Look, up there on the poster: it's Verdana! Some $250 million was spent on Superman Returns, and Microsoft Fonts are all they can find for the logotype? For the design-aware moviegoer, the warning signs are there.
You have to ask if the money was well spent. Director Bryan Singer relocated production to Sydney, apparently as much for 'lifestyle reasons' as for any cost savings. Sydney's dull business district doesn't have a fraction of the character of an American Metropolis; it takes a lot of money to digitally sex up those bland Wynyard and Martin Place locations. And though entire plantations and buildings were installed at great expense in rural New South Wales, it still doesn't look very much like the United States corn belt, with all those primeval mountains messing up the landscape.
Singer, by the way, is famously uninterested in trivia like visual effects — and with a nine-figure budget at your disposal, you can afford to leave it to the experts. Still, many great directors were also great technical craftsmen, and by the time Singer racks up his third 2001: A Space Odyssey reference, you wish that he had the talent to create his own iconic moments. It's shot using the latest HD technology, which is pretty good; the problem is that it's not filmic enough to make those digital set extensions look real.
There are a couple of good action moments, but the climactic set-pieces aren't as exciting or impressive as they ought to be, and drag out the film's second half. You suspect that Singer isn't comfortable enough with the previz process to tighten up those sequences before they get locked down. Otherwise, he's letting through too much sloppy editing. There's plenty of evidence of that: this film is 157 long minutes, and our audience felt it, writhing in their seats to the end.
Perhaps we can be thankful that this wasn't worse, driven as it is by merchandising tie-ins and studio accountants, like most big blockbusters. Kevin Spacey injects much-needed screen presence, his campness and menace more welcome than we might expect. A digitally resurrected Brando offers more novelty value than anything, and the trippy promo showing how Rhythm & Hues did it is more interesting than the film itself. But Kate Bosworth is badly miscast; she is fifteen years too young for the part of Lois Lane (now a middle-aged single mother).
If any good comes out of this, it will be a renewed appreciation for the skills Richard Donner brought to the original films — pioneering work despite their now-dated FX and social values. Singer, to his credit, seems to learned a lot from those. (And if, by the way, this review doesn't have enough innuendo about Bryan Singer's personal life for your taste, try the one at slant instead.)
