Superman (1978)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1978
	Director: Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon 1-4, The Omen)
	Actors: Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman (The Conversation, The Firm, Enemy of the State)
	Country: USA, GB, CDN, CH
	Genre: Fantasy, Adventure
	Conditions of visioning: 13.09.2020, VOD, 14" computer screen.

Synopsis: Kal-El, born on the dying planet Krypton, is sent to Earth by his father where he will grow up to be known as Superman (Reeves), a super-hero with god-like powers. Review: I am very sorry to give such a bad rating to such a classic movie but it didn't age well. I have to immediately mention that I watched the 3-hour so-called TV Extended Version, 40 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. You can read all about the different cuts on this Wikipedia page. This probably influences the rating as the added material is not essential and just slows down the pace and highlight even more the movie's weaknesses for the simple sake of seeing more of it. Superman is known as the first major big-budget superhero feature film, released now more than 40 years ago, at a time when little was known about how to make a successful comic book adaptation. They were just the first and had to kind of create a Genre. I had a found memory of the movie but hadn't watched it in at least a decade, and it looks much more kitsch than I remembered. It does contain some iconic moment like Marlon Brando's performance, but the one thing I give it credit for is the performance by Christopher Reeve who can make you believe it is possible to not recognize that Clark Kent is Superman: he is so clumsy and bent over and shy that he is easily ignored or overlooked. If the movie was released today I am sure his acting would be the source of many memes. But at the time it was original and pleased the audience. The heroic scenes did as well, most of them involving flying. Watched today, those scenes look really bad and artificial for a movie which was released the same year as Star Wars. Another iconic element of the movie is the score by John Williams. Unfortunately, past the main theme, it often drifts towards a Star Wars feeling, like if the composer had some musical pieces that he swapped between the two. The love story with Lois Lane also comes out of nowhere, and the character of Jimmy Olsen is annoying. Another annoying thing is the inconsistency of Superman's reactions: saving a cat here and lifting the San Andreas fault there, flying at the speed of light but wasting minutes to smile at people instead of rescuing Lois Lane. I hope that's a default proper to the Extended version and that the original one fixed it. I had a bit forgotten that Gene Hackman was known at the time for his incarnation of a goofy Lex Luthor surrounded by a team of idiots. This is part of the comic book elements the cinema crew had to play with. And as usual with Superman, he is over-powered and his interaction with the environment doesn't make any physical sense, until the very ending. At least they tried to make that look less awkward in the recent remake Man of Steel and the rest of the DCEU. I can still try to remember the few good elements with nostalgia, but in all objectivity this movie, or at least this Extended cut of it, is not very good.   Rating: 4 /10