by Steve Brennan

Created on: March 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 20, 2009

"Whatever happened to the heroes?" sang the Stranglers. Well, ever since Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve brought us the original superhero movie in 1978, they've been raking in vast amounts of cash courtesy of the paying public, whose appetite for flying saviours, angst-ridden vigilantes and mutated monsters remains as strong as ever, ensuring they're kept in spandex and continued employment. It would now be a strange summer indeed without at least one big-budget comic book extravaganza, a genre that has, for the last 5 years or so, been the bedrock of Hollywood's summer schedules, propping up the otherwise declining profits of the multiplexes.

You've got to get this kind of thing right, though. If there's one group of fans that will burn you to the ground for ruining their favourite characters, it's the comic book crowd. Think of Batman & Robin being skinned alive by critics and audiences back in 1997, or the distinctly lukewarm reception given to the Fantastic 4, or the commercial failure of Ang Lee's Hulk. It hasn't kept any of them down though. Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale simply wiped the slate clean with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, with stunningly effective results. The Hulk received an unprecedented reboot a mere 4 years after his movie debut courtesy of Edward Norton, while the X-Men, Fantastic 4 and Iron Man continue to expand the Marvel movie universe. Busy people, your superheroes of today. And few would argue that if it hadn't been for 1978's fondly remembered Superman, none of these movies would have come to pass.

Richard Donner's achievement in 1978 was to take a character that, even then, would have been easy to parody, and create a lovingly rendered popcorn spectacle which remains arguably the best film of its kind (and Superman II isn't far behind). Thanks in no small part to the late Christopher Reeve's warm portrayal of Clark Kent and the Man of Steel, Donner crafted such a definitive origin story that, almost 30 years later, Bryan Singer saw no need to hit the reset button. Approaching Superman Returns as a loose sequel set in the "Donnerverse", he instead created an almost slavishly beholden tribute film, which admirably aimed for so many right buttons but ultimately failed to hit them all.

Singer's approach is to pretend that Superman III and IV simply never happened (or so we have to assume - such vague and left-unsaid continuity is a big part of this movie's problem). Some introductory text informs us that

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