Sunday, March 3, 2013

Superman 4 - The quest for a decent script

Christopher Reeve's final outing as the Man of Steel was in 1987's Superman IV - The Quest for Peace, directed by Sidney Furie.


Superman finally decides to address the problems of the world and dispose of all the nuclear weapons by hurling them into the Sun. However Lex Luthor is back and manages to piggy-back a device onto one of the missiles which leads to the creation of the Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow) who will battle Superman in several pointless and messy encounters.

So many questions from this one. What makes Superman's cape flutter in space? How can he talk to the Cosmonauts in a vacuum? And why does Clark Kent reveal his secret identity to Lois (again) for five minutes and then wipe her memory (again) with that kiss trick? I felt like Will Smith's character in the Men in Black movie shouting "Stop messing with her brain!"

On the plus side Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder return and Reeve is as good as ever. But the special effects are really creaky and the flying sequences are poor. Plus there are those terrible eighties fashions that we all thought were great at the time.

They had such a great actor as Superman and they kept wasting him with duff scripts. Oh well. Let's zoom twenty years into the future and see what Brandon Routh and Kevin Spacey can do.

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