Superman Returns (HD DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

"Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane...." Great Caesar's ghost, it's more high-definition CGI.

The most-important news here is that this HD-DVD and DVD Combo is the first disc from Warner Bros. to offer a double-layered high-definition side for an HD movie and a load of extras, and a regular, standard-definition side for an SD movie. Previous Combo formats from WB offered only a single HD layer. In essence, this HD-DVD/DVD Combo provides three discs in one, covering everything that is on the two-disc standard-def set and the high-def movie, too.

More on that in a minute. First, a word about the film. OK, maybe it's just me, but it seems like every new actor playing Superman is younger than the one before him. Director Bryan Singer said he wanted a relative unknown playing the new Superman because he was trying to make the character an Everyman, a super man of the people. But it seems as though he chose somebody who looked as much as possible like Christopher Reeve, and, indeed, the new guy, Brandon Routh, not only looks like Reeve, he is almost exactly the same age as Reeve when Reeve took on the part. It's just that somehow Routh looks younger. Never mind, too, that neither Reeve nor Routh looks much like the comic-book Superman. Apparently, that's beside the point. Both men are tall, handsome, dark-haired, and athletic. In 2006 as in 1978, the two actors undoubtedly appeal to young people, which is all that matters.

Yes, the new "Superman Returns" does fly. It just doesn't soar. Not only does Routh remind one too much of Reeve, there is a feeling throughout "Superman Returns" of having seen the whole thing before. Whereas the previous year's "Batman Begins" reinvented the main character, prompting viewers to want to watch it more than once, "Superman Returns" feels like once is enough. Where "Batman Begins" was fresh, "Superman Returns" is mostly more of the same, though for the most part, it's almost enough.

So, what's the same about it? According to the new film, Superman has been away from Earth for five years, and when he returns, it's to his adopted mom's farm, just as before, crashing into a field, just as before. Eva Marie Saint takes over the job of the mother, Martha Kent, since in reality it has been some twenty-eight years since we saw Phyllis Thaxter in the Reeve "Superman" movie. Then, a correspondingly similar roster of familiar characters shows up to fill out the rest of the story: the love interest, Lois Lane. The villain, Lex Luthor. The Man of Steel's actual father, Jor-El (Marlon Brando in archive, digital footage). Newspaper editor Perry White. And cub reporter-photographer Jimmy Olsen.

Moreover, the new movie's structure almost exactly duplicates the 1978 entry. Superman comes to Earth. He finds his foster mom. He takes up his job at the Daily Planet. He begins saving lives and keeping people out of mischief. His dual identity as Clark Kent and Superman gives him romantic trouble as Lois sees Clark as a dork and Superman as a super man, with the requisite flying duet. Lex Luthor is on the loose, having been released from prison on a technicality, and he's up to his usual no good (actually, worse than ever, about to kill billions of people with a cockamamie scheme that will destroy most of North America). Kryptonite plays a big part in the goings on, and everything ends with the notion of another movie in the near future. Oh, and the heroic music that John Williams gave us in 1978 again underlines many key scenes.

OK, so what's new about the film? New actors in key roles create a slightly different perspective. Kate Bosworth is the current Lois Lane, and Lois is now a mother with a five-year-old son in tow, and a fiancée, Richard White (James Marsden), the nephew of the Daily Planet's editor. Although this situation makes the Clark Kent-Superman-Lois Lane relationship more complex than before, Bosworth is less interesting and less involved with the other characters than Margot Kidder was. Interestingly, too, even though five years are supposed to have gone by since the last time we saw Lois, Ms. Bosworth is actually about seven years younger than Kidder was when Kidder first played the role. Well, this is a fantasy, after all, and I guess in fantasies it's possible for people to get younger as the years go on. Seems to happen in Hollywood all the time look at anybody over thirty-five.

Kevin Spacey is the new Lex Luthor, and he plays it straighter than Gene Hackman did. Luthor is now more seriously menacing, less a cartoon character, and practically steals the show. I'm not suggesting Spacey is any better than Hackman in the role, just different enough to give "Superman Returns" some edge, and a little needed energy. Parker Posey plays Luther's girlfriend, Kitty Kowalski, replacing Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine in one fell swoop and doing a good job at it as a semi-comic foil to Spacey's deadpan Luthor. And Frank Langella and Sam Huntington do respectable jobs as Editor-in-Chief Perry White and young Jimmy Olsen.

This time out, the film portrays Superman more than ever as a Savior of Mankind, with Jor-El more than ever a god. It's not just the same Jor-El voice-over that helps create this mood but the fact that Superman's super powers are more super than they've ever been. Not only can he stop speeding jet planes, he can carry an entire continent into outer space. (Don't ask. You gotta see it.)

Then there's that five-year-old, little Jason White (Tristan Lake Leabu), to contend with. He turns out to be the most enigmatic character in the film, his personality both sweet and mysterious, and again we can smell sequel written all over him as well as the rest of the movie.

Here's the thing: In his previous big film, director Bryan Singer infused "X-Men 2" with a heart and soul I thought were missing from the first "X-Men" movie, and it's clear he tried to do the same here. "Superman Returns" has its fair share of thrills, including an extraordinary sequence early on involving a shuttle craft and a jet airliner, but it also has long stretches of character interaction and dialogue, things you don't always see or expect in an action-adventure film. Some of it works, and some of it doesn't. While the Superman-Lois Lane relationship opens out nicely, an extended sequence at the film's climax with a "Snow White" ending goes on much too long. In fact, the whole movie goes on too long.