| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Slick and classy White supremacist propaganda given verisimilitude by impressive special effects (SFX) and first-class acting. The plot holes hardly matter here as the fulfillment aspect of the melodrama is more than enticing enough to help us overlook them.
Where the film really scores is in having special effects that serve the story rather than the other way round. Foregrounding the love story between Superman and Lois Lane offers the audience an emotional hook to accept what is visually always going to be ridiculous: A White man prancing around in public in a skintight leotard.
Yet there is still time for deftly-introduced humor - just in case you start taking it all a little too seriously. Margot KIDDER and Christopher REEVE understand this perfectly and neatly walk the tightrope of the absurdity of the situation and the common Western feminine longing to lie in the arms of a super man. Their chemistry is palpable; making the love story moving because they never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the SFX whose non-CGI nature makes it easier for the actors to play off what they are actually experiencing.
Special kudos needs to be given for REEVE managing to play two contrasting roles so convincingly, yet with enough humor to help us forget that it is obvious that Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent are one and the same. For the male audience, this dichotomy represents the masculine desire to be more assertive, virile and masculine than men ever feel they are.
The political aspects of the film are underplayed but represent a northern European sense of Christian morality; positing the White Hollywood notion that Superman’s birth planet, Krypton, is ruled by English-speaking Whites whose God-like demeanor is really a simple parallel to that of White Anglo-Saxon America.
Yet again we are confronted with a White baby Jesus bequeathed to Earth to help save mankind from itself. (Mankind here being White America; the Earth being the United States [US] - in US movies aliens rarely land elsewhere.)
Although Superman is virtually-indestructible and non-martyred, the movie’s self-reinforcing Catholic notion of Original Sin does not reflect Native-American nor Black America but only the White portion of it: 'Truth, justice and the American Way' as defined solely by and for Whites. The absence of Black characters confirms this.
Easily the best adaptation of the Superman stories that there will ever be, whose two-and-a-half hour length simply whizzes by. And one of the best superhoero films Hollywood will ever be involved in.
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