Christopher Reeve was exceptional in this, and every time I rewatch Superman that’s the thing I come away with before anything else. Not the flying, not the effects, not even that music, although all of it still works on me. It’s him. He plays two completely different men and makes you believe both of them, the nervous, slouching reporter who trips over his own feet and the calm, smiling alien who catches a falling helicopter with one hand, and he does it so well that the whole silly idea of a pair of glasses fooling an entire newsroom actually holds up. I’ve never bought that disguise from anybody else. With Reeve I don’t even question it.
And I say all this as a Marvel guy. I’m not really a fan of DC, which anyone who read my Marvel fan’s take on Batman vs Superman already knows, and I’ve gone on before about how Superman as a character has never grabbed me the way the Marvel heroes do. But I still enjoyed this film, and it was exceptional. It’s one of the first real comic book movies, I think, or at least the first one that took a comic seriously, arriving just a year after Star Wars had shown everybody that a big earnest adventure could fill a cinema, and it plays its hero completely straight when it could so easily have gone for camp.
Two men in one suit
What gets forgotten is how long the film waits before it gives us Superman at all. Krypton blows up, Jor-El sends his baby son off in a crystal ship, and then we’re in Smallville with a teenage Clark who can outrun a train but can’t get the girl or the respect of the football team. Pa Kent tells him he’s here for a reason, then drops dead of a heart attack in the yard, and Clark’s line over the grave, all those powers and he couldn’t even save him, is the first time I really felt for this character instead of just being impressed by him. That’s the Clark who walks into the Daily Planet years later. A guy who knows exactly what he can do and still can’t fix the thing that matters most.
So the bumbling act makes sense to me, it’s a man choosing to be small. Reeve hunches his shoulders, pitches his voice up, fumbles his words around Lois and lets Perry White walk all over him. Then there’s the scene I’d put up against anything in the genre, the night Clark comes to pick Lois up after she’s been flying with Superman. He takes the glasses off, straightens up, drops his voice, and for a few seconds Superman is just standing there in Clark’s suit about to tell her everything. Then he loses his nerve, puts the glasses back on, and he’s Clark again, fussing about hamburgers. No special effect at all. Just an actor changing the way he stands, and I buy it completely.
Easy, miss, I’ve got you
Lois is a big part of why the film works for me too, a reporter who can’t spell and doesn’t care, charging after every story and treating Clark like a friendly golden retriever. When she falls off the side of the Daily Planet building and Superman shows up for the very first time, catching her and then the helicopter too, his line about having her and her asking who’s got him is still one of my favourite moments in any superhero film. It’s funny and it’s thrilling and it tells you everything about who he is in two lines. Then he spends the rest of the night saving a cat from a tree, stopping a cat burglar, catching Air Force One, and it’s just joy, a guy who’s finally allowed to be what he is.
The interview on her balcony and the flight over Metropolis afterwards are pure romance, Can You Read My Mind playing over the top and all. It’s cheesy and I don’t care. What I love is that Superman is being honest with her in a way Clark never gets to be, telling her he never lies, telling her he’s here to fight for truth and justice, and she falls for the one version of him who isn’t hiding. Every superhero secret identity romance since owes something to this, including the one that made Peter Parker work for me in Spider-Man more than twenty years later.
Lex, missiles and turning the world back
Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor is less a supervillain and more a real estate crook with a lair under Grand Central, and honestly that’s part of the fun. His plan is to drop a nuclear missile on the San Andreas fault so California falls into the sea and his desert land becomes beachfront, and he’s got bumbling Otis and Miss Teschmacher for company. The kryptonite round the neck and Superman sinking into the swimming pool is a proper scary moment, and it’s Miss Teschmacher who saves him, because he promises to stop the missile heading for her mother’s town first. That choice costs him, since the other missile hits and Lois dies in her car in the earthquake.
That’s where the film makes Superman choose between his two fathers. Jor-El told him never to interfere with human history. Pa Kent told him he was here for a reason. Superman screams, flies up, spins the world backwards and turns back time to save her, and I know people have argued about that ending for decades but I’ve never had a problem with it. It’s him deciding he’s more Smallville than Krypton. When I think about the versions of this character that went dark, the Homelander types in The Boys or Omni-Man in Invincible, the difference is always the farm and the man who raised him. This film understood that before anybody.
It’s also what the next decade of comic book films mostly forgot. The Batman of 1989 went for gothic and a lot of later DC went for gloom, while this one just lets its hero smile, fly Lex and Otis off to prison, and grin straight at the camera as he goes past in orbit. I’m a Marvel guy through and through, and that grin still gets me every time.
