There’s
a case to be made for either of them, alas.
Superman
III at least
looks great in terms of special effects and camera-work, even if the tone is
pure cartoon rather than authentic comic-book.
Oppositely,
Superman
IV: The Quest for Peace seems to have been assembled in a tearing hurry,
with terrible special effects and an incoherent editing style. Yet -- in
many respects -- Sidney J. Furie’s The Quest for Peace attempts to
re-capture the serious, heart-felt tone of the first two films in the series.
So,
it’s probably a draw. Is it better to watch a well-presented tonal
disaster, or a terribly-visualized return to sincerity?
Pick
your poison.
Certainly,
critics had very little encouraging to say about this fourth entry in the
canon. Films in Review’s Michael Scheinfeld called Superman IV “an embarrassment” (October 1987, page
494), and Anne Billson at Monthly Film
Bulletin rightly opined that the film suffered from “a fatal lack of narrative structure, degenerating into a series of
virtually disconnected sketches” (September 1987, page 283). At The New York Times, Janet Maslin
acknowledged the film’s general sloppiness and threadbare qualities, while simultaneously
observing (hopefully...) that there was yet life left in the film series.
Superman
IV: The Quest for Peace
is so ham-handedly edited and vetted that it is indeed difficult to pinpoint
the good underneath the bad. Yet it is
there -- in small doses -- if you are
willing to look closely.
For
instance, just as the original Donner film sought to speak trenchantly to its
time (a corruption-weary, post-Watergate America), Superman IV attempts to forge
meaning by commenting on the unfortunate
shift in the American media towards sensationalistic journalism, the global nuclear
arms race, and even the rise in America of AIDS.
All
of these ideas are significant ones that speak directly to the Zeitgeist and social
context of 1987, and yet they are not presented in a fashion that, finally,
renders the film’s commentary particularly meaningful. Superman IV had forty-five minutes
cut from its running time for theatrical release, and that dramatic shortening
of the material means that the moments of possible high-impact instead feel
rushed and confusing. We don’t see any
one theme truly explored well. Instead,
everything feels like a first-draft sketch. Like a half-painted work of art.
The
Quest for Peace
works best today for the (final) lesson the story teaches Superman. By film’s end, Kal-El has come to a powerful
reckoning. He can guide humanity by example (by being a paragon of virtue), but
he can’t actually take the reins away from
man, and try to control the direction of life on Earth himself. That’s the kernel of a great and important Superman
story, but Quest for Peace is not the right vehicle to exploit that
particular narrative. It seems too cheap-jack,
too disjointed, and too rambling to succeed, despite another great performance
by Christopher Reeve as Superman.
Thus
Superman
IV is a lost opportunity. The
film that should have set the Superman film series back on course is instead
the film that hammers the final nail in the movie franchise’s coffin. Consequently, another film about the Man of
Steel was not released until almost twenty-years after this disaster, 2006’s Superman
Returns.
“Nobody wants war. I just want to keep the threat alive.”
Meanwhile,
a failed international summit pushes the United States and Soviet Union into growing
their nuclear missile arsenals, an act of irresponsible brinksmanship that
causes a worried boy, Jeremy (Damian McLawhorn) to write Superman a letter and
ask him to save the planet.
Superman
considers the request, and after consulting with a databank of Krypton’s Elders
in his Fortress of Solitude, decides to act.
Superman speaks to the United Nations assembly and announces he will rid
the Earth of all nuclear weapons. He
then proceeds to gather the weapons up and hurl them into the sun.
Unfortunately,
Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) has escaped from prison, and sees an
opportunity. He creates a villain called
Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow) who can both challenge Superman and re-ignite the
arms race.
Superman
and Nuclear Man soon clash over Metropolis and around the world, but Nuclear
Man grievously injures Superman with a scratch to the neck, a scratch that causes
the Man of Steel to slowly waste away.
His hair whitened, his body weakened, he stands to die unless Lois, and
the Kryptonian power module can revive him.
“I've always considered you the Dutch Elm disease in my
family tree”.
As
a property, the Superman mythos is very much bound to special effects, to critical
visuals like flight, x-ray vision, heat-vision, freeze-breath and more. To believe in Superman, we must believe,
well, that a man can fly. Donner
understood this when he made the first Superman movie, but in large part
the lesson appears to have been forgotten here.
Made
on the cheap (its budget cut from 37 million to 17 million…), Superman
IV: The Quest for Peace just never leaps over the crucial threshold of
believability; not in a single bound, not ever. The visual effects look so cheap and
unconvincing that it is actually hard to pay attention to the plot. There are moments in the sequel, for instance,
when we see the two wires lifting Superman up off the ground, and then
horrifyingly inept moments when he focuses his eyes to shoot heat beams…and
nothing comes out. It’s…inept on a level almost unimaginable ,
especially for what had been an A-level franchise just a few years earlier.
One
of the film’s most cringe-inducing moments occurs at the Great Wall of
China. Nuclear Man blows up huge chunks
of the wall, and bricks fly everywhere. Then Superman shows up and instead of
using super-speed to re-assemble the wall, uses some kind of lame “brick-o-vision”
to put it back together. It’s just
awful. It relies on a power Superman
doesn’t have; and it’s utterly ridiculous
It’s
not just the special effects that are terrible in Superman IV, either. Crucially, it’s the film’s editing too. One horrible moment set on the moon (the same
one that reveals the wires holding up Superman…) also reveals that the outer
space backdrop is actually a black curtain.
These drapes are visible for long stretches of time, and thus totally
destroy the illusion that this scene is set anywhere but a studio stage.
Again,
the level of sheer technical incompetence is breathtaking.
 |
| Glorious Brick-O-Vision (and his curl is on the wrong side.) |
 |
| They forgot to add the special effects for his eye beams... |
 |
| Look closely at the moon-drapes in the background. |
In
a similar vein, almost every battle sequence and every flight sequence in this
sequel is edited in such a slipshod fashion that there’s no comprehensible sense
of location, geography, or space. Lois
and Superman go flying together early in the film, and cross hugely different
landscapes and terrains over a matter of mere seconds, sometimes literally
shot-to-shot, frame-to-frame. One minute, they’re flying over Buffalo herds on
the Great Plains, the next they are in San Francisco.
There’s
absolutely no connecting or bridging material here to remotely suggest time and
distance. Our heroes would have to be
flying not only fast, but at supersonic speeds to cross such a variety of
terrain so quickly. The same problem
scuttles the film’s frequent outer space sequences. We see Superman and Nuclear Man fly into
space above Earth, but instead of being in Earth orbit, they are
instantaneously thousands of miles away and our planet is only a small sphere. It’s absolutely jarring.
 |
| From the mountains... |
 |
| ...To the prairies... |
 |
| ...To the oceans... |
 |
| ..And back to Metropolis. All Ii six or seven shots. |
Perhaps
these moments would have been passable in a film that seemed to take its time
in terms of the major plot points and key developments. Instead, the movie just powers right through
crucial events, like Superman’s life-threatening illness, and the result is
that nothing at all in the film carries any sense of impact or weight. Superman
gets scratched, Superman gets sick, Superman uses his Kryptonian power crystal
to get better. End of story.
There’s
no sense of the stakes here -- either
emotional or global -- and no sense of why this story matters in Superman’s
life. Judging by the atrocious manner in
which the film is cut, it seems that not enough footage was shot in the first
place to make the film remotely coherent.
That may not be true -- because of
the significant cuts in running time -- but that’s exactly how it
plays. Honestly, Superman IV looks like it
was under-shot by about forty percent.
Transitions are largely missing, and the movie just bounces from one
scene to the next with little rhyme or reason.
And
this is a true shame, because the script, actually, isn’t entirely bad. For instance, the Warfield character is very
obviously a Rupert Murdoch parody, and a good one. Murdoch, of course, is the media mogul behind
Fox News, and he was already on ascent in the mid-1980s. In fact, he had just purchased the New York Post in 1984. We have now seen precisely what decades of
misinformation, sensationalism and jaundiced coverage can do to a nation’s
civil discourse, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace --
the canary in the coal mine, so-to-speak -- picked up on the negative impact of
the trend relatively early, in 1987.
At
the same time, the film speaks to the arms race of the day, and the 1986
Reagan-Gorbachev Reykjavik Summit. It
even handles the idea with a modicum of cleverness. In two instances, we see heads of state on TV
discussing the failed summit. One is
from Russia, one from America, but they use the
exact same words to describe the failure to reach an agreement on missiles;
a fact that reminds the audience of the common humanity lurking beneath
differences of ideology. Both sides want
to protect themselves; both sides don’t want to back down first. Somebody has to step up first and make a bold
move. That’s what Superman does
here. He leads by example.
The
notion of the physically robust, athletic and beautiful Superman suddenly
falling gravely and incurably ill and hiding alone in his home from the eyes of
the world also seems to reference the AIDS plague. But again, before any solid points can be
made about the issue, the film jumps to the next scene.
Despite
such problems, I cannot bring myself to entirely dismiss or hate this Superman
film. There are moments worth
remembering. For instance, the script
supplies Superman with a great speech about how he sees Earth. He says “There will be peace when the people of the world, want
it so badly, that their governments will have no choice but to give it to them.
I just wish you could all see the Earth the way that I see it. Because when you
really look at it, it's just one world.” This is a great message, and one that is very
believable considering Superman’s unique skill-set and viewpoint.
Even Lois Lane is re-established relatively well here. When
she visits the sick Clark, for example, she seems to be talking directly to
Superman, and Lois contextualizes beautifully her feelings about the Man of
Steel: “I'd want to tell him that I cherished the time we spent
together, and I never expected anything from him. Even if I only saw him for a
few moments, it made me happy. And I'd want to tell him that I love him and
that I'll always love him. And no matter what happens on this world, I know he
tried his best to help us.”
If the rest of the film had lived up to these (brief) moments
in terms of character and heart, I’d be writing a very, very different review
today. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,
while perhaps not the “Dutch Elm disease” of the franchise family tree, is
nonetheless a grave disappointment and a deeply, tragically flawed film.
John I agree with your review of Superman IV(1987). The original Planet Of The Apes 1968 to 1973 movies had their budgets cut with each sequel, but they managed to make the films still a respectable part of the overall series. Superman series died with this film. Nuclear Man looks like he was a member of the World Federation Wrestling. Even with a $17 million dollar budget and the original cast intact they surely could have made a much better film than this with better writers. This film had no respect for what Richard Donner had established in both Superman The Movie(1978) and Superman II(1981). I consider Superman Returns(2006) to be the third part of the original Superman films discarding both the disappointing Superman III(1983) and the Mystery Science Theater prime choice to be too painful to watch a second time Superman IV(1987). Superman’s U.N. speech and Lois Lane moments with Clark/Superman are the only parts that remind us of the remnants of what this franchise once was in the beginning.
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