Superman (1978) Review

The structure should not work. Twenty minutes of Marlon Brando intoning on a crystal set, then a wheat field elegy shot like a Terrence Malick picture, then a newsroom farce with Gene Hackman doing wig comedy in a basement. Donner welds them with a single idea he called verisimilitude, meaning everyone plays it straight even when the plot involves spinning the planet backwards. Christopher Reeve is the reason it holds. He invents a Clark Kent who is not a disguise but a separate posture, a half inch of stoop and a voice pitched slightly wrong, and he switches between the two inside single takes without a cut to help him.

Geoffrey Unsworth shoots Krypton in white glass and Smallville in low gold, and the helicopter rescue still teaches the genre how to stage a save: you show the crowd, you show the fall, you make the catch matter. The weaknesses are real. Lex Luthor's plan is a real estate swindle, Otis and Miss Teschmacher belong to a broader film, and the ending literally undoes its own stakes. It flies anyway.