Amongst the total tonnage of witty exchanges and cultural criticisms that have denoted the oeuvre ofQuentin Tarantino, it’s not exactly surprising thatDavid Carradine’s speech about Superman inKill Bill: Vol. 2sticks out. Outside of the skeptical perspective of Mr. Tarantino, the character of Superman is largely seen as a symbol of America’s promise, a summation of our greatest faiths and toils to create a world free from murder, crime, greed, and intimidation, along with all other sorts of repression, corruption, and death. Where Batman is the symbol of the wealthy as civil-justice idealists, and of the personally damaging yet socially accepted disease that is vengeance, Superman is representative of all we hope America can be, all the good that we are capable of as a democratic society.
What makes the whole idea of Superman so fascinating, then, is that the hero is an alien, the last surviving son of Krypton, which is a fact at the center of Carradine’s speech to his former bride. As an immortal, he can only surmise so much about what humankind is, American or otherwise, and though he sees them as inherently good, kind, and brave, he also seems them as safe and a bit soft, which is how he conceives of Clark Kent, his alter-ego, as Bill so eloquently states. It’s the dichotomy between these two versions of the same being that powers the films that have been adapted from the DC Comics property originated byJerry SeigelandJoe Shuster.
At the core of the bestSupermanfilms is the actor who plays Superman and Kent, and that’s been perhaps the most consistent element of the Superman films that have been released thus far.Christopher Reeve,Henry Cavill, andBrandon Routhanchored films by the likes ofRichard Donner,Zack Snyder,Richard Lester,Bryan Singer, andSydney J. Furie, and have rendered even the most ludicrously wrong-headed material enjoyable. It’s the environment that surrounds Superman in these films that has shown variety, ranging from the stylish to the sober-eyed to the shallowly “dark,” and the effectiveness of these films has depended on how these filmmakers and writers envision the world that Superman lives in, how they envision Earth on the whole. And at their best, these films have given Metropolis, the city where our hero dwells, a buzzing, infectious energy; an addictive, progressive pulse of life to the society that Superman protects. In these worlds, filmmakers similarly convey what’s worth protecting in the real world, and what’s worth aspiring to even beyond the bounds of mortality.
So, given the importance of the Superman character to pop culture and his relevance in the wake of Henry Cavill’s performance, I decided to rank the Superman films that have been released thus far. Enjoy!
8. Justice League
Superman doesn’t really matter inJustice Leagueand that’s because nothing really seems to matter inJustice League. For all the rampant problems in scripting, design, direction, and beyond inBatman v Superman, the movie felt like a vision from a singular source, that beingZack Snyder. A number of scenes and the pacing may have felt dictated by producers and studio honchos, but it all felt like Snyder’s movie, for better or worse. In comparison,Justice Leaguefeels like the ultimate endgame of movie by market-testing, an unmercifully long hodgepodge of scenes crammed together to form the very loosest semblance of a narrative. If there are flickers of personality in Batman’s relationship with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) or Lois Lane’s awkward yet warm kinship with Martha Kent (Diane Lane), most of it comes from the actors, who show inexplicable yet brave dedication to the material.
On the whole, however, this is a movie made with no real sense of tone, no feeling for emotional growth or catharsis, and a stunning lack of involving action, aside from the video-game-level pageantry of the climactic fight against Steppenwolf and his parademons. For the digitally altered scenes that Superman shows up in, he is given next to no presence and is lended no emotional core to reflect on where he’s been and what it’s like to be back. In other words, there’s no one at the helm to say what the movie should look, sound, and feel like in the end, just a bunch of people adding in scenes, music, and effects that they think will satisfy a general audience. And in trying to design a movie that will satisfy everyone on a base level, the creators ofJustice Leaguehave created a flavorless catastrophe, a movie with no soul, no purpose, and no insight.
7. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
In which Superman (Henry Cavill) is written and portrayed like a grade-A, prime-cut asshole. To be fair, he’s not the only one. InZack Snyder’s nonsensical, grim-as-fuck epic, the two most famed titans of the DC universe convey nothing about their personality beyond their propensity for battle, their tactical brilliance, and some vague spirituality that never gets too much attention. There’s little of the adopted humanity, the experience of living on Earth, or the conflicting small-town ethos in his character; just a god on earth who is willing (if not exactly eager) to own Batman’s (Ben Affleck) ass. That is until he finds out Batman’s mother’s name and the early members of the Justice League, includingGal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, come together to fight off some grey blob of muscle and trash called Doomsday. If one were to put together a book about how not to adapt any of these characters (but especially Superman),Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justicewould be a prime example that would take up several chapters, one that passes the giddy, wrong-headed experiments ofSuperman IIIandQuest for Peaceto enter a realm of sheer unpleasantness.
6. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
This might come as a bit of a surprise, considering the story, about Superman fighting against the spread of nuclear weaponry was the product ofChristopher Reevehimself. What’s more, the film was directed bySidney J. Furie, who has directed a number of strong B-movies, includingThe Entity,Hit!,The Ipcress File, andThe Naked Runner. Yet,Quest for Peaceis somehow more ridiculous and less fun than the unhinged catastrophe that isSuperman III, laying on the anti-nuclear speechifying thick and saddling poorGene Hackman’s Lex Luthor with a Spiccoli-clone nephew, played by a youngJohn Cryer. The film is at its best when the focus is on the battle between the Man of Steel and his numerous villains, most prominently Nuclear Man, played byMark Pillow, a former Chippendale dancer. But when the film attempts to be funny, dramatically substantive, or impart a political message, every minute becomes excruciating, at once too bland to grab the imagination and too ludicrous to give any serious sort of attention toward.
5. Superman III
There are calamities, and then there’sSuperman III. After butchering the second installment in the franchise, followingRichard Donner’s falling out with producers, Lester was handed the opportunity to helm the third film, and rather than fashion a superhero film, he decided to get ambitious in terms of both tone and narrative trajectory. The filmmaker pairedChristopher Reeve’ alien-hero withRichard Pryor, as a gifted hacker, and a not-so-great Lex Luthor stand-in named Ross Webster, played byRobert Vaughn, and laced the entire film with outrageous physical gags and erratic, jokey dialogue.
It’s a radical act, one that is in line with Lester’s superb early works, fromA Hard Day’s NightandThe Knack and How to Get IttoPetulia, andThe Bed-Sitting Room. One has to admire the general chutzpah that Lester puts forth here, but it’s also a bit of a con, a half-measure of experimentalism that rendersSuperman IIImore of an oddity than a truly avant-garde pop film in the vein of Lester’s Beatles films. The entire subplot of Clark Kent returning to his hometown and wooing the girl he had a crush on in high school, played byAnnette O’Toole, is so astoundingly inept and innocuous that the actual risks that are taken in the main storyline come off as fanciful and occasionally outright sloppy.
By the time the film gets around to the Superman vs. Superman fight, the film has become episodic at best, a collection of not-so-well-written sketches involving the Man of Steel and Pryor’s Gus Gorman. This too might have been okay if the film were actually funny, whichDavidandLeslie Newman’s script very simply is not; on the other hand, gifted DP Robert Paynter, who lensed classics likeTrading Places,An American Werewolf in London, andMichael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, shoots and frames the entire mess handsomely throughout. The film is worth seeing for the sheer shock of what Lester is attempting pull off here, but calling this anything less than a disaster is just delusional.
4. Man of Steel
The most frustrating thing aboutMan of Steelis that it’s got several very interesting ideas going on within its overblown runtime. Unfortunately, almost all of those ideas are solely embedded inDavid S. Goyer’s script, and even then, aren’t developed to the extent that they can surpassZack Snyder’s pageant of all things brown and gray. The theological concepts that the film tangles with, including just how hard it is to be a God, are consistently alluded to but are drowned out by caterwaul of earnest machismo, fatty backstory, and the kind of product placement that is hard to ignore.
What does work here isHenry Cavill, who has the right delivery and, oh yes, the figure for the role, and the cast on the whole, includingAmy Adams,Michael Shannon, andLaurence Fishburne, is quite excellent. And to his credit, Snyder certainly has a grasp of scale, and when thing get hectic toward the end, his sculpting of space in each composition help lend the film the sense of awe that it lacks elsewhere.
As such,Man of Steelisn’t entirely disposable, but its feeble handling of Zod (Shannon), the 9/11-aping finale in Metropolis, and the total disinterest shown towards Lois Lane (Adams) all severely diminish its positives. And that, frankly, isn’t getting into the purveying, obvious product placement and the rather distasteful way the film both brazenly advertises the military and then uses the deaths of military and police officers to reiterate how evil Zod is. Snyder, who has pompously boasted about his fidelity to the source material, fashions a problematic, overtly self-serious movie, one that might get the basic mechanics of the original storyline correct but shrugs off the irrepressible, ecstatic spirit of the comics.
3. Superman Returns
With the possible exception ofX2,Bryan Singerrarely comes off as so assured, so buoyantly expressive as he does inSuperman Returns, which castsBrandon Routhas the favorite son of Krypton and a gleefully campyKevin Spaceyas Lex Luthor. Singer’s use of color here is specifically worth mentioning, especially in comparison toZack Snyder’s posturing grey grimness. The gloss of the blues, reds, and greens are more in line with the comics’ color palette, and Singer’s stylish camera moves add a level of aesthetic attention that arguably even trumps Donner’s sober, sharp filmmaking.
Much has been made of the film’s narrative devices, most specifically Superman’s progeny that is revealed toward the film’s end, but under the wild, campy style that Singer exudes here, it’s entirely palatable. Getting hung up on the plausibility of the only son of a fucking near-immortal alien-man who flies, has super-strength, and shoots heat-beams out of his eyes is exactly the trap that Snyder fell into, and in the trade, he made an even more implausible and risible film thanSuperman Returnscould ever be confused for. Where Snyder highlights the pent-up masculine fantasy of Superman, Singer locates the melancholy of a cape-wearing deity, the loneliness and anguish of his heightened position and balances it with the inherent joy of reading the comics and digging into the mythology in the first place.
2. Superman II
TheRichard Lestercut of this film is not exactly unpleasant, but leans just a bit too hard on the zany humor that has always been the director’s stock-in-trade. Otherwise, the film that Lester cut, from footage largely shot byRichard Donner, is generally fun if not memorable in any real way, finding our hero feuding with the legendary General Zod (Terence Stamp) and his alien acolytes (Sarah DouglasandJack O’Halloran), as well as Lex Luthor and Otis (Ned Beatty).
It’s a lot of story, and Lester hangs the nonsense together with what feels like overwhelming indifference toward the dramatic oomph or even kinetic action of the film. The Donner cut, on the other hand, is nearly as striking as the original film, focusing the film more successfully on the same thematic concerns asMan of Steel, plumbing the distinct struggles of being a god and being tempted by his emotional connections to mortals. The romantic side of the film, between Superman and Lois Lane (Kidder again), works so much better under Donner’s watch, and the effectiveness of Reeve’s inner turmoil over giving up his familial immortality to be with Lane is far more potent. With the undervalued Donner, the man behind minor classics ranging fromLethal WeaponandLethal Weapon 2toScroogedandThe Omen, at the helm,Superman IItakes its firm place amongst the very best of the superhero genre, alongside its sterling predecessor,Tim Burton’sBatmanandBatman Returns,The Incredible Hulk, andShane Black’sIron Man 3.
1. Superman
As directed byLethal WeaponauteurRichard Donner,Supermanlacks the style that madeTim Burton’sBatmanascend to levels of expressive art via a number of touches worthy ofFritz Lang. Beyond this, however, you could hardly ask for a better superhero movie than the originalSuperman, with credit going first and foremost to the late, greatChristopher Reeve. In both the role of the superhero and his journalist alter ego, the actor shows a preternatural physical awareness and an under-celebrated comedic quickness that gives both sides of his character depth beyond what’s given in the script. Matched alongside the inimitableGene Hackman, as Lex Luthor, andMargot Kidderas Lois Lane, Reeve’s performance gives the film the same heroic thrill asJohn Williams’ unimpeachable score and the lovingly rendered production and costume design and set decoration.
Donner balances a rousing playfulness in the script and performances with sincere dramatic muster, ranging from Kal-el’s escape from Krypton and his coming of age with the Kents to his tentative romance with Lane. In other words, the film is only serious enough to express Donner’s directorial competency as a storyteller, which he smartly balances with an adventurous and humorous tone that perfectly reflects the cheesy structure of the source material. Though not particularly ambitious, in terms of sheer fidelity to one of the most intrinsically American modern texts, Superman is a minor sort of cinematic miracle.
