Superman Week: Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

If you’re a fan of Superman at the movies, you’ve probably played this parlor game before.  Which sequel to Superman: The Movie (1978) is worse: Superman III (1983) or Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)?

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.”

It is a time of difficult change in Clark Kent’s (Christopher Reeve) life.  He sells the family farm in Smallville after the death of his mother, and retrieves a Kryptonian power module from the barn there.  And at the same time in Metropolis, the Daily Planet is purchased by media mogul and huckster David Warfield (Sam Wanamaker).

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”. 

I have never been one of those reviewers who feel that special effects make or break a film.  With the right presentation, a film can overcome weak visual effects and still fly high.  However, in the case of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), weak special effects undeniably play a role in the film’s dramatic failure. 

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 in 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.