DVD Review: Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns on Warner Home Video

The disc’s intense focus on the film’s production and Brandon Routh’s transformation into Superman probably makes this a must-own for fans.

Superman ReturnsBryan Singer’s Superman Returns is a pleasant enough piece of hackwork, anonymous in all the right ways so that it neither offends nor thrills. Like the massive model train set on which Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) demonstrates his latest plan for world domination (think An Inconvenient Truth by rent stabilized way of The Abyss), the film is little more than a crystalline maquette spit-polished to an illusive glow, a hollowed-out fortress of solitude that collapses in the face of any emotional expression above tentative (so best restrain the urge, fellow fanboys, to shout out “Kneel before Zod!”). On some level it’s preferable that Singer stays out of the material’s way to the extent that he does, but after a distended two-and-a-half hours I was longing for the homo hauteur to let fly with his patented queer-release sledgehammer (in such ample use during the eye-candy X-Men pictures) and whack me hard upside the cremaster. At his root Superman is a decidedly non-sexual character (he’s more an idealized and unattainable confluence of traits both Aryan and exotic), though as embodied here by stunning newcomer Brandon Routh his beauty comes across as particularly oppressive and fascistic. There’s an Ayn Rand joke just waiting to be made in the image of Superman bearing The Daily Planet globe upon his shoulders and when the camera rises to join our tights-and-cape clad hero in the heavens it quite humorously suggests a digitized, Technicolor rendering of Patricia Neal’s memorable ascent into Gary Cooper’s crotch at the close of King Vidor’s The Fountainhead. Yet aside from a reverse-motion shot of Superman inhaling the inverted and impossible breath of a Busby Berkeley extra while lifting a sunken ship out of the ocean, the themes and characters in Superman Returns remain frustratingly conceptual (reducing Harold & Kumar’s Kal Penn to a mute, drool-jawed bystander is one egregious error out of the film’s many). Singer steals amply from Spielberg’s recent output, most notably in Superman Returns’ recurrent half-glimpsed 9/11 imagery (prepare yourself for the eventual video bootleg that appends the film’s first-act plane crash set piece onto the finale of United 93) and in some half-baked father/son shenanigans (complete with Sky Captain-esque resurrection of Marlon Brando) that I would have more readily accepted had the film had the cojones to play its climactic scenes as the straight-male weepie version of Longtime Companion that they threaten to become.

Image/Sound

Essentially, the greatest looking (and sounding) DVD I’ve come across since Blade II. The image sometimes struggles to keep its shit together, but even around small patches of color, the tiniest of artifacts seem to evaporate even before they can be spotted. As for the audio: from sounds big (the striking opening sequence) and small (Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor leaving the home of the granny he’s screwed-figuratively, but possibly literally-and welcoming the world outside), the sound explodes off the screen.

Extras

The three-hour making-of featurette that highlights the second of this two-disc special edition seems hell-bent on making us feel as if we were part of the film’s production since day one, from Byran Singer working on his pitch to Warner Bros. to Brandon Routh’s screen test and training to production of some of the film’s more memorable sequences. Of special interest is a nice stretch devoted to the storyboards and how they were adapted into three-dimensional models. But the triumph of this disc may be a demo that shows how Marlon Brando’s Jor-El was resurrected for the project, also bringing to mind what it might have been like for Brando to have had a runaway dance hit on the Billboard charts. Rounding out the disc is a series of trailers, teasers, previews of other Superman-related video goodies coming our way, 10 deleted scenes (the bulk focus on Clark Kent’s home on the range), and an annoying Easter egg (look for it in the deleted scenes section) of Kevin Spacey acting like a jackass while giving Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane the inquisition.

Advertisement

Overall

The disc’s intense focus on the film’s production and Brandon Routh’s transformation into Superman probably makes this a must-own for fans, straight and queer alike.

Score: 
 Cast: Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Frank Langella, Sam Huntington, Eva Marie Saint, Kal Penn, Noel Neill, Jack Larson, Marlon Brando  Director: Bryan Singer  Screenwriter: Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris  Distributor: Warner Home Video  Running Time: 154 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2006  Release Date: November 28, 2006  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.