Supes successfully soars?

From Boston Herald, "Bryan Singer’s highly-anticipated “Superman Returns” was finally unveiled for the press Thursday night in L.A. (the print was finished at Technicolor at 2:30 that afternoon) and Warner Bros. must have given a sigh of relief when they heard the genuine applause at the finish. What Singer’s done is a dandy trick: He’s honored the tradition of Superman as a quintessentially 20th-century American myth and simultaneously given the Man of Steel a home (cinematically) in the 21st century.

This Superman returns from a five-year absence to find the love of his life, Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane, settled into domesticity with a son Jason and a lover, Daily Planet editor Perry White’s nephew Jack (James Marsden), who also works at the paper. An unmarried heroine with a kid, a woman with two very different men in her life – and, oh yes, a Pulitzer Prize – what could be more contemporary?

Even better, Singer has transformed Superman, the alien from another planet with his extraordinary powers, into a majestic, awe-inspiring figure, not a kiddie comic book guy in tights. Like Apollo come to earth, like Atlas holding the world in the great Rockefeller Center sculpture, Brandon Routh’s Superman has a gravity that enobles this entire two-and-a-half hour picture. There is one dazzling sequence early on where Superman rescues a doomed airplane whose passenger list includes Lois Lane, his estranged true love. Singer of course couldn’t know that the sequence would echo the final moments of the horrifying 9/11 “United 93” but that it does – and that it has Superman for a happy ending – gives it perhaps a greater gravitas. Here is a fantasy that like Disney’s plaintive Oscar-winning wartime song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” speaks directly to a need for healing from the brutal realities we face daily.

Singer has cast two of the surviving cast members from the Fifties “Superman” TV series. Noel Neill, Lois Lane, plays a dying widow under Lex Luthor’s thrall and Jack Larson, Jimmy Olson, appears as a bartender serving Jimmy (Sam Huntington) and Clark Kent drinks. He even wittily manages to get in the famous phrases, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” and “Faster than a speeding bullet.”

More importantly, Singer straddles Superman’s time zones and eras. The venerable Daily Planet, with its golden globe atop the Metropolis City landmark building, is a Thirties building with 21st century hardware, flat-screen monitors, computers and faxes. Parker Posey’s wry comic relief as Kitty, Lex Luthor’s moll, is, right down to her name, an evocation of Hollywood’s spunky, wise-cracking Forties heroine Paulette Goddard (with a bit of Jennifer Jones). There is luminous Eva Marie Saint as Ma Kent once again in a movie, if only through screen magic, with her “On the Waterfront” leading man Marlon Brando whose work as Jor-El, the father of Superman, is recycled to positive effect.

How the public responds to “Superman Returns” when it opens at 10 PM on June 27th is anyone’s guess but Singer & Co. can be content knowing they’ve managed not only to resurrect an American icon but done it with smarts, grace and even poetry. It’s going to be hard for any superhero movie to beat the magisterial bearing Singer so emphatically summons as in one memorable shot Superman is seen suspended in space, his dusty-colored cape twirling, an ancient god come from the heavens. Fittingly, the film is dedicated “respectfully” to Christopher Reeve and Dana Reeve."