DVD Review: Superman: The Movie

"You Will Believe a Man Can Fly..."

Man, did I ever. In 1978 my ten-year-old brain was blown away by Richard Donner's Superman, and now, three years shy of my 40th birthday, I can still be transported to the boy I once was when I watch Superman. It's not only the best superhero feature film (and fanboys can start arguing now...), but a great film in its own right.

Is there anyone who doesn't know the story of how Superman was created? Well, in the 1930s, a young comic book writer named Joe Shuster and his partner, comic book writer Jerry Siegel, created The Man of Steel, who made his first appearance in Action Comics, #1, in 1938. The rest is history. Superman is a uniquely American icon, and the character has appeared in every form of media, from radio to television, the movies to video games, as well as animated series and shorts.

Big budget films were starting to become the norm in the 1970s, and it was an appropriate time to bring Superman to the big screen. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, had written a very long screenplay for Superman (which ended up being split off into two different movies), a serious take on the superhero mythos. Up until the release of Superman, the comic book genre really hadn't been produced in a serious manner — think Batman and the campy TV show of the 1960s. I'm sure people at the time thought that Superman would be another campy, Batman-ish b-flick. Man, were they wrong.

Superman has a very strong three-act story arc, taking us from the beginning on the doomed planted of Krypton to Smallville, Kansas, with a young Clark Kent (Jeff East) coming of age, and finally to the city of Metropolis, where an adult Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) is a reporter for the great metropolitan newspaper, The Daily Planet, and is, on the side, Superman.

The special edition DVD restores about eight minutes of footage not seen in the theatrical release of Superman, and these extra scenes flesh out the story a bit, giving us a longer opening on Krypton, with a bit more character development in Smallville and the film's third act.

We open on the icy planet of Krypton. The great scientist Jor-El (Marlon Brando, in his infamous million-dollar role) has been trying to warn the planet's government that the planet is doomed, that it will in fact be destroyed in a short amount of time. Of course, no one believes him, and Krypton is destroyed due to its red sun. Jor-El has just enough time to send his infant son, Kal-El, on a journey to the planet Earth, before Krypton's demise.

Article Author: Scott C. Smith

Scott C. Smith is a freelance writer from Happy Valley, Oregon. He has a cat and likes pop culture a little too much.

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