News

By Hilary White
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Superman ReturnsTORONTO, June 28, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The makers of Hollywood blockbusters seem to have learned an important lesson from Mel Gibson’s spectacular success with The Passion of the Christ: religion sells, even if only ersatz religion revolving around fallible caped superheroes.
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  Superman Returns, which opens today, is a fitting tribute to the iconic Superman heroic legend and a summer blockbuster that pushes all the right buttons as a piece of entertainment. Its handsome and indomitable hero, played confidently by newcomer Brandon Routh, his thrilling rescues and astonishing feats are believable and attractive. The movie picks up five years after the end of the last one, after Superman has gone back to find his lost home world. Upon his return, he finds his true love, intrepid girl-reporter Lois Lane has a son and a permanent relationship (not married though) and the world is still in need of a hero.
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  There seems to be no physical feat Superman cannot perform. Following a night of stopping robberies and putting out fires, newscasts are overheard estimating that he can fly at nearly the speed of light. He can lift mountains and survive in the airlessness of space. Routh plays the double part of Superman and the nebbishy Clark Kent perfectly with an obvious tribute to the late Christopher Reeve, but makes the part his own.
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  Some of the plausibility problems of the earlier films have been more carefully thought through. The Man of Steel may be able to stop bullets and trains, but in Superman Returns, the laws of physics, the mass and inertia of a plummeting passenger jet for instance, receive a bit more attention. In the Reeve Superman films we were told in the promos that we would “believe a man could fly” and we did. Now we can also believe that a man can stop a crashing Boeing 747, though with a little difficulty and at the last possible moment.
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  By no means, though, is the audience cheated of the requisite spectacular feats of superness. The assistance of some astonishing computer generated effects provides one of the niftiest scenes anyone has yet seen in films, when a miscreant tries to shoot our hero in the left eye at closer than point blank range. The audience cheers and whoops with delight as the bullet bounces off his unblinking eye with a clang.
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  The film retains the tongue-in-cheek tone, without a hint of the postmodern meanness or irony that so delighted audiences of the earlier films. It maintains a light-hearted and even tender attitude towards its fallible hero and his longing for love.
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  While such exploits, however, are splendid fun for those who love to indulge a bit of hero-worship, the audience of the early 21st century has larger worries than it did in 1978. The glorified natural prowess of a Superman, with all his Nietzschian implications, may have looked like the answer to the smaller stuff thirty or even sixty years ago in the midst of the great depression when the character first appeared, but as a proposed Saviour of mankind, he serves only to highlight the global enormity and insolubility of modern human worries.
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  But the film does quite frankly and unambiguously propose the Man of Steel as a quasi-religious saviour. He is offered as a demi-god to a world that needs the transcendent power of the real God.
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  It is rare that a film will so obviously and closely follow the defining themes of Christianity. In Superman Returns, the hero comes down from his heavenly father, works for a time of selfless ministry helping others, is defeated by his enemies and dies. He is buried, spends three days in the symbolic tomb of a coma, and is resurrected. Other defining Christian doctrines, including the Trinity and the more difficult and obscure idea of the hypostatic union, the union of the second Person of the Trinity with a human nature, are also referred to. There is even a hint of the presence of Mary at the foot of the cross.
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  In one scene, as he hovers far above the world listening to the cries for help (prayers) of the people below, the voice of Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s Kryptonian natural father, the wise Jor-El, is heard paraphrasing John’s Gospel. Jor-El tells his super son that the people of earth are striving to be good and to order their society morally and that they need his leadership. “They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, I have sent them you: my only son.”
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  But though Superman is obviously selfless and good and kind and brave, though he can fly and stop bullets, catch falling jets and put out fires with his super breath, as a saviour he cannot solve the real problem facing man. He has no power to forgive sin and heal its moral wounds in individuals or society. He cannot save mankind from that which truly threatens it.
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  Superman is one of us in every way that counts. He has no supreme or transcendent wisdom. He fails; he sins (he has fathered an illegitimate child and has no qualms about using his X-ray vision and super hearing to spy and eavesdrop on his ex-girlfriend); he longs for human love, he struggles for meaning.
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  The film is subtle in re-writing the problem of mankind in naturalistic terms and many will likely miss its humanistic overtones. Our troubles, it says, are natural, not supernatural. Crime, not sin is what worries us and so a man – a regular guy with unusual abilities – can be our Saviour.
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  As a summer blockbuster adventure, Superman Returns is everything an audience could want and its lack of an overtly negative moral message will reassure many parents. But with the film’s unabashed rewriting of the central story of Christianity in naturalistic terms, the subtlety of its denial of the transcendence of God and the nature of salvation is one that may disturb the more alert.

See the Superman Returns trailer:
https://supermanreturns.warnerbros.com/