Once again, it's a case of TPTB not being able to see the forest for the trees.
If one looks at the successful comic book related movies that have come out in recent years the common thread has been that they all stayed close to the source material and respected the character as it had been written previously.
Superman didn't do that. It used another movie as it's source material, a movie that was fine for the time but has since lost touch with what the Superman mythos had evoled into.
Given that Superman has been around for seventy years one can find a myriad of different 'Supermen' over the years. But DC comics in the mid-eighties realized that their flagship character had gotten stale, and had lost touch with the audience.
The reboot was well-done. It gave the franchise a much needed new 'coat of paint' without sacrificing any of the core values and ethics which had defined the man of steel since 1938.
Lois and Clark is the only version of Superman that has embraced the basic themes of the comic book Superman that has existed since 1986.
No one expects a major motion picture to try and replicate the television series. They need to find a wider audience and be 'BIGGER'. The TV show was a romantic dramedy that went in with it's focus on the relationship between Lois Lane and Clark Kent/Superman (hence the title?). A movie needs to have more action and excitement to draw in the general audience.
It was always stated by Donner that to make the movie work you had to buy into the love story. That's true, with some qualifications. The Donner films, even with all his claims about the love story, didn't actually do a very good job with it. It (for me) was never really believable that these two people had any chemistry for each other. The need to force the issue didn't allow for any natural evolution of that relationship.
You cant' do the Lois and Clark/Superman love story in one movie. Lois and Clark had three years to bring it about and another year to mess with it. Even relying on what came before in an older, dated, movie, we still didn't see any real growth of the relationship between those two people (and the addition of the kid was just another gimmick to force the issue).
You need to have the the time to grow the relationship over time (like three movies). Each movie can have it's big, special effects laden, action plot, but allow the growth of the 'love story' be the subplot that ties the movies together and allows us to see the growth in the characters over that time.
Bottom line, you can't force a character into a mold because it was popular and successful with someone else. If you do, all you wind up with is an unsatisfying bad copy of the character you used as your 'new' inspiration.
Tank (who tends to get off on tangents when it comes to Superman and all the current live actions versions because he can't understand why it's so hard for Hollywood to get it right)
