How ‘Superman’ Inspired a Movie-Review War: When Is It Fair to Say That Too Much Fun Is No Fun at All?

Critics, more than ever these days, tend to lean into the same opinion of a movie. More and more, the collective wisdom rules. “Superman,” however, may be a singular exception. It’s not just that a lot of the reviews, like mine, have been unabashedly enthusiastic, while a not-so-small contingent of critics, like this one, have slammed the movie as an overcooked debacle. It’s that when I look at the divided reviews of “Superman,” it’s as if I’m taking in the response to two entirely different movies.

One of them — my “Superman” — is a ripping good yarn, a brash, jaunty, clever, sweet, rooted-just-enough-in-the-real-world adventure that conjures some of the deadpan serial nuttiness of the Superman comics of the ’60s and ’70s. The other “Superman,” the one that’s gotten kicked in the blue-spandex shins, is too fast, too frenetic, too snarky, too overstuffed, too empty of soul and emotion and conviction. (And that goddamn dog!) Could both these movies exist?

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In a funny way, yes.

In the last six or seven years, as a reviewer of comic-book cinema, there have been times when I felt like I needed to join a support group, one in which my opening statement would be, “Hi, my name is Owen, and I liked ‘Captain Marvel’.” I did! I thought it was quite enjoyable and couldn’t fathom the media hatred of it. (It grossed $426 million domestic, so someone agreed with me.) I also liked “Eternals.” If you call me soft on those films, I won’t get defensive (though I’ll go to the mat, as I did at the time, to say that many of the folks who were so hard on “Eternals” seemed to be punishing Chloé Zhao for the crime of having sold out to direct it).

What I’ll make note of, especially in the case of “Superman,” is that when it comes to rendering judgments of comic-book movies, what’s in play is no longer just the usual thumbs up/thumbs down opinion. It’s actually a philosophical question about the nature of fun — what it is and what it isn’t, how it’s changed, and whether the concepts of “fun” and “corporate product” can, or should, go together.

I think they can (just look at “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” or “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which conjures some of the wonder of an old Ray Harryhausen flick). But when it comes to how corporate priorities dictate cinematic storytelling, tastes and values are always in flux. In the age of made-for-Netflix junk films, a lot of the corporate action cinema of the ’90s — a movie like “The Last Boy Scout,” say — looks better today than it did then. And I think it’s fascinating to consider how “Superman: The Movie” (1978), which launched the comic-book-film genre, is a blockbuster classic that nevertheless, in my opinion, is remembered and talked about through rose-colored glasses.

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There’s no question that Christopher Reeve is great in it, and that he and Margot Kidder, as Lois Lane, have a delectable screwball chemistry. But there are ways that the bar was lower back then. The famous “Superman” tag line, “You’ll believe a man can fly,” wasn’t lying; a major part of the film’s appeal was its state-of-the-art-for-the-time effects showing Reeve’s Superman zipping through the air. That was cool back then, but today, in the age of everyday digital magic, supernatural wonder made real is simply the language that movies speak, in an “Of course I’ll believe a man can fly! I’ve been watching this shit since I was three!” sort of way.

I love about half of the 1978 “Superman,” but the film always wears out its welcome for me because I’ve never been able to stand the villains: Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty, and Valerie Perrine acting as if they were in a sketch on “The Carol Burnett Show.” And that’s no small matter. But somehow that lame stuff gets grandfathered into our nostalgic love of the film.

To me, the new “Superman” has a more authentic comic-book flavor (though as I’ve said many times, Christopher Reeve gives the greatest superhero performance in screen history). I felt connected throughout to the urgent, anguished, slightly boyish valor of David Corenswet’s performance, and to how his Superman confronts battles at once external and internal (Kal-El was told by his late parents to lord it over the human race — which, in a way, it would make total sense for Superman to do).

Yet I think there’s a different war being played out in the reviews. Critics have always disliked certain genres, but in recent years the collective media establishment has come to regard comic-book movies with a special disdain — as a unique incarnation of the Death of Cinema. I’m not immune to that feeling. I think any movie should be a self-contained experience (even a sequel), and the fact that comic-book movies have become interconnected like Tinkertoy, so that the most powerful feeling they sometimes leave you with is that you haven’t done enough homework, represents a singular joylessness. If the outcome of a fantasy film is just one small link in a vast storytelling chain, then that outcome doesn’t amount to a hill of Orbs. And that kind of is the death of cinema.

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But comic-book movies, including “Superman,” are also made in an expensive and elaborate style that places action and movement front and center. And I think part of what the critics who don’t like “Superman” are rejecting about it amounts to an ideological attack on the hallmarks of that style. The film is being panned in more or less the same way that “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Captain America: Brave New World” were panned — as exemplars of The New Zappy Oppressive Fascist-Pop Comic-Book Aesthetic. Since I’ve written that kind of review myself, I don’t begrudge the critics who’ve taken that tack. I get where they’re coming from.

But I can’t help but point out that all a movie like “Superman” really needs to justify its existence is, you know…to be fun. Which raises a metaphysical question: Is “Superman” fun? Or is it trying so hard to be fun that it’s no fun at all? Or, just maybe, is it a movie that some people want to get their fun from by hate-watching it?

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