When Richard Donner’s Superman was first released in 1978, getting audiences to believe a man could fly didn’t just mean state-of-the-art special effects – and these don’t hold up too badly even now. It meant convincing them that superhero films were worthwhile in the first place; it meant event-movie seriousness, a great John Williams score and opening intergalactic credits that were a little like the recent smash Star Wars; it meant Hollywood grandeur and acting nobility, a film that began looking like a weighty action thriller with substantial comedy moments, a disaster movie, or rather averted-disaster movie, giving us a tremendous shot of the San Andreas fault opening up, and a supernatural time-travel drama.
Superman is a very 1970s New York film, with some great, bustling streetscape scenes, and the film is shot and lit in a familiar realist way quite different from the hard, flat, unreal colour and production design of Marvel or DC films now. It was the great origin myth movie, the origin myth for superhero movies themselves, the product that now dominates cinema. And for this film, the “extended universe” was the actual universe, our universe: a standalone drama with Superman at its centre, and bad guys lined up ready to be fought.
