The other evening I made an attempt to see the new Superman movie with the boys. Simply getting into the theater was a tad more arduous than I expected. I approached the ticket window with both boys where we were the only ones in line. I asked for three to see Superman. The price she quoteed seemed a little low, but I assumed we must still be at matinee pricing as it’s a 6:30 show. I payed, and she handed me two tickets. I asked about the third and she looked genuinely surprised that the three people standing in front of her booth would want a third ticket.
In looking at what’s in my hand, she has already sold me one adult and one child ticket. Now she’s going to sell me a second child ticket. So I pay for it, but I can’t help wondering what she had in mind. That one of the kids was just walking Dad and brother to the theater before going off on his own for a couple of hours?
That behind us, we proceed into the theater where we’re instructed to go to theater 10. But when we get there, theater 10 is not showing Superman. It’s showing My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I guess all “super” movies are equivalent. In checking the tickets again, I notice that she actually sold us tickets to Super-Ex. Then, as we’re looking for the right theater to be in, we meet a couple who also is holding Super-Ex tickets and looking for the Superman theater.
At this point I’m really hoping the chick-let in the ticket booth just broke up with her boyfriend or something, because if this job is too complicated for her, she has a long few decades in front of her.
Well, at last we’re watching the movie. And in retrospect, I’m thinking maybe we should have gone with Super-Ex instead. The characters were actually well played. Kevin Spacey is a wonderful Lex Luthor. And I liked the homage of working Noel Neill (Lois Lane from the old TV series) into a small role. But who wrote the script? Did anyone tell him this was a comic book? The film is completely devoid of cheesy dialog, wit, sarcasm, or any other rhetoric which is the bread and butter of comics. The comic fodder of the bumbling Clark Kent is completely untapped. And while there are lots of special effects, it manages to have almost no action sequences. Nothing that’s engaging anyway. I think the film needs to be classified a drama. And it probably succeeds as that, but it wasn’t what I was expecting.
[WARNING: SPOILER ALERT – STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT]
The movie did provide some food for thought though. Apparently, years before the movie took place, Superman and Lois had a baby. While the chemistry of that makes sense, the physics is still making my head spin. I keep envisioning sperm that are “faster than a speeding bullet” and “more powerful than a miniature locomotive”. I gotta wonder why poor Lois wasn’t just shredded like a wet Kleenex during sex. Ouch. Maybe Noel Neill had it right after all. Keep that relationship strictly professional.