It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… it’s… Milton Keynes?

Justifiably much maligned, nevertheless I have something of a nostalgic soft spot for Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. For me, quite possibly alone in the world, it remains a landmark film. Not for its script, or cinematography, or effects, but in a deeply personal way. It was the last film my mum ever took me to see. Now before you reach for the hankies, my mum is absolutely fine; alive and well. But this was the last film she took me to the cinema to see. We have, in the intervening years, been to the cinema together several more times, although I think the most recent might actually still be Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But in those instances we either went together or I took her. Superman IV, for me, represented the end of an era and the passing of the torch. For the Superman franchise, however, it represented a throwing-in of the towel.

The Cannon Group – who only ended up with the Superman rights after the twin commercial disappointments of Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie had soured the Salkind’s appetite to redeem themselves after Superman III – could talk big, but they budgeted small, or rather they boasted a tantalising headline-grabbing budget before salami slicing it (sometimes with a chainsaw) while said film was in production. Nowhere was this imbalance more cruelly apparent than Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, a film whose ambitions exceeded its grasp with the same tragic certainty as Wile E Coyote sending off his latest order to the Acme factory. While director Sidney J Furie, a talented and versatile journeyman director, dutifully tried to capture some semblance of the Salkind/ Donner mythic scope, the catastrophic penny-pinching from producers Golan and Globus ensured every grand gesture was undermined by effects that wouldn’t convince at a village hall pantomime and performances so broad you’d think they came from the same venue.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace must have felt, in conception at least, as a zeitgeist-capturing masterstroke. With Reaganomics reshaping the world, having the Man Of Steel take on the military-industrial complex in a two fisted story about hostile corporate takeovers of beloved institutions and out-of-control billion-dollar weapons industry drunk on limitless funding, staked out a noble and archly anti-establishment position for the ersatz champion of truth, justice and the American Way. A pity, then, that funds were so short Clark Kent himself had to put his family farm up for sale just to help pay the bills. Of course, global nuclear disarmament is bad for certain businesses and there’s nothing that gets Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor fired up than a get-rich-quick scheme. Freshly sprung from prison, Luthor puts his towering intellect to use in supporting the warmongers of the world and creating a superpowered opponent to destroy Superman and make the world safe for warmongering and profiteering once more.

Christopher Reeve – returning valiantly one final time as Clark Kent and his caped alter ego – is actually the one who advocated for the film’s central message of nuclear disarmament, a notion sincerely admirable yet heartbreakingly naïve within the volatile confines of the Cannon Group’s coffers and anything approaching the geopolitical realpolitik. His Superman is earnest as ever, but increasingly he seems baffled by his surroundings, like a Shakespearean actor who’s wandered into a children’s nativity play and gamely decided to stay. His heartfelt speech before the UN should have felt monumental, a rallying cry for global peace – but instead, Reeve is left marooned at the podium of an undersized Milton Keynes lecture hall, addressing extras hastily corralled from a queue at a nearby cafeteria.

The film’s production woes couldn’t be contained behind the scenes – they glare from every frame. Lex Luthor, played again by Gene Hackman with the air of a man visibly counting down to the exact second his contract expires, concocts his most ridiculously arbitrary scheme yet. With strands of Superman’s hair (displayed absurdly in a museum exhibit, attached to a weight as if it were a carnival sideshow rather than a scientific marvel), Luthor creates Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow), an antagonist memorable chiefly for his shiny gold leotard and acrylic fingernails. Hackman deserves credit, at least, for committing to material that barely meets the threshold of coherence, delivering each line with a professionalism that suggests he’s either too seasoned to protest or too wise to bother, even while Jon Cryer’s risible Lenny Luthor desperately tries to pull his performance in a broader direction. Cryer would, of course, redeem himself decades later with his own take on Superman’s arch-nemesis but here he’s given the impossible job of being a one-man Otis/ Miss Tessmacher substitute reimagined as a gormless surfer-dude archetype constructed exclusively from tired teenage clichés, his every utterance a painful example of Cannon’s misunderstanding of and desperation to connect their take on Superman with “youth culture”.

Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), Perry White (Jackie Cooper) and Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) return too, all wearing expressions usually reserved for hostages trying to reassure loved ones they’re being treated well and they’re joined in their discomfort by the likes of Sam Wanamaker and Mariel Hemingway and – if you’re quick enough to spot him – a young Jim Broadbent, who visibly squirms his way through his scenes. We should be grateful the experience didn’t put him off acting for life.

Of course, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace‘s action set-pieces are legendary – but only in the sense that the Loch Ness Monster is legendary: rarely glimpsed clearly and disappointingly fuzzy and unconvincing upon closer inspection. Superman battles Nuclear Man across the globe, yet the world suspiciously resembles the same soundstage from multiple angles, punctuated by obvious model work that would have embarrassed Gerry Anderson decades earlier. This wasn’t simply a stylistic miscalculation – it was the direct, brutal consequence of Cannon’s financial brinksmanship, cutting corners until the film itself became little more than a vague suggestion of spectacle. Cannon’s creative accountancy delivered the film a double blow, with a much longer original cut – featuring not one but two iterations of Nuclear Man – being scrapped after it was filmed on the assumption that a shorter film would show more times a day and therefore bring in more box office cash. This meant that not only did the footage end up on the cutting room floor, but the special effects teams—already working on a shoestring—wasted half their resources on sequences that were never used, resources that might have made the surviving shots slightly less embarrassing.

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace has earned an enduring legacy as a superhero movie punchline. The collapse of a franchise that might have killed the genre had it not been for Batman a mere two years later, the success of which reiterated that the real villains of Superman IV were behind the camera, in the production office, siphoning off the pre-sold distribution dollars to prop up other projects for their floundering production house. You can’t really watch Superman IV for entertainment so much as witness it as a lesson and a tribute to the careers which ended here. There’s morbid fascination, noticing the seams in every costume, the wires in every flight scene, and the despairing looks in every actor’s eyes. For all its earnest intentions, Superman IV ultimately represented a catastrophic blow to Superman’s big screen prowess, a cratering of audience interest that the character is still trying to build back from today.