At it’s best Superman is a movie capsuled by its time and place because of the dated flying visuals and the absurb amount of on-the-face American values that it shows off which make the film seem like too proud to be a product than anything else. Aside from that, it’s a really great action movie which looks expensive and has a lot of great looking sequences, some of the scenes on Krypton and especially the formation of Solitude of Fortress still sent me in awe as did the whole third-act.
It’s written by Mario Puzo and he is a very intentional writer, the movie starts with a court scene just like The Godfather book and Puzo writes Lex Luthor to be as much of an egomaniac as he can except dressing him as a clown which makes his character with a contribution by Gene Hackman’s performance, entertaining to watch even if predictable to a fault. Superman & Lois’s relationship made me slightly comfortable for no reason but I liked that the film decided to bring it onscreen in the way it did: it was weird but it had a taste of reality in it.
Superman 1978 feels very much like a superhero movie that we are familiar with today, so most of the plot points and developments are things we have been aware of for years but it still manages to be a really good experience if you can look past the awful flying effects haha
7/10 A thing I really like about it is how almost all of the third act is Superman saving this whole connected earthquake mess, moving from problem to problem. Just makes the film so much more engaging
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Very much agree wrt your last point. The saving people aspect of Superman is the one thing that really works; I don’t know why so many movies are scared to just embrace it.
A lesser movie would have spent time following side characters, wasting time with showing the enemy forces approaching and destroying things, keeping the hero in his struggle to breakout of his “break” and be the hero for what? 15 minutes of heroism. Superman avoids all that by focusing on Clark’s need to save humanity and actually doing it as Superman, not to mention it all looks gorgeous the earthquakes and the dam breaking up, brilliant stuff
There are obviously way too many superhero movies these days, but almost none of them grasp that it’s the saving that gets audiences excited. Credit where it’s due, Whedon understood this when he made The Avengers — so much of the climactic battle in that movie involves the heroes prioritizing saving people above all else, and it’s just so joyous as a result of that. It’s the one thing the genre can actually do well!
That moment in Justice League where Batman tells Flash when the latter is confused about what to do is awesome: just save one person.