Superman Returns

[avram]

bugsybanana and I saw Superman Returns on Friday. This is pretty directly a sequel to the 1978 Richard Donner film, but holy crap, it’s half remake. Seriously, this thing slavishly recreates entire scenes and incorporates chunks of dialog from the original. Hey, Brian Singer, could we maybe have had more new stuff in our new movie? And what the heck was the deal with that meteorite at the beginning?

And I like a bit less Jesus in my Superman. Sure, the Clark Kent/Superman thing has maybe an echo of the whole “wholly God, wholly man” thing, but a key part of the Jesus myth is that Jesus’s death and resurrection redeemed mankind from sin. This isn’t part of the Superman storyline — Supes’s death and resurrection in 1993, for all of the ham-fisted gospel parallels the writers put in, was just a crappy DC marketing ploy, and is too recent to have really shaped his myth. And, frankly, it’s just too awful a story for me to take seriously, so I don’t like to think about it. But then, that’s why I’m hardly buying any Big Two superhero comics anymore.

Superman’s mythological roots don’t lie in the gospels, but primarily in the stories of brawny-yet-clever heroes like Hercules and Samson. Supes being a sun-god makes him even more like Samson, and Lois in the old Silver Age comics made a pretty good Delilah.

If you want the feel of the old Silver Age Superman written with modern attention to dialog and plotting, pick up Grant Morrison’s and Frank Quitely’s bimonthly All-Star Superman, up to issue #4 so far. Morrison knows what myths to draw from; Samson and Hercules even show up in issue #3 to flirt with Lois, arm-wrestle Superman, and generally cause trouble.

Comments

[phrotus.livejournal.com]

Ditto like whoa. I've never even been much of a Supes fan*, and I'm devouring All-Star like it's candy. Oxygen candy. In fact, I'm not sure I would mind if oxygen were actually replaced with All-Star Superman.

*(For what it's worth, thoug, I s'pose the word of a longtime Superman lovah is a better endorsement.)

[avram]

Oxygen candy where you only get one molecule every two months!

[batyatoon]

... being a sun-god makes him more like Samson huh?

*bewildered*

[avram]

You know, Samson, the guy whose Hebrew name sounds sorta like the Hebrew word for sun (and also like that of a babylonian sun god), and who has a girlfriend whose name sounds a lot like the word for night, who deprived him of his power by cutting off his hair/rays?