I love how people are expected to defend themselves after the tide has swung against a big popular tentpoler like Superman Returns (for which the Sunday 7.16 cume will be a disappointing but still-considerable $162 million). Suddenly its admirers were wrong …they blindly went along, allowed themselves to be deluded…they lacked the focus and inner constitution to resist.
What’s happening now is a little bit like the Allied forces rounding up known Nazi loyalists after Germany’s defeat and grilling them about the depth of their allegiance.
I reacted to SR the way I did because the too-long issue aside (which hit me after the second viewing, and which I wrote about) and the Kate Bosworth problem (which hit me right away and which I didn’t make that much of a deal about because…I don’t know why…in all candor I should have pointed this out more strongly), I felt lifted up by the emotion that Byran Singer put into this film, and, being a lapsed Christian, found myself responding almost involuntarily to the Christ metaphor, and especially to the IMAX-3D scenes.
(I wrote this earlier this morning, but thought I’d post it more broadly to address the Superman backlash, which I’ve been noticing a lot over the past week or so.)