This morning I have Iggy Pop's excellent "I'm a punk rocker, yes I am" in my head because I watched the "new" Superman movie last night and thought it was excellent. The Iggy Pop song was the montage at the end of the film and it was quite catchy. Now that I am on the subject of Iggy Pop , he actually walked into a local pub in my home town in Ireland this time last year and asked for a pint. The local bar is known for it's no televisions, old man pub vibes and trendy rock music playlist so the barman was well aware who Iggy Pop was when he came to the bar. The barman , being quite cool himself, did what every Irish barman would say.
"How ya Iggy, what can I get ya?" 🤣
Previous visitors to the pub called Phil Carroll's have been Johnny Depp with Lisa Marie Presley while on their way to Marylin Manson's wedding in Gottfried Heinwein's castle here in town. They too were left alone in which the clientele were thanked with an anonymous round of drinks. Anyway I digress.
Film night is usually Saturday night but we are heading out tonight so we threw it on. I heard it got good reviews. It was good that they used a relatively unknown actor for Superman called David Corenswet who is a very very good looking man and looks like a superman. Luis is played by Rachel Brosnahan who is one of those actresses who is understatedly beautiful until you realise she is very very beautiful as well. The villain in the film Lex Luther is played by Nicholas Holt and has come a long way from his first movie "About a Boy". Well around 25 years later as he is now a man.
Now before I began the film I was weary about Superman. We have seen it all before and I still think my favourite of the Superman films was Superman II with the 3 villains, General Zod and his two henchmen , Ursa and Non coming to Earth and taking over the planet. Remember the villain Non couldn't get the laser eyes correct which was funny.
Now right from the start Superman looked different. More Marvel like. More Guardian of the Galaxy like and when we go deeper into the film there were more characters introduced into it that started indeed making it look very very Guardians of the Galaxy. Superman even had a dog called crypto and droids running his lair. It was all very well done and I enjoyed that. The CGI is questionable in places but it doesn't ruin it. The world in which we preside is not surprised at monsters turning up either and giant monsters attacking cities is not shocking for the people in this new era of Superman. In fact it is quite normal. In one of the scenes , a team of superheroes are fighting a giant jellyfish in the background which is a world away from the traditional Superman.
Nicholas Holt is an excellent bad guy in Lex Luther and he is brilliant through-out the entire film. There is a female villain that works under Luther called The Engineer and I found her pretty awesome as well. Ultraman was pretty cool in the film too. And Superman had his own allies, Mr Terrific was one that made me laugh but he had pretty good fight scenes as well.
Overall Superman was a most enjoyable film and the franchise worked going in the Marvel direction. I could see this developing from here an excellent more modern day franchise like the Avengers that brings Superman into the new era. A feat that Henry Cavill could not pull off. At first I was iffy about watching it but I am glad I did.
8/10 for me. I thought the back story with the warring African tribes was not really needed but apart from this I enjoyed it.
