It wouldn’t be as much a privilege if we were all sons of Superman. We’d probably be colliding against one another even in all that airspace, as we dart and glide and zoom to and fro, under the radar, above vast cornfields in Kansas, through urban canyons, between skyscrapers, up to the nimbus clouds, up, up, and away to the stratosphere.
It wouldn’t be as much fun if there were legions of us creating an empyrean traffic jam while striking fear in the hearts and evil minds of the Lex Luthors, or regaling the Jimmy Olsens of the world, their camera flashbulbs popping infinitely, while we hear the oohs and ahhs of the madding, matronly crowd surrounding all the Lois Lanes on the ground – that is, when she and her clones, newshens all, aren’t availing themselves of our escort services and also floating high, in stiletto heels.
"Faster than a speeding bullet…" Hey, wait. If the Man of Steel and his only begotten son were faster than a speeding bullet, that leaves Jimmy no chance to catch them on the fly, right? No, not even with superspeed film or a videograb. And the gawking, gaping crowds on the streets could scan the skies all they want and not even glimpse a blur, a whir, a Nike swoosh against the blue.
But just do it, Kal-El. You’re Superman, you’ve flown past the horizons of our rational imagination, into wondrous turfs that all spell suspension of disbelief.
You’re a bird, you’re a plane, you’re myth, hyperbolic and hyped up through comic books that have spanned generations. And you’re a movie icon, with no edition ever failing at the box office. You’re the primus inter pares among all superheroes. You’re a sure thing.
So here we are again, thrilling to your return, and we can even watch you on an IMAX screen here in Manila, er, Pasay, starting today. And so we rest all logic, leave the constraints of narrative credibility at home, else we don’t have a grand time in 2006, a year after Christopher Reeve’s demise.
Why, we must nod in appreciation over Superman Returns. And we do, we do. It means our boyhood’s back in flower, and marvelously abloom are all our fantasies about saving the planet.
Unlike Michael Jordan who did it twice, and Paul Newman as Fast Eddie lording it over the green pelt of a pool table, you don’t even have to say "I’m back." You just do it. You did it. You’re here with us anew, providing ritzy, escapist entertainment that will surely rake in the megabucks.
Never mind if Lois herself questions the need for you, as she does in this movie. Never mind if, in the overweening comfort of Digital Dolby and Sensurround, as some of us put on 3-D glasses for 20 special minutes of asteroids and you hurtling towards us in our seats, we still wonder how Ms. Lane and everyone else in the Daily Planet never even imagine to play Photoshop with Clark Kent’s horn-rimmed glasses, and say, "Hey, doesn’t he look like …?"
As we sit through this 150-minute movie, special effects will mesmerize and turn us into Sons of Sam, or retards accepting everything because it’s all comics lore. And yet the spell can be broken sometimes, and we have to ask, just ask: When Kent/Kal-el had a night’s dalliance with Lois Lane, was he, uhh, faster than a speeding bullet? Was he truly the Man of Steel? And if, as the expository dialogue has it, Superman disappeared soon after, was it enough for Lois to go through a disconsolate if brief spell before she took it up with whatzisname, an office colleague?
The reason we ask, while not really demanding an answer, is that she says Superman was gone five years, and yet her son looks like he’s at least all of six or seven. Or, okay, make him four; maybe he’s just big for his age. Still, that means Lois didn’t exactly pine too long after what must have been a memorable night of steely shafting, right? Oh, I’m sorry, this is a family movie.
So, okay, suspend disbelief some more. Even as we begin to suspect, or try to figure out whether that boy has indeed been sired by the survivor of Kypton, the movie does a fine job of keeping us on tenterhooks.
The boy is asthmatic, with or without Kryptonite beside him. And yet at a critical moment he manages to push a grand piano to impale the efforts of a baddie about to hurt his mom Lois even more horribly.
Well, we’ve read how an ordinary mortal can carry a 51-inch screen plus all the other amenities of a home theater system on his back when that home is threatened by a conflagration. Experts credit that superpower surge to adrenaline rush. Maybe the boy’s been sniffing at something other than an inhalator.
And so we’re kept in melodramatic suspense. But, come on, our movie instincts keep nagging us: Is he or isn’t he the son of Superman? Why, corny naman if not. He must be the Son of Superman.
Far be it from me, an occasional Lex Luthor in my own right (and here the arch-villain is played deliciously by Kevin Spacey), to spoil it further for everyone who doesn’t make it to the besieged box office on this first day. Other than by adding (hey, doesn’t a single arch-villain turn into a bore, and doesn’t Superman ever envy Batman’s colorful pantheon of nemeses?) that other questions bedevil or beguile us throughout an otherwise spectacular movie.
Such as: What happened to our superhero’s cape? Why the fashion change? Looks to us like precious inches have been added before it plunges down into a calf-deep hemline. And it ain’t a bright red no more, but a gamut of flat colors ranging from brick red to maroon to mauve to, why, outright brown, a dark brown, especially when that cape stiffens up in certain scenes. (No, not what you think; they never flash back to that one-night stand. The movie’s still rated a G, for General Audience.)
Sure, the kids will enjoy it. But methinks some of them, even if weaned on the early DC comics, would also ask: Why is the S insignia on that famous chest not a bright red? Why does it look like copper, with a heavily dimpled surface much like that of a Spalding all-court basketball?
We must explain very carefully that perhaps the moviemakers wanted to incorporate the surface look of modern-day graphic novels, which also explains why Superman’s eyes can sometimes be impossibly blue, and on some occasions turn gritty gray. Why, that’s it, it’s the graphic grit effect, so that this movie can pass itself off as a colored (Techni-, that is) cousin of Sin City.
Our last observation is that Brandon Routh as Superman easily calls to mind – at certain angles, especially when he’s playing the mythic hero to the posturing hilt – why, Richard Gutierrez’s Captain Barbell in our homegrown TV series. This should make GMA-7 very happy.
It’s super entertainment, all right. And we should quickly quash all those nagging questions once we realize that Clark Kent still tears off his office apparel, coat, tie and shirt, presumably also his pants and black leather shoes, whenever an emergency demands his time. And we never wondered where he left them, or if he ever got them back, right? Phone booths don’t apply anymore; this movie doesn’t have London for a setting, and quite reasonably validates common knowledge that we’re in the era of mobile phones.
One other thing going for Superman Returns: Kate Bosworth is also delicious, the best-looking Lois Lane our superhero ever had. Maybe that’s why he succumbed to less-than-steely romance. Enough of that pas de deux in the sky.
In any case, you won’t find a copy of last Wednesday’s issue in my North Pole abode. It’s gone the way of that presidential virus: all chewed up.
And I didn’t take the World Cup second-round sked for the surviving 16 teams into consideration when I made that order-of-finish prediction. Brazil can’t ever clash with Holland in the finals, but only in the semis, possibly. Nor can Spain finish fourth and France eighth. Either one has to give when they meet in the quarterfinals.
Other than that, the eight teams I ranked all made it to the Group of 16, with Switzerland and Ukraine the only pair that will produce a quarterfinalist not in my list.
In my book, the quarter pairings ought to be Germany-Argentina (a humdinger), England-Holland, Italy-Switzerland (although Ukraine can pull a Miami here), and Brazil against … Wait. SuperHamlet time. Spain or France? Our colonial masters have done well (by us?), but I’ve idolized Zinedine Zidane so much I’d like him to have his last game against Ronaldo-Ronaldinho-Robinho-Ricardinho, so we have a ZZ against the 4 Rs. And let’s see whether the musketeers retire The Mark of Zizou.
That’s the fun in playing the personal crystal ball. Shake it and you can even break it. Even with my X-ray vision, that’s only how far I see, thus far, through the beautiful game.