A carnival of technology

Nuclear Power. In the best hands, it is dangerous. In the hands of Lex Luther, it is pure evil. This is Superman’s greatest battle. And it is for all of us.

Rated PG
Rated A-II by the USCCB (link)

Starring Christopher Reeve (before the accident), Margot Kidder (before the breakdown), and Gene Hackman as an art-deco villian lost in an 80’s pop-culture world in this touching fish-out-of-water tale.

Viewed 2005-08-23 by susi, dcantrell, dane, mike, and dshea

Most bad movies seem to fall into one of two general categories: the exhausting, and the ridiculous. Superman IV is one of the later.

To me, Superman starts off at a disadvantage. Growing up, I preferred the Marvel characters to DC, since their powers were more specific. Characters like Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men all had a very specific set of powers, and adversaries and obstacles had to be overcome within the confinment of these powers. Sure, there were exceptions created as lazy plot devices, but for the most part Marvel characters were less capable of unlikely feats as DC’s Batman, whose powers extended as far as his fancy gadgets allowed, and Superman, whose powers merely had to be super. The original statement of Superman’s powers were that he could “leap 1/8th of a mile; hurdle a twenty-story building… raise tremendous weights… run faster than an express train… and that nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin!” (Action Comics #1, 1938, via superman.ws), and his powers have evolved ever since. In Superman IV, his powers apparently include super hearing, bionic vision, heat vision, x-ray vision, telekinesis, super breath, the ability to erase other people’s memories, the ability to fly through space, and the ability to prevent others flying through space sort of near him from dying. Maybe the telekinesis one could be better explained by someone more familiar with the history of Superman, but it still seems pretty lame that he can move things without touching them or using any obvious temperature altering rays from his eyes. And, finally, Superman is a bit of a jerk. Specific to this movie, Superman turns global crises into personal conflicts, exploits the relationships of his friends and coworkers, and at one point takes Lois Lane for a cross-country flight for the purpose of clearing his mind and, once she remembers that he’s Clark Kent and everything seems happy, erases her memory. Superman’s expanding powers have apparently turned him into a self-centered asshole.

So, as you can see, Superman IV doesn’t begin with the best of settings. In addition to Superman’s appearance as a lazily-written, unlikable character, the plot of the movie centers around a heavy-handed political message. After some wacky hijinks between Margot Kidder and Mariel Hemmingway at the newspaper and even more painful comic relief with Lex Luthor and the teenage stereotype at the chain-gang quarry, the goal of the movie eventually becomes to disarm the world. Obviously, the best diplomat to handle the threat of global thermonuclear war is Superman, someone who settles conflicts through super strength and mind control. After an unlikely sequence in which all the countries of the world launch their missiles into Superman’s space net, Superman unknowingly throws a box of something from Lex into the sun about halfway through the movie, creating Nuclear Man. Nuclear Man is a really dumb villian. Besides his unfocused goal of destroying everything in sight rather than simply destroying Superman and getting it over with, Nuclear Man’s weakness is shade. Fight inside, Superman! Ugh, eveyone’s an idiot.

Superman IV is a Golan-Globus sequel, and it shows. Unbelievable (even within the constraints established by super powers) action sequences are interspersed with tedious comedies—mostly based around Superman’s double identity—with no attention paid to pacing, characterization, or overall enjoyability. I can’t even remember what happened to Nuclear Man. I think the moon was involved. Maybe he got locked in a dark closet. This movie is dumb.