SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE Ha ha, they're all in a giant net! I've seen the (hysterically awful) second half of this movie a few times on TV, but never got around to watching the whole thing until now. Interestingly, the first half of Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (augh, that title!) isn't half bad. That has to be the biggest surprise here. Christopher Reeve returns as Superman, even though he promised it would never happen. The movie opens with Clark Kent - alone, so he's not wearing the glasses - looking around his childhood home in Smallville, and examining a green Kryptonian crystal which could save his life one day, foreshadowing, foreshadowing. Clark also gets to fend off the buyout offers of a developer interested in his land there (whatever happened to Mom?), insisting he's going to "hold out for real farming". Meanwhile, the Daily Planet has been bought by a sleazy tabloid publisher (Sam Wanamaker), much to the chagrin of Perry White (Jackie Cooper), who insists "You are not gonna turn this grand old lady into one of your bimbos!" Clark tries to keep the Planet on course, until they receive a letter from a schoolboy who wants Superman to save the world by ridding it of nuclear weapons. The paper blows this up into a big, insipid human-interest story, demanding an answer...and after some thought, Superman says no. But then he gets suckered in after getting slagged a little in the press (Brainiac couldn't budge him, but the media does?), and everything goes to hell when Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman again) decides to make this now nuke-free world his own...especially once he creates Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow, in his only movie role ever), a product of Superman's DNA and...don't even ask. I'll get to that in a minute. It's as if it's a "what if?" kind of film where we're shown the consequences of either decision Superman could have made in response to the kid's request. If he says no, then he gets slagged in the press. But if he says yes, Lex Luthor will create a Nuclear Man! Gee, I guess the moral is, don't fuck around too much with human affairs. I guess. Up to a certain point, while fraught with extremely cheesy individual scenes, the overall story arc for Superman IV is actually pretty good. Sure, there are not one but two cringe-inducingly cheesy introductions for Mariel Hemingway as that publisher's daughter, a stray satellite that looks like the Stanley Cup, John Cryer as Luthor's wacky-teenager nephew, and a runaway-subway rescue by Superman (followed by a brief statement to onlookers to remember that "public transit is still our safest and most reliable means of transportation"!). And there's worse than that. But I like the idea of the media basically putting Superman to the question of where he draws the line between helping and interfering. And since it would pretty much be inevitable that Superman would get a letter like that from some kid, combining them is a good idea. But almost everything goes to shit after Superman says no. I don't know what kind of process this movie went through from conception to completion, but almost everything about the film changes drastically once Superman changes his mind. This movie was going somewhere; Superman saying no might've been a fairly inspired way to have public sympathy drop off, for example, setting up...well, something, anything more inventive than the freakin' Nuclear Man. Nuclear Man is created by taking some of Superman's DNA, combining it with a bit of what looks like cheese, a microchip, and some strips of fabric, and attaching it all to a nuclear missile (good job, Mr. "I'm going to rid the world of ALL nuclear weapons") and launching it, with Superman inevitably catching it and throwing it into the sun. What happens is that we see, animated, the explosion turn into a sort-of fetus inside a womb which grows into a fully grown man in seconds. With a costume, logo, cape and everything. This thing didn't even exist ten seconds ago, and now he has English skills, a mission, self-awareness - man, I don't know about you, but it took me YEARS to learn that stuff! Anyway, Nuclear Man comes to earth, does Lex's bidding, and wants nothing more than to destroy Superman. But he wants to have some fun first - his idea of fun is to fly around the world causing random destruction that Superman has to fix. He blows up the Great Wall of China with fireballs from his hands, but Superman fixes it all with blue lasers from his eyes. (uh...?) He picks up the Statue Of Liberty and drops it into Manhattan (hilarious scream from this lady when she looks up), but Superman picks it up and puts it back. He also just causes all sorts of stuff to blow up in a Metropolis street, causing Superman to cry out "Stop! Don't do it, the people!!!" Funniest goddamn thing I've heard in a long, long time. Superman temporarily defeats Nuclear Man (who gets all his power from the sun) by trapping him in an elevator and dropping him on the moon. But then the sun comes up and he busts out. Uh, a lunar "day" is a whole month long - Superman apparently dropped him very close to the terminator line. Why? Apparently, because he wanted to straighten the American flag. Oh, good, risk death and defeat so you can straighten a flag on the moon. Nuclear Man's idea of an entrance is to fly around, land in the middle of a busy street and cry out "RAHHHHRRR!" (everyone stops what they're doing, curious as to what he might say next) His voice is obviously dubbed by another actor. And his costume is totally lame, brown and gold boots and swimsuit and cape with a cheesy "N" logo. I guess you can't expect too much from a costume when it's MADE BY THE FUCKING SUN. This movie has to be the king of outer-space mistakes, from minute one (Superman's cape flapping around) to much later, which has more outer-space mistakes than I could list, but my favorite has to be when Superman is buried on the moon, and after much effort, he pushes his way out of his lunar grave, and takes a big, deep gasp of, uh, air. No, my favorite is when in another attempt to piss off Superman, Nuclear Man pulls Hemingway way up into the sky, way up, up so high that the Earth is a significant but small disc way in the black, starry background. Neither the suffocating vacuum, body-shattering cold nor flesh-destroying radiation seems to bother her, as she ALSO takes a few gasps. There are more goofy things here than just the outer-space stuff. For one thing, don't you think Superman's DNA would be off-limits to the public? Do you really want to risk that stuff getting into the wrong hands? If that's the case, then the strand of Superman's hair at the museum is under awfully loose security. And what the movie lacks in logic, it doesn't make up for in FX (awful superimposing, obvious cables, stuff like that). There's a bizarre scene where Clark and Lois actually walk off the side of a building, and on the way down, Clark becomes Superman, and takes Lois out on a flying date, flying around the world, even dropping her from a great height at one point and laughing (ha ha, I could've killed you, ha ha!). She then tells Superman that she remembers "everything" (from Superman II, I assume), and they romance a little more, and then Superman somehow makes her memory of it all disappear again. Huh? Is this some kind of alterna-Lois, a manifestation of the subconscious part of Lois which understands that Clark is Superman? Yeah, maybe, but in her day-to-day life, Lois obviously regards Clark with something akin to pity; she thinks he's charming in his own way, but kind of pathetic. This does not seem like the attitude of a woman who understands on any level who this guy really is. Reeve does, however, get a really good scene later where he plays brilliantly on the cluelessness of Lois and the Hemingway character, where he has a date scheduled with one as Clark and the other as Superman. "That's a very attractive outfit you're wearing," Superman says, heeding a bit of advice given to Clark moments before. This whole scene is pretty inspired, until Lex Luthor butts his way in and ruins everything. I liked the less goofy, more straightforward and simply uptight-seeming Clark Kent, and who knew Superman could speak Russian (in outer space, with no air!), Italian, and shoot blue lasers from his eyes? Personally, I've always found this character to have the most possibilities in scenes where he's alone, because he can basically be himself; he doesn't have to be Superman or be Clark Kent, both of which are disguises. There isn't a lot of that here, but there's some. Hackman, on the other hand, is just bizarre as Luthor, either rattling off semi-clever villain dialogue and mannerisms, or exploding needlessly ("YOU'RE FIRED!!!" doesn't usually work in the MIDDLE of an otherwise calmly spoken discourse). The subplot with the newspaper is wrapped up as mindlessly as anything else here; White says that he talked to the city, who decided to declare the Daily Planet a landmark or something, and they gave him the money to buy out the parent company! Can you see city hall giving the New York Times untold billions of dollars, just so it doesn't become a New York Post? And isn't Metropolis going to want that money back? Or are they just going to take the company? Did my eyes deceive me, or did the city just buy this huge-ass corporation? Superman IV: The Quest For Peace is such a confused movie that I can't help but feel a little affection for it, since it obviously isn't as completely wrong-headed as Superman III was. Reeve himself has a story credit for this movie (and some second unit direction work!), along with the two screenwriters. I don't know who to blame for the totally silly second half. The diminishing budget (this movie's was cut in half), cringe-worthy scenes, haphazard editing (apparently, the original cut ran about 45 minutes longer) and basically the entire Luthor/Nuclear Man story killed this series with a finality Doomsday could never hope to match. I don't know if Reeve again swore "never again" after this one, but to be sure, it never happened again (now, of course, for one more reason), relegating Superman to several TV series in the last decade. I, for one, miss the big-screen Supermans, and hope we get a new one soon. Directed by Sidney J. Furie. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE