Superman Returns

I was going to review this movie, but Phil Plait (who will be at Dragon*Con this year! I’ll see you there, Phil!) did a great job and hit all of the high spots.

Except a few…

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Such as:

• Why the heck is Superman, a.k.a. Clark Kent, such an expert on the Metropolis utility system? How does he know exactly where to go to stop that industrial-looking plant from blowing up?
• When all that shattered glass is falling onto the helpless citizens of Metropolis, and Superman vaporizes it with his eyeballdeathray before it can hit the street, how come the superheated glass vapor doesn’t immolate the innocents below?
• If the kryptonite-laden continent could cause Superman to be beaten up by Lex just by the act of standing on it, how did he pull off the trick of flying underneath it and then hoisting it to orbit, with his hands and face pressed against kryptonite?
• There are many more, but the one that bothered me the most was all the Superman-hanging-in-space scenes. If he’s in orbit, he should have been passing quickly over Metropolis at orbital velocity. If he’s not, then he should have looked like he was standing on nothing, with gravity pulling his cape down around him. Personally, I think he was holding himself up at low earth orbit elevation, but not at orbital velocity, so the whole cape-floating-in-space thing should not have happened.
• And what’s up with him breaking Mach 1 in space? What air exactly is causing this shockwave? And what’s up with a Boeing 777 passing through Mach 1 (there was a lot of breaking the sound barrier) and not disintegrating? Could our jetliners manage that? How about the fact that the thrust to send a new Space Shuttle up to Orbit at 4 gees would certainly have ripped those couplings right off of the plane, with disastrous consequences to its aerodynamics…

I could go on, but I won’t. Go read Bad Astronomy