Science Fiction Archive

Christopher Reeve’s reign as The Man of Steel comes to a rather ignominious end with this, his fourth outing. Not that Reeve is bad, in fact he clearly still had a lot of affection for the character, and the basic idea is a good one – Superman taking on an almost godlike role in order to save mankind from itself – it’s the execution that lets it down.

Sidney J. Furie was once a director with talent, producing, amongst others, The Ipcress File, here though he displays none of the flare he once showed. The Quest for Peace is the work of a talentless hack, the Superhero equivalent of Plan 9 from Outer Space but without that films charm. Superman decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the world governments (and I mean ALL of them) say “gee thanks Mr Superman, without you to throw the nasty bombs into the sun we’d never have thought of getting rid of them”.

Rather than pit Superman against the world’s leaders, the filmmakers give us, once again, Gene Hackman as comedy villain, Lex Luthor. The problem is he’s just not funny anymore. Batman, Spider-Man, and The X-Men all get new villains in each new outing but it’s like Superman has only got one bad guy. Someone should really buy the producers of the Superman films some comics, after all Bryan Singer continued this preoccupation with the bald headed master of menace in Superman Returns.

The problem with Superman is that he’s Superman. He’s almost omniscient and it’s hard to find a worthy challenge for him. Superman II manages it by pitting him against three Kryptonian villains, each with powers equal to his own.

When I first saw Superman II at the cinema I thought it a better film than the original. As a fifteen year old comic geek it had what the first film lacked, namely super villains. For the first time we got to see a real Superhero vs. Supervillain knock-down-drag-out fight. There were faults – the romance with Margot Kidder never really worked for me (and still doesn’t) and Superman’s mum lying to him that, after choosing to become human, he can never go back, was always a pretty big plot hole.

The forty-three year old comic geek who just watched the film still loves the fight scenes (although some of the effects seem a little less special than they used to) and Terence Stamp and Sarah Douglas are still excellent bad guys (even if General Zod does go a bit Cockney at times, particularly the TV broadcast from the White House).

Now though I can also see the faults – sllly comedy moments and some ropy dubbing (how many characters does Shane Rimmer voice?), Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor completely superfluous to the plot, too little Ned Beatty, E.G. Marshall’s atrocious wig. Plus the whole Superman becoming human (for all of about five minutes) subplot isn’t really needed. The film runs over two hours, not as long as the first film, but then that had to tell the origin story, with Superman not making an appearance until an hour into the film. Superman II could have been trimmed by about thirty minutes and not lost anything of importance.