A combined effort from Zak Snyder and Christopher Nolan is set to bring the last son of Krypton back to the big screen, for what is presumably intended to be the biggest summer blockbuster of 2013. I thought (still think) very highly of the original Superman movies, before they denigrated into farce (quest for peace, bah). Christopher Reeve brought Clark Kent to life as much as he did Superman and that, I think, was the key to making his “man of steel” relatable and likeable. In Superman, Siegel and Schuster created, for all intents and purposes, a God. Obvious biblical comparisons between the young Kal El and baby Jesus have been fleshed out as far as Marlon Brando’s emphatic “To the people of Earth, I give my only son”. We all know Gods can fly, Gods can do anything our imaginations let them do, but men, men are earthbound. By creating a Clark Kent who subsumed his ego selflessly in his secret identity, Reeve managed to live up the the movie’s weighty tagline. One of the iconic shots of Superman, in all his mediums (Comics, film, TV) is of the man of the steel flying in low orbit around his adopted homeworld, surveying all he guards. There is perhaps no grander, and indeed more noble a metaphor for the highest potential of human ambition than that of unassisted flight. It can be argued that in one way or another we all desire to fly.
The comic book nerds of my generation will have come of age associating Tom Welling with Superman more than anyone else. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar created a deep and intricate universe out in rural Kansas and as TV re-imaginings go, Smallville was exceptionally well received. It balanced a faithfulness to the character’s canon with a decent amount of originality and adapted many of Superman’s signature tropes for the 21st century. The “no tights, no flights” rule stringently in force under the Gough/Millar tenure ensured the teenage Kal El kept his feet on the ground until season ten. Flying for Clark was the piece of the jigsaw puzzle necessary to fulfill his unique destiny, to fly Welling had to shed Clark’s adolescent definitions of love, freedom and justice, he was already “super”, he just had to become the “man”. Smallville is worthy of a post in itself but I’ll keep it this; the show dips in quality in the last two seasons in particular, the supporting cast are excellent (Costner will have his work cut out following John Schneider as Jonathan Kent) and the finale is superb. With all that in mind it is quite disappointing not to see Welling in the title role for this. Conversely, plucking that version of superman so far out his universe that he would be barely recognisable in what appears initially (and worryingly) as a darker Watchmen style project probably wouldn’t do any good either.
Mentions of Nolan will be unavoidable, comparisons with his ingenious revision of Batman equally so. But this project will be tougher still, for although Batman is right now probably DC’s flagship character and the maybe the greatest noir character in literature generally, he does not hold the burden of being “Earth’s mightiest hero”. Jeph Loeb, Frank Miller and Joseph Sale had given Batman his balls back long before Nolan arrived on the scene. Superman is a bigger challenge precisely because “the boy scout” as his peers mockingly call him, is not as good of a character. He is less well rounded and, ironically, less edgy than the caped crusader, so anything less than a big effort is liable to leave him just flat. For Superman, you have to get the audience to indulge its most romanticised reflections of themselves. For Superman, there is set the loftiest of benchmarks, for Snyder and Nolan to succeed, in 2013 – we must once again believe that a man can fly.
brendanmcgarry 