George Taylor
Lame beyond belief, it's still slightly better than 3. Lex Luthor - who needs a rest by this time, did the producers forget every other villain superman fought? Creates and Anti-Superman, Nuclear man. Havoc ensues. Its nice that they tried to have an anti-nuclear weapons message, but it's lost in this silly, overblown movie.
Blueghost
Superman 4 is about a man suffering from bipolar disorder, psychiatric strategy used by doctors to get a patient to regurgitate some inner hidden thought that's bothering them, or, failing that, to get them either hooked up with a female who is probably a prostitute and will pass on whatever she discovers to both the doctors that hired her and law enforcement. So it is that we get a real contrived plot of the man of steel ridding world of nukes. Eh, well, okay, but if you were a military with a stockpile of ICBMs and there was this all powerful flying guy hanging around, how would you go about guarding your weapons? That's a major plot hole.The film is respectfully well shot, but the psychiatric story needed to bring in someone that Reeve's character could fight. So we get this very contrived villain who is very wooden and melodramatic, even for a comic book villain. And that's pretty much the gist of Superman 4. It's an awful film for many reasons, and one of them being to make sure any Superman would- be heroes in the audience have their psychology put to rest in terms of Kal El like heroics or aspirations thereof. And this is the thing that gets me, here the usual suspects who produced these films have a real chance to create something that people'll like, and instead decide to close the chapter on the series with a lackluster installment. Just once can't producers end a series on a high note? Lucas and Spielberg both showed it can be done. And yet we gets films like Superman 4.Oh well.So that's Supes-4. Take that for what it's worth. Just as with Lucas' original Star Wars trilogy or Woody Allen's "earlier funny ones" (movies), so it is that the consensus of the Superman films with Chris Reeves is that the first two are good, the two followups are less than lackluster.Personally I think this thing and the previous film with Richard Pryor are an abysmal joke. I'm sorry Reeves and the rest of the cast got put in these films. Oh well.
leplatypus
For sure, the results is awful as the feat is impossible to get, even for a Superman! In the man of steel comics, you can find brilliant comics about a dark or stupid clone of Superman called Bizzaro! And you can also find other comics about Superman becoming internationally involved (like in the beautiful Peace on Earth in which he wants to eradicate starvation). Here, we have the two stories mixed together with Luthor being the conductor behind but the production just tears everything apart! Luthor is becoming a mere clown assisted by a rock and roll nephew??? There are a lot of scenes that doesn't make sense at all: sure it was the same for S3, but the entire movie was funny and the crazy things make laugh: here it's totally serious and those nonsense just don't fit: humans flying alone and even breathing in space, Supe rebuilding China wall with his eyes ! Clone is seeded by the sun and born as a talking adult with his costume neatly done (even with the chest N for Nuclear Man!) and I could go on: the scratches, the krypton crystal,
The effects are horrible: done 10 years after the first and the effects looks like a poor 50s B-movie: wires everywhere, moon space is a dark curtain (not even flat), same shots used in different parts
. And the final blow with a salvage editing: if I watched only the screen version, I rate it 1 because the elements of each plots don't make sense together. My dad DVD has deleted scenes and those lost 30 minutes helps the movie: the 1st dumb clone is not that bad and the race arms is much better told with the Kremlin and everything else! At the end, if this quest for peace was challenging, all the more than Supe had a view of the whole planet instead of saving Lois or a cat or a man drowning, this last Christopher movie is nonetheless a missed opportunity!
Maddie
This movie makes me despise movies in general.This movie was made by a production company called Canon. They made terrible movies. (That's probably why they went out of business.) This movie lost the whole point of making a movie, it was just so confusing, losing plot points and characters, and all of the scenes in space made no sense. All of them! And the fight scenes in space look like two men in costumes having a wrestling match while floating in a void. And I won't even mention the fact about Superman's cape fluttering in space.This just wasn't a well thought out movie. It was like they were given a hundred dollars and told to make a movie. The green screen scenes were crap, and all of the flying scenes looked practically the same, because they were practically all the same! The people who made the movie were too lazy to make more than one flying scene, I am guessing. Or the production was being rushed.It seems that Lois Lane can defy gravity in this movie. Superman let go of her in one of the most terrible scenes-and she kept flying beside him. Unless she is an alien, like him.If IMDb had an official worst movies ever list- this should be number one.
AD
