AmateurMovieReviews.com

I am sure somebody has already reviewed this here, but I thought that I might as well put in my two cents. I just saw this movie, and I saw in playing in a theatre on my University campus...so although it's out of the theatres, I got a nice look at it on the big screen.

This movie is rife with special effects. It was clearly made to impress, and something like every five minutes you are bombarded with some enormous impressive image, in high detail. For example, even when we are just seeing a scene about Lex Luther in his boat, the scene begins not inside the boat's cabin's but over an impressively stormy, computer-animated sea. Or when the crystal starts growing in the sea, we see great dramatic view of the crystals growing from the bottom of the ocean. Also, when we see superman flying into space with the enormous crystal, for example, we feel like we are there because the enormous rocks are falling all around us. The only thing that is annoying is how fake superman looks when he is flying, because he looks absolutely computer animated. I don't think this is a big deal, though, since we all know it's not real, and everything is so computer animated these days that soon we are going to think that real life looks like that.

Back to Lex Luther, though, I must say that Kevin Spacey does an excellent job of playing the creepy, and sometimes comic, villain. Kevin Spacey is one of my favorite actors and I like how he entangles into the role, making us laugh in the very beginning when we meet him, stealing some dying widow's fortune and then throwing away the wig he is wearing and exposing up to the bald Lex we have always known. On the subject of casting, while Lois Lane is very beautiful, I don't like the actress they chose. She somehow didn't fit the part of Lois in my head, but that is obviously a personal preference. The other characters were fine.

The movie is nice. It is an exageration of all the other Superman movies. They poke fun during the movie at common phrases surrounding Superman ("truth, justice and all that stuff"), and make fun of hero movie in general by exagerrating everything. For some people, this makes the movie phony. In fact, my friend next to me during the movie couldn't keep from laughing during the scenes where Superman makes daring, predictable rescues, because they are so iconic and anti realistic. If you ask me, the movie does this intentionally, and it seems like a trend these days to make fun of the traditional way of making a movie, in a movie of the very same genre. For example, we see cartoons making fun of cartoons, gangsters making fun of gangster movies, and heroes making fun of their former selves, as here.

I really liked that they spent the first 10 ten minutes of the movie playing the famous Superman theme, and showing prior credits. I really liked that they gave us time to work up old memories of superman while absorbing the good old dramatic music and getting us in the mood for action.

Now, about the plot. The thing is, I liked the plot in that not everything turned out perfectly (that is, Lois and Superman don't end up together). When I saw the beginning of the film, and we discover that Lois is married, I realize that her son Jason must be Superman's, which of course we learn later when he saves his mom in an asthmatic fit when he throws a
PIANO at her attacker, but then I found myself wondering, how can they take a noble hero like Superman and allow him to break up this nice family? And the fact is, they don't let it happen, which I admire, but there is still something wrong about the son being his. Obviously it is necessary for there to be plenty of sequels, but I feel unsatisfied with an ending where Superman is just "around sometimes", and Lois has to see him but doesn't get to be with him. But I also don't want her husband to be shafted because he is also a very good man. Anyway, I guess it makes sense because although the boy is his son, he will never have to know it because being Superman is such a strong secret anyway. But what will happen to Clark? It's something terrible for him. But since he is superman anyway I guess he will strong enough to get by alone.

I liked the movie, it was entertaining. It was funny because they exaggerated so much and often Superman ended up making fun of himself and his past. The story line was clever enough, I can't complain except that it is cheesy, and as I said before, I think that that was really part of the point of the movie. They know that Superman is an icon and that it is hard to compete with the tradition of the story, except by adding thousands of amazing special effects. It is clear that this movie was made with 3-d in mind, and since it actually showed in some 3-D IMAX theatres, I think that even for me, and I don't like action movies and stunts very much, it would have been an amazing experience. I hope you like this one. It's no deep film, but it's a nice evening of entertainment for any age.