Superman II is a huge step down from the original and overall pretty messy, but still an enjoyable film somehow.

I had heard that this movie was fiddled with too much in both production and post production, and that’s as clear as day here. The film feels unfocused for at least the entire first half, as the main villains are introduced extremely early, but we only ever get bits and pieces of them until the last forty five minutes or so. Instead, the film decides to put its focus on Superman and Lois’ romance, which is great and all, but there wasn’t much progression in the plot or character development during this. It was carried by the actors’ surprisingly great chemistry.

Speaking of the villains, we don’t even really know who the main one is because it keeps cutting back and forth between Lex Luthor and General Zod’s crew, which by the way escape by complete coincidence, in which there are a lot of coincidences in this movie. It’s not a spoiler, obviously, to say that the main villains end up being General Zod and the other two Kryptonians, but if the movie itself can’t make that clear on its own then that’s a problem. Back to Lex, he could have entirely been cut from the movie. I know they make him an important piece of information later on, but the writers and editors could have easily found a way around that.

I said that there wasn’t any character development in the first half and I really mean it. It takes just over halfway through to get to Superman’s main arc, and I have to say I was really disappointed with how they handled it. The creators could have added a human sense or emotional weight to Superman’s decision he makes, but instead it unfortunately comes off selfish. That’s not even the big deal though, because the arc itself doesn’t really even last that long and is resolved with an absolute coincidence caused randomly earlier in the film. Just like Lex, it ends up feeling entirely pointless.

I’m almost to the positives, I promise, but I do have one more criticism. When General Zod and the other two show up to Earth, they pick the most random and entirely uninteresting place to go to and “do bad things” at. Like what were the writers thinking? Being a sequel, this movie should feel grander than the first in at least one way or another, but having them land in some random town instead of a place with a higher population makes no sense to me. This made them feel less dangerous and not important, leading to almost no tension at all.

Now, speaking of positives, I’ll explain or at least attempt to explain why I still gave this a positive review overall. For one, there are still hints of the magic of the first movie here and there. Like I said Superman and Lois’ chemistry is wonderful and, I probably should have mentioned this before, makes the movie not boring. I love these two together, and I think they carried the movie.

Also, before the the main villains show up to Earth, they are honestly pretty cool and actually do add some tension and sense of doom for a while. Their first evil thing that they do was fun to watch, and I was really expecting some good stuff later on. I think the characters themselves were also intriguing, and had an interesting chemistry with one another, though I wish they didn’t have to make the big guy the stereotypical stupid character.

The third act is really where we see the magic of the original film return for the most part. We get all the classic musical drops, and the action, while not great by today’s standards, was fun to watch and kept me engaged. Where they end up going for the ultimate climax was also a very smart move in my opinion, even though it ended in a pretty underwhelming way, which was actually I found out due to the original movie changing its ending. Funny enough, the ending of the first movie was actually originally intended to be the ending for the second one, but the producers or someone else higher up decided the first movie needed a bigger way to finish off the story.

It’s definitely not great and is overall quite a mess, but I can’t get enough of Christopher Reeve’s Superman, so even just that made a messy film enjoyable for me.