole world-spinning-backwards thing.)
What's really interesting about Kael's review is how presciently she surveyed the superhero movie landscape. Overall, I've generally felt that she was a bitterly dismissive critic, but she shares some good ideas here. (Arguably, she tosses out more alternative story beats than she really should – after all, you review the film they made, not the film they should have made.) As she laments the bland heroics of the Superman story, she accurately predicts the darker, brooding superheroes of Burton's Batman and Raimi's Spider-Man – vigilantes despised by the very public they feel honor-bound to protect. She even calls for the emotional shift that Bryan Singer has infused into the story: Superman's withdrawal from a society that doesn't understand him.
