Ebert on ‘Superman’

Roger Ebert, on Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman:

More recent superhero movies are top-heavy with special effects and wall-to-wall action. Superman is more restrained in its telling, but doesn’t seem slow, probably because it tells a good story rich in archetypes. It started something. “It is to the superhero genre what Snow White is to animation,” writes the young Indian critic Krishna Shenoi. “It is literally the film that started the superhero film genre. Without it, there would be no Batman, no X-Men, no Iron Man.”

Superman pointed the way for a B picture genre of earlier decades to transform itself into the ruling genre of today.

Not a word, though, for John Williams’s score, which I’d argue did as much to make this movie work as anything visible on screen. Effects and scenes that looked like B-movie cheesiness instead felt like they were real, because of that music.

★ Friday, 5 November 2010