There are few Marvel films that have not been covered by The Legionnaire.  The same cannot be said for its cinematic comic book rival, DC.  To review them, one should probably start with arguably the most famous of this subgenre, Superman (1978), at least until we got the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  Despite this granddaddy of them all being surpassed, its theatrical cousins took many cues from it.  As for being a Catholic reviewer like myself, there are many tropes attached to the “Man of Steel” with which I must contend.  Any of them that deal with his origin story, including Man of Steel (2013), naturally set themselves up for a comparison with Jesus.  Superman leans into these contrived parallels a little more because in 1978, doing so was considered less problematic than in recent years.  It makes little sense since Jesus is love, but, sadly, people cannot get past their prejudices.  Thankfully, the movie is based on a fictional character, whereas our Lord and Savior is very much real, and I ultimately take solace from this fact.  Besides, there is more to take away from this somewhat cheesy movie, even with the limitations in filmmaking of its day.

Superman begins a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  I am not talking about the Star Wars universe, but in the DC one there is a dying planet called Krypton.  Before it goes boom, three accused rebels are sentenced to space jail, called the Phantom Zone, which is a flat square floating through the void.  The person ushering them off to their sentence is Jor-El (Marlon Brando), member of the high council of Krypton, and the only one of his peers who has accepted that their planet is doomed.  In the face of their refusal to accept reality, he decides to send his son, Kal-El, to Earth, taking with him the stored knowledge of their race.  Jor-El does this with the understanding that his offspring will have god-like powers, but hopeful that the infant will grow into a beacon of hope that will inspire humanity.  Do you see the comparisons to Jesus yet?  Baby Kal-El crashes to Earth in Kansas in the United States, and is taken in by Jonathan (Glenn Ford) and Martha Kent (Phyllis Thaxter), who take the human looking Kal-El in and raise him as their own.  Despite outward appearances, Kal-El shows that he is different when the toddler lifts their car so that Jonathan can more easily fix a flat tire.  Not long after Jonathan suddenly passes away, the teenaged Clark Kent (Jeff East), the name the Kents gave him, feels he must leave home to find his purpose . . . I guess?  I am also not sure why he chose north, but that is the direction in which he travels, creating a facsimile of Krypton in the North Pole from which he can learn more about his heritage from recordings by Jor-El.  Emerging twelve years later, the adult Clark (Christopher Reeve) goes to Metropolis and takes a job with the Daily Planet.  This is where he meets Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), a female reporter working the city beat to which he is assigned.  To her, he is the mousy and shy Clark.  However, when she is about to take off in the company helicopter to cover a story, and the vehicle almost crashes, he becomes Superman for her.  Of course, she does not know the two are the same person, as with the rest of the populace that witness him flying around performing various deeds.  The next day, with every other newspaper in town scooping the Daily Planet on this new hero, Perry White (Jackie Cooper), their editor, demands someone get an interview with Superman.  As Perry yells at them, Lois discovers a note indicating that Superman will come to her place at 8:00 pm that night.  Though she asks him a few questions, they spend most of their time together flying above the city.  She is literally swept off her feet, and still has her head in the clouds when Superman departs and Clark shows up at her door for a planned date.  Watching all this unfold is Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), the genius businessman and self-styled greatest criminal mastermind of all time.  Seeing the hero as a threat, he begins to study Superman, learning the newcomer’s weaknesses.  Hence, when it comes time to hatch Lex’s devious plot, he has countermeasures in place to prevent any tampering from Superman.  On the given day, he sends Superman a message that only Clark can hear, though doing the classic villain move of revealing the entire scheme. Changing into his disguise, Superman finds Lex and demands that the nuclear missiles Lex has hijacked be terminated.  Instead, Lex tricks Superman into exposing himself to Kryptonite, his one weakness.  With one bomb set to hit the San Andreas fault line and break off California, and another aimed at New Jersey, Superman appears powerless to do anything.  What saves him is Eve Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine), Lex’s assistant, whose mother lives in New Jersey.  Go figure.  Thus freed, Superman races to the other side of the United States, diving beneath the ground and pushing the continental plates back together.  In cleaning up the messes caused by the resulting earthquakes, he is not in time to save Lois, who had been out there interviewing for a story about recent real estate deals in the area.  Her car falls into a crack in the ground, suffocating her before Superman arrives.  Even though it is against Jor-El’s rules, in his grief Superman flies so fast around the earth that he reverses time.  As such, he is able to prevent Lois from dying.  With this, he darts back to Metropolis to take Lex directly to jail.

Superman is no Jesus.  Our God is so much greater than any caped hero, though I do not wish to take anything away from our eponymous character.  He is a good, er, person, and human in the way he shows emotions.  Jesus, too, wept, such as when his friend Lazarus died and He raises him from the dead.  He could do that because He is God.  Superman is not, and though their powers are different, they share the ability to prevent people they love from dying.  The difference with Superman is that he had been specifically been told not to interfere with human history.  It is one thing for Our Savior to show His compassion for humanity by resurrecting the recently deceased.  His actions go beyond the personal, directed at bringing humanity closer to Him.  It is another to physically spin the Earth and go backwards in time.  Still, it is the only abuse of his power that Superman does.  Even though I am not comfortable lumping Jesus and Superman together, I do appreciate some of the language used to describe what the latter will be to humanity.  Jor-El refers to his son as becoming a light to the human race, a beacon of hope.  More importantly, he claims that we on Earth have the ability to be great if we choose to be.  There is a lot of wisdom in this statement.  Much of what happens to us in the here and now is of our own doing.  Of course, there are circumstances that are put upon us over which we have no control.  What we do have control over is our reaction to events, something that God gave each of us.  To be great means to rise above the ordinary, be it in bad or good times.  You do not need the ability to fly, have extraordinary strength, or wear an “S” on your shirt to be great.  What God wants of us is what is inside us, in our souls.  Since He is love, uniting our hearts to His means having access to greater means of doing some of that rising above mentioned a moment ago.  All you need to do is let our real Superman in.

It has been the better part of thirty years since Superman’s release.  The character has changed somewhat over the years, as have the special effects used to portray him on film.  While none of it has been particularly good, and there are some creepy aspects to this one, I might take the original and its corny-ness over any of the others.