Alright, y’all want my reasoning behind my dislike of Superman ‘78? To save myself time and effort, here are snippets from others’ reviews which align with my own thoughts.
Unlike some, I think Superman can be an extremely great character, and I love him to pieces when he succeeds at least mildly at reaching his potential. But here, he just doesn’t gel with me. He doesn’t even think of becoming Superman until he’s TOLD by his biological father. He doesn’t even THINK to use his powers for good until he’s told to do so when he turns 18 - and he’s not even someone Clark knows already or has previously formed a connection with. As such, Superman isn’t a result of Clark’s own morality and desire to help people - he seems more to be a result of Clark learning that he’s a super special alien. That’s just not what Superman’s all about to me. To me, Superman is a good person, and that’s the most important thing about him. As I see it, the reason why Clark became Superman is just to help people, and it came about as a result of internalizing the moral instruction of his adopted parents, not from just suddenly being TOLD when he’s an adult by someone he didn’t even know before. Everyone likes Superman for different reasons, but for me, this movie just COMPLETELY missed what I like best about him.
In addition to Superman seeming disconnected from humanity and needing to be TOLD to help people, Superman also fails to show many particularly compelling traits you would expect from a hero. Think about it - the day is saved by Lex Luthor’s henchwoman, not him! Throughout the entire movie, I fail to see him show any particular cleverness, endurance, courage, or anything. (I guess you could argue that turning back the world was “clever”, but I found that plot point so completely, utterly, painfully stupid that I can’t agree.) He just IS super, and I guess that’s supposed to be enough, even though that’s just a part of his biology as opposed to who he is as a person.
Bottom line, I just don’t find this version of Superman compelling at all. He lacks volition, his motives and everything he does seems to be motivated more by Jor-El than his own desires, he doesn’t seem to have much emotional attachment to humanity, and there’s just so little to him beyond his physical abilities.
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Perhaps one of the biggest unexplained plot points of all is, why does Jor-El want Kal-El to “become an inspiration to humanity” or “show them the light” or whatnot at all? The reason why he sent Kal- El to earth was to save HIM, not for humanity’s sake. This is a big reason that I feel the “Superman = Jesus” analogy the movie tried to push fails. Jor-El isn’t shown having any actual motives to inspire his son to become this Christ figure. They COULD’VE shown him having such motives, but they didn’t. His desire to have Kal help humanity just appears without an explanation in Jor-El’s character being given.
What I can’t stand is that SUPERMAN can fly around the world to turn back time. I know I should suspend my disbelief, but it’s such a lousy ending for the movie. Can’t he do something else, better to defeat Lex Luthor and save Lois Lane? And if he can fly fast enough to turn back time, why couldn’t he just have caught both nuclear warheads?
While Christopher Reeves plays a fantastic Superman, the movie fell short where many movies do in that the super-villain isn’t a challenge for the superhero. Lex Luthor is an evil genius, but he is not portrayed, in this movie anyway, as someone who could challenge and defeat Superman, even in a battle of wits.
Reeve’s decision to play Clark Kent as a bumbling character based on Cary Grant is one that fits with the film’s infantile tone
My third problem is that Superman brings Lois Lane back from the dead by reversing time itself by going backwards around the Earth (with terrible yet unintentionally funny special effects), which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It also kills what precious little suspense was there to begin with because Superman could theoretically keep doing this whenever he felt like it. It really just felt like the writers wrote themselves into a corner and pulled something out of their asses to keep the plot going.
Superman is so smart, and so smart, that he goes to a reporter and tells her all his secrets except his own identity. And she publishes for all his enemies to read.
But let’s take a look at the plot: Lex Luthor buys cheap mid-western real state with the intention of sending a nuclear missile to San Andreas fault, thus sinking the whole west coast, which would cause his cheap real state to become the new west coast, thus making him rich. Never mind the fact that the plan is neither physically possible nor economically viable, those are the least of this movie’s problems. The problems start when, luckily for Luthor, the US Army, who are depicted as the most incompetent group of buffoons in the history of cinema, decide to launch 2 nuclear missiles within US territory, with enough fuel to reach both coasts and no failsafes whatsoever. They literally just plan to hurl the missiles up into the air and hope for the best because if anything goes wrong, they’re screwed. The missiles are going to be transported from the base where they are stored to the launching base (where no one will ever check if anything went wrong) by a group of soldiers so dumb and horny they’ll leave their post in unison at the sight of a scantily-clad woman lying in the pavement ahead of them.
It’s bad enough that the only real difference between Luthor’s plan to hijack the missiles and a Coyote’s plan to capture the Road Runner is the number of empty Acme boxes lying around afterwards. It’s bad enough that the plan actually works, thanks to the spectacular incompetence of the US Army. It’s bad enough that Otis (Luthor’s henchman) demonstrates that he is the stupidest living being ever put on film by screwing up a task a 6-year-old child would’ve done correctly. But what makes this sequence completely unbearable is the fact that Otis’ screw up is going to play such an important part in the plot later on. Quite literally, Otis’ braindead screw up is the one and only reason Superman manages to defeat Luthor.
Then Luthor realizes that Superman could still foil his plans so he decides to get rid of him, and using reasoning that Uwe Boll would’ve been ashamed to put on film, he “deduces”, out of the blue, the existence and effects of Kryptonite. Then he lures Superman into his lair (in the sewers) so he can kill him. At this point, Superman is completely clueless regarding the missiles and Luthor’s plan. If Luthor has kept his mouth shut, he would’ve won. But just to prove that this movie is nothing but a bad James Bond movie written by Ed Wood, and that Luthor is nothing more than a poor man’s Goldfinger, he tells Superman everything about his plan, including how to stop it if he desires to do so. Then he puts the Kryptonite necklace on Superman, pushes him into a pool, and continues his James Bond-villain impersonation by conveniently walking away for no readily apparent reason, hoping that Superman is nice enough to die unsupervised and stupid enough not no realize that all he has to do is to bend over and let the necklace slip from his neck. All Luthor had to do was to wait two minutes for Superman to drown. If he was in a hurry, he could’ve helped him. But no, he walks away.
So Superman is in the pool, a Kryptonite necklace slowly draining away his powers and even his very life. This is the first time in the whole movie that Superman cannot simply muscle his way out of a problem. So what does he do? Does he demonstrate that being a hero is about the heart, not the muscles? Does he demonstrate that a hero might be down, but he’s never out? Does he demonstrate that a true hero will always find a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat no matter what the odds are? No, that would be SuperGIRL. What Superman demonstrates is that he’s absolutely worthless without his muscles. So how does he get out of there? Well, it turns out that Otis’ screw up in programming the missile has conveniently sent it to the town where the grandparents of Luthor’s henchwoman live. And she saves Superman so he can save her grandparents, in what is effectively the worst “plot twist” in the history of cinema.
The romance: This was painful to watch. Lois is an annoying character. She’s supposed to be an experienced and respected reporter, yet she doesn’t show the slightest bit of competence or professionalism at anything she does (especially that awkward interview scene… “Can you see my underwear?” Really?). Clark is given pretty much zero reasons to fall for her, yet he does - I guess because he’s the male lead and she’s the female lead and that’s the only reason. Why would he suddenly fall for the mean lady at work who’s a kinda disrespectful to him? The flying scene with the narration was just cringe-worthy.
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What was a bit weird though, was Clark’s personality. It’s normal for a superhero to have two personalities, the superhero persona, and the public civilian self. The bumbling klutz Clark Kent persona is clearly an act, but it seems like the Superman persona is also fake. The good-natured goodie-two-shoes boy scout personality doesn’t really resemble Clark when he was a kid, his true self, which this movie unfortunately ignores until we possibly see a bit of it again at the very end. It’s a personality that’s quiet and introspective, wondering about his role and place in the world. If he was like that when he was a kid, there isn’t much reason to completely change, so much so that he seems like a different character when he’s older, right? His kid personality feels like Superman’s real personality, the personality we should have seen more of.
Also, the ending is horrible. I mean poorly-thought out horrible, similar to what helped kill the Matrix. You see, Superman solves all these disasters, but as a result can’t save Lois. She gets killed, and Superman decides to do the one thing he promised not to do… alter history. He turns the world around, and sets time back by, I don’t know, five minutes. Then he goes down to see the now-living Lois. BUT WAIT!!! SINCE IT’S FIVE MINUTES AGO, SHOULDN’T ALL THOSE DISASTERS THAT WERE HAPPENING BE OCCURING AGAIN!? Also, Lois was killed in the flick by being buried in a landslide. For some unknown reason, when he turns back time the landslide itself is not occuring again. With plotholes like this, one can wonder what the writers were doing all this time. It’s also hard to believe that this film was scripted by the same person who wrote the Godfather.