It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… the same?
For a movie that left X-Men: The Last Stand holed below the waterline in its wake, there’s something faintly ironic about a film that tries so desperately to fly forward while constantly looking over its shoulder. Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s painstaking homage-cum-sequel to Richard Donner’s Superman (and, in a more biological sense, Superman II), spends so much time reverently tracing the contours of past greatness that it forgets to carve out anything distinct for itself. This isn’t a reboot. It’s a resurrection – but not in the triumphant messianic sense the film itself keeps rather tactlessly hinting at, but more in a Weekend at Bernie’s way: reanimating the body with stiff puppetry, hoping nobody notices.
Not that Superman Returns is a bad film. In fact, it’s often stately, measured, and sincerely affectionate – the work of people who clearly adored the 1978 original and wanted nothing more than to recapture its grace. But that’s precisely the problem. Superman Returns is so dutiful in its reverence that it becomes beholden to the past, embalmed in nostalgia. The John Williams theme (albeit conducted by John Ottman), the curl of the cape, the swoop of the titles – all present, accounted for, and polished like relics in a glass case. There’s no denying the craft. The issue is that it’s all so well-behaved.
Brandon Routh, in his big-screen debut, manages a deft balancing act. His performance integrates just enough homage to Christopher Reeve to sell the necessary continuity without slipping into outright impersonation. He hits the right vowels, keeps the smile on simmer, and his Clark Kent is pleasingly square. But beyond the surface echoes, Routh brings a quieter vulnerability to his Kal-El that feels authentically his. There’s a warmth and sincerity that gently modernises the character without rejecting his lineage. It’s not a reinvention, but it doesn’t need to be. Routh’s Superman is steady, sympathetic, and capable of carrying the weight of expectation without buckling under it.
Kate Bosworth, on the other hand, miscast and visibly misgiving, makes a Lois Lane who seems to be haunted not just by Superman’s five-year absence, but by the creeping realisation she’s been handed a role written for a different actor, a different era, and maybe a different film. It doesn’t help that the central emotional dilemma – Superman returning to find Lois with a fiancé and a surprise son – feels more like the setup for a mid-season Desperate Housewives arc than a superheroic myth. James Marsden’s Richard White, blandly noble to the point of narrative inconvenience, is never really treated as a character so much as a minor obstacle with a jawline.
Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor, meanwhile, is the closest the film gets to actual personality, but again the spectre of Gene Hackman hovers. Spacey clearly relishes the archness, but his villainy is bound by the same tonal constraints that hobble the rest of the film – it has to feel like a continuation, not a confrontation and certainly not a catharsis so instead we get another get-rich-quick scheme, another perfunctorily shrill henchwoman, and a performance pitched not at menace but arch theatre.
Perhaps what’s most striking – and strangest – about Superman Returns is its tone: poised between operatic sincerity and museum-piece formality. Singer sets his sights on myth but achieves mausoleum. The action sequences, when they do arrive, are beautifully executed but oddly muted, as though the film’s afraid to flex its muscles in case it tears the vintage costume, the way it tears a 747 with its abject lack of understanding of torsional stress. The admittedly still spectacular plane rescue is its one clear concession to modern superhero cinema – kinetic, well-staged, and genuinely rousing, even if nearly everything Superman does makes the situation worse before it gets better – but it arrives early and casts a long, expectant shadow over the rest of the film, which prefers its heroics to be slow-motion straining or silent gazes across mid-century skyline vistas.
There’s also the awkward pacing – Superman Returns is a film that runs long but somehow feels slight. It gestures at grandeur but doesn’t earn it. There’s no true antagonist for Superman, no philosophical clash, no narrative gearshift. Just a melancholic amble through set pieces that echo better-remembered moments from better-loved films. Superman doesn’t just return; he retraces. And nowhere is that more exasperating than in the decision to reprise, almost verbatim, the most tedious aspect of Donner’s original – Lex Luthor’s real estate obsession. In 1978, he wanted to nuke the San Andreas Fault and create a new West Coast with beachfront property in Nevada. Here, it’s the same core plan stripped of even that pulpy lunacy – now it’s just raising a giant, damp Kryptonite rock in the middle of the ocean, hoping the audience cares. It’s not even fun anymore. It’s just criminally – and geologically – uninspired.
The tragedy of Superman Returns is that it isn’t a misfire so much as a missed opportunity. It had the budget, the cast, the goodwill – and even the kernel of a bold idea: what does a messianic figure do when the world has moved on? But the film never dares to dig into that question. Its insistence on reverent fidelity becomes its straitjacket. It’s a film that knows what Superman was but has no idea of what he could or should be now.
Worse still, it landed during a generational shift in superhero cinema. Just a year earlier, Batman Begins had redefined how a DC comic book character could be reintroduced – not through rose-tinted mimicry, but through deliberate, grounded recalibration. Nolan’s approach was character-led and contemporary, treating canon not as obligation but as raw material. Superman Returns offered the opposite: a museum display with cleaner glass.
A couple of years later, Iron Man would take a lesser-known Marvel character and, with wit, energy, and the faint whiff of petrol, ignite an entire cinematic revolution. Compared to that – or to what The Dark Knight was about to deliver – Superman Returns looked tired and timid. It was a throwback at exactly the wrong moment, clinging to cellophane-S nostalgia while the rest of the genre was busy reinventing itself. Not only did it fail to move the Superman brand forward, it became a metatextual parallel of its own plot, adrift in a world that had abandoned it for other heroes.
There’s potentially a version of this film that could have made its longing into something radical – a deconstruction of Superman as an idea, a myth out of time. And had the film trusted more in Routh’s thoughtful performance rather than shackling him to echo chambers of the past, it might have found a genuine bridge between reverence and renewal. But Superman Returns never questions its own devotion. It’s too mannered, too faithful, too ready to expertly re-tease the curl to his forehead rather than ask what the cape still stands for.
