Superman (1978), 6/10
This is something of a topical movie, seeing as the James Gunn one is bound to hit theaters in a few months, and it feels like we're approaching a watershed moment in superhero cinema, so this movie being a watershed moment in itself fits right in. Despite not being the first film adaptation of a comic book superhero (Adam West's Batman had a movie in the 60s for example), it is the first that's aiming to be a proper film spectacle and be taken seriously. It's an odd film with some serious structural and pacing issues, but considering before this there basically was no template or idea of what a "proper" superhero film should be like, it's understandable. Aside from some of its effects, I wouldn't really call it dated, its problems would have been problems even at the time.
There's plenty of good to talk about so let's start with that: I finally understand why Christopher Reeve is still considered the definitive movie Superman. When you consider what a foundational film this is, it's astonishing just how right they got both Superman and Clark Kent on the first try. Superman's earnestness and sincerity don't feel naive or camp, and Clark Kent's bumbling awkwardness comes across as endearing rather than annoying. Despite the movie's tone wavering back and forth wildly, Reeve's performance never feels out of place, which is quite something. But there's many deeper nuances to the performance too: Clark and Superman act, speak and carry themselves completely differently, and for the first time I actually believed that people would not consider Clark to be Superman, they're that different. The acting overall is pretty good: Gene Hackman (in a truly heinous wig) is hamming it up deliciously as Lex Luthor and Margot Kidder is a great Lois Lane. The effects have held up great. It's remarkable just how believable the flying sequences are almost 50 years later. The sense of speed, physicality and scale is conveyed perfectly. There's some clever writing in how the movie gets to show Superman's powers without having a single fight scene. The soundtrack is an obvious banger.
But this movie has big problems with its pacing and tone. To put it in more modern terms, its structure resembles more a miniseries that got edited to be a movie, because the structure is pretty episodic, and they don't really flow together that well. The movie spends an inordinate amount of time before Superman even dons the costume or uses any of his powers. This would be fine if it spent that time more on character exploration a la Batman Begins, but what's here isn't really that interesting or engaging. Supe and Lex don't even meet until the last third of the movie, and prior to the climax there's basically no action at all, which is just weird for a Superman film. The episodic structure carries over to the tone, which can alter drastically from scene to scene, and the result is rather messy and inconsistent. Lex's antics with his henchmen are just a couple of colourful costumes short of the Adam West Batman show, whereas the beginning on Krypton is incredibly serious and somber. The scene where Lois Lane's car falls down into a crack in the earth is genuinely harrowing: you see her struggling, dirt pouring on her, the car slowly getting crushed. I can imagine that scene giving kids nightmares, and what makes it worse is that she actually dies as a result, though it's fixed by the famous "speed around the planet to reverse time" scene. The tone feels like a result of either a script that wasn't fully ironed out, or a production where the actors never quite synced with that kind of movie they felt they were in.
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