Just got back from seeing it.
The first half of this post is mostly spoiler-free. The bottom half has some spoilers.
You were warned
There is a lot of this movie to like. Especially for fans of the first two films in the original series.
Pro is correct that it (mostly) works as a direct sequel to the first two Donner/Lester/Reeve films. Basically, if you liked those films, you'll probably like this. If you hated those films, you probably won't.
Sure there are homages to the first two films, but I wouldn't call them "wanking over" those films. It comes off as less of a "wanking" and more of the inclusion of certain themes, cues, phrases and jokes that one would expect might crop up in any sequel. Seriously, if that means Singer was wanking over Donner, then every director who made 007 say "Bond, James Bond" was wanking over "Dr. No."
Ninety percent of the cast was very good.
Contrary to the trailers, Spacey doesn't play Lex as a goofball. In fact, the scenes in the trailer are the only goofy bits and are basically because Lex is almost taunting Lois. The rest of the time, Lex comes off as cool, in control, and fairly badass.
Routh is no Chris Reeve but he did a damn good approximation of Reeve for most of the film. If Singer deserves the most credit for anything in this performance, its casting Routh. Not unlike Hugh Jackman in "X-men," Routh shows that Singer wisely understands the utility of casting an unknown who can make you believe in the character, instead of a "name," who makes you think "hey, its [insert name] wearing a Superman costume." No complaints.
Likewise, the supporting cast, from Frank Langella as Perry White to James Marsden as Lois's fiancee to Parker Posey to Lex's henchmen (who weren't at all bumblers like Otis) were all good. Even Posey played her part fairly straight.
The only two cast members who didn't work for me were Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, and "the kid."
Bosworth was pretty and sort of looked like a Curt Swan drawing of Lois Lane. However, nothing in her work made you believe she was "Lois Lane." Lois, whether Noell Neill, Margot Kidder, Dana Delaney or even Teri Hatcher is normally a woman cut from the cloth of an old Howard Hawks film: a smart, sexy, go-getter with quick wit and sharp tongue. Bosworth, besides looking too young, had none of that spark. She came off as window dressing. Her performance wasn't overtly terrible, but it wasn't anything that made you believe she was a woman who would win both a Pulitzer and the heart of the Man of Steel. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're going to cast a 25 year old actress as Lois Lane, get someone like Anne Hathaway, who can at least bring some talent and fire to the table.
The kid, however, WAS overtly terrible. I mean "Jake Lloyd as Anakin" bad. In nearly every scene he acted either autistic (staring ahead with creepy blankness) or, in one scene (running around with a trash can on his head, bumping into doors) retarded.
I'm going to start the spoilers pretty soon.
In regards to plot and special effects, the first 90 minutes of the film is great. About as good a "comic book" movie as you could get. While there were minor deviations from the plot of the first two films, most of them weren't deal breakers. Furthermore, little nods to the first films (like Lex finding a new supply of Green K in a museum that JUST HAPPENS to have a collection of rocks from...Addis Addiba)(like Ma Kent having a snapshot of Glenn Ford as Pa propped up on the piano) make up for those little inconsistences.
The special effects were uniformly excellent and, as others have noted, the sequence where Superman saves the jet is pretty much worth the price of admission. Singer handled the return of an iconic superhero in this sequence in a way that echoed some of the best moments of "Kingdom Come" and "the Dark Knight Returns."
Unfortunately, where "Batman Begins" started a little weak and ended with a bang, Superman starts with a bang, and ends a little weak. Besides being rife with false and repetitive endings the ending failed to match the spectactle of the beginning. It was also a little too downbeat. Instead of a miraculous save by Superman and a trimphant spin over the earth (ala the Reeve films), we got a melancholy Superman floating off feeling (it seemed) sorry for himself after being rescued by three humans and a gaggle of doctors.
And now I'm getting really spoilerish. I mean it. I am going to bitch about a few things in detail. Seriously...don't say I didn't warn you. Don't whine I spoiled the ending.
Sadly, the final sequence, the "Lex's evil scheme to kill Superman and corner the real estate market" was even less logical than his scheme in Superman 1. Basically, Lex wanted to use Kryptonian technology to create a new continent and sell it at a premium, while flooding the east coast and causing (once again) massive earthquakes there... and killing Superman in the process.
Lex puts his nefarious scheme into place, starting with a large island that springs out of the ocean like the fortress did from the ice in the first Superman film. The island, however, is foreboding unhabitable greenish rock, prompting Mrs G to observe "who would live there"? Seriously, Lex would have had an easier time marketing condos in Antartica or the Mojave desert (which would appear to be beachfront property, according to Lex's map of the flooded continent).
The island causes floods and earthquakes for a few minutes. These topple large patches of the Metropolis skyline and rip up most of the streets. However, at the end of the movie, you don't see any of this damage even though its apparently only a few days later.
And, finally, it turns out the Island is composed of...you guessed it...Kryptonite. So much Kryptonite that, within a minute of stepping on it, Superman loses his powers and gets the shit kicked out of him by Lex and his goons. Leaving him to be rescued by, in an admittedly sort of nice twist on the classic bit, Lois.
However, about fifteen minutes later, with the producers realizing that they need to show Superman defeating Luthor and saving Metropolis, and faced with an expanding Kryptonite land mass, decided to throw their own internal logic out the window and have Superman save the day by....
...picking up the giant, Kryptonite-laden, island, the one that nearly killed him by stepping on it a few minutes earlier, with his bare hands and carrying it into space.
At this point, even Mrs G, who has probably never read a single Superman comic book, who couldn't remember the plot of "Superman II," who still confuses the Green Lantern and Green Goblin, (ie, she's not a anal retentive fangirl) leaned over and asked:
"Come on...fifteen minutes ago just stepping on it took away his powers and now he can lift it into space? When did Superman become immune to Kryptonite?"
Like I said. No internal logic. (And don't even get me started on the last scene with Lex. Dumb. Even Ned Beatty would be embarrased)
The other major flaw in the story was...yeah, there's no getting around it...the kid.
Even putting aside his terrible performance, the inclusion of the kid in the storyline hurt the film...and probably the chances for a good sequel. I realize that Singer was going for a theme that Superman was more noble to give up his child and let him be raised by humans (the way Clark was) in order to drive home an "adoption is good" point.
I also think that, if you look at this as the third film in a "Superman trilogy," the inclusion of the kid was not a terrible endnote.
However, this isn't the final film in a trilogy. Its the (hopefully) first film in a kickstarted franchise. And, by doing the story with the kid, Singer wrote a movie that hamstrings us to a "movie continuity" that
We now have a Superman who has a son living with Perry White's nephew and Lois. A son who thought his father was Richard White. A son who is developing powers and is going to find out that everything he has been told is a lie. A son who didn't lose his father because his father was blown up on a distant planet, but a son who lost his father because, basically, his father left him.
A son who already killed one man, albeit in self defense.
That's a lot of potentially dark, heady, decidely unSupermanesque, material that now has to be dealt with in the sequel. Meaning that, unlike Batman Begins, which gave us a clean slate, Singer has scribbled all over the slate right off the bat.
While I won't go all John Byrne and claim its out of character for Superman to have left the kid (I can see arguments for what he did), I think it creates a situation where Singer boxed in the writers and directors of any future films and forced them have to tell a somewhat linear story about...the kid, instead of making the next films more in line with the comics. In fact, I would think Byrne would LOVE this, since it reminded me of nothing so much as some of his themes in the "Generations" books.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, giving Superman an heir feels like an ending, not a beginning. This was demonstrated by the speech Superman made to the sleeping kid at the end, which was largely what Jor-el said to him as a goodbye. It came off like a passing of the torch to the next generation of "Supermen," not the beginning of a never ending battle.
And, as noted above, that made the ending a bit of a downer. It felt like, instead of "Superman returns" we got "Superman came back, but now he has to leave again and mope."
I realize this sounds like I didn't like the movie. Not true. For most of it, I liked it very much. And viewed as the final film in a trilogy it worked more than it didn't. However, as noted above, the film should have jump started a franchise, not closed it out.
