That reminds me of when I told a friend I got it for $1.50. He was like, "I hope you mean they paid you $1.50 to take it." HYPERBOLE IS HYPERBOLIC
I loved that scene! Spacey was great as Luthor, my favorite by far. Hackman played him too much like acorn-ball. I like the seriousness Spacey gave the role.
The critics were kind to the Donner films as I remember. I loved them myself, as did most of my friends. But then again we weren't a group of internet fanboys (internet? what's the internet?) but I remember my parents and older siblings' friends loving the Donner films as did most of their contemporaries. Of course I was a teenaged girl who didn't hang with "fanboys." Maybe the fanboys were there not appreciating Donner's more sentimental vision of Superman. As an adult rewatching them, (and not a teenaged girl overwhelmed by Chris Reeve's obvious charms) I can appreciate in retrospect how good they were and how much more I appreciate heartfelt characters than overwhelming frenetic CGI battles.
I agree Singer didn't modernize things for SR as much as he probably should have, but I still thought the style and tone were radically different enough from the Donner movies to still make it feel like it's own, unique thing. And that somber tone and art deco design aesthetic are what stand out to me the most about SR. Which is why I'm always surprised when all others can seem to focus on are the homages and vague story similarities. To me those were just minor background things. Heck, if anything I'd say SR was more nostalgic for the stylized, golden-age Fleischer Superman than the Donner one. It's all over the look and design of the movie-- even more so than the few Donner elements we see.
I don't see portraying Luthor as a land-obsessed con man accompanied by a smattering of dimwitted henchmen as a minor background thing. It's probably the least impressive version of Lex Luthor we've ever had. Both the brilliant criminal scientist and the ruthless corporate magnate (and the DC Animated Universe version, who was a mix of both) were more interesting than the Donner/Singer version of Luthor. Hackman made him funny to watch, but man, what a lame interpretation of the character. If you ask me, the only real Lex Luthor we've ever gotten in a live-action Superman movie was Robert Vaughn in Superman III. Sure, his character was named Ross Webster, but he was a criminal who controlled a vast corporation and used its resources to support grandiose schemes that increased his wealth and/or combatted Superman. He was a prototype for the businessman Luthor we got a few years later in the post-Crisis reboot. And he was a more credible villain than Hackman's Luthor ever managed to be.
I don't know. Almost successfully killing Superman (if not for Tessmacher jumping in to save him) and successfully landing a missile that kills Superman's love interest have to give him SOME credit as a worthy opponent.
I was referring to the fanboys and their hatred of Superman Returns more than anything else, but yeah, I see what you're saying. BTW, the idea that Superman Returns was a box-office failure is bogus and has been disproved: You're Wrong: 20 Common Box Office Misconceptions (scroll down to the section marked 'Famous Flops Which Did Not'.) If anything, the reason it didn't 'make money' was due to Hollywood accounting. I'll agree with you about Donner's Luthor, who could be brought down by Napoleon Solo & Illya Kuryakin, but Singer's Luthor was a combination of Donner's version and the version in the recent comic books/DCAU TV shows, and a much cunning man (swindling a rich old lady of her fortune and using it to accomplish what he did was a masterstroke, as well as keeping his head down and out of sight until she died and he was able to use her fortune to accomplish what happened in the rest of the film, as well as the feint staged to keep Superman from finding out about the robbery of the kryptonite by having Kitty almost crash her car.) That version's just as great as the ones you've mentioned and like.
It's sad that even the studio admitted Superman Returns didn't live up to their expectations either. They didn't even bother to try and salavage the film with a sequel From Jeff Robinov 2008 "Superman Returns didn't quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to. It didn't position the character the way he needed to be positioned. Had Superman worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009. Now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all." Really what else could we expect from SR?
Spacey was excellent as Luther, but was a real estate scam honestly the most dastardly idea they could come up with for him? Who the fuck would want to live on craggy island anyway? How are you supposed to build a house on that thing? It had 20ft high shards of sharp rock sticking out of the ground everywhere. It was the least attractive bit of real estate i've ever clapped eyes on.
I think Spacey was the perfect actor but the role was poorly conceived and written for him. While I liked his description of Superman as a god, which also gave some insight into why he probably hated him and when he stabbed Superman, everything else didn't work. I also didn't care for him shouting wrong. It looked good in the trailer-maybe?-but didn't do anything for me in the film. OT, but Shaka thanks for that link to Cinema Blend. I loved the piece about Sixteen Candles. Damn straight Breakin' spoke to my generation. It was the first movie I went out to see, at the drive-in.
It wasn't that the land itself was desirable to live on (at least not at first, but his plan to divide it into states seemed to imply that he planned on developing it further and possibly covering it with topsoil), it's that as the crystal island continued to grow and displace more water it would rapidly flood the parts of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa facing the Atlantic, thus killing billions in the process. The ultra-rich would probably then be offered the opportunity to take their chances in an even more over-populated (now with billions of refugees) East/South Asia or to live on an exclusive continent of their own. Yeah, it was real estate related in the long run, but killing billions of people by creating a new continent seems pretty dastardly to me, far more so then even the nuking western California into the sea scheme from Superman or teaming up with Zod in order to get him to give Luthor Australia as a spoil in Superman II.
Hmm, well the killing people bit is pretty dastardly yes, but come on, that land mass was completely undevelopable. How the hell would you transport and lay enough top soil to cover that continent sized monstrosity, especially after devastating the global economy, a significant number of its resources, mineral and mechanical, and killing half the planet's population? I presume he was also hoping to discover the Fountain of Youth, cause he would be about 100 years old before he even made a dent in that. Really bad plan.
Yeah, well, shooting a nuke into the San Andreas Fault also won't cause western California to fall into the sea. I'm not saying it was a realistic or well-thought out plan from a real world perspective, I'm just going by what seemed to be implied by the maps Luthor pulled down in the movie and adding a bit of speculation.
No sure, it just seemed to me that they went out of their way to make the new Luthor Continent look completely uninhabitable and pretty much useless for anything, which kind of made the whole plan seem stupid. I'm just explaining why I didn't like the film that much.