I want to back up and answer Julian on the flying thing.
I didn't mean to imply Chris wasn't great at flying, in fact after all these years it's the one thing that's still unfailingly fun to watch in the first film (well, after that astonishing cinematography in the Kansas scenes...WOW!).
Where was that filmed? I think I heard part of it was in Newfoundland or somewhere. Either way, it looked beautiful. If I wasn't mistaken, didn't the cinematographer die on making it?
Plus, those scenes had the Best Supporting Performance by a Cereal Box.
My problem as a kid...and it's never totally left me...was the way he sort of floated up off the ground and all you heard was the flutter of his cape. I felt that where George's takeoffs and flights seemed generated by POWER (super-leg muscles), Chris' seemed the product of some kind of magic.
Well, if you like power, SUPERMAN RETURNS certainly delivers. I especially like when Superman landed on Luthor's island, and there was an angry, purposeful CRACK with his landing!
This implication of magic, rather than science (however fanciful) dogged the Reeve films throughout. In the second film, he has his powers removed by some sort of tanning booth in a manner that's never really explained, then he gets them back without even an attempt at explanation. Jor-El's messages at first seem to be recordings, but then he answers questions and has give-and-take discussions with Superman like he's a ghost, not a hologram. In Donner's version of S:II, Jor even "sacrifices himself" to get the super back in Superman. How can you sacrifice yourself if you're already dead? Again, there's something supernatural and magical at work here. And how else do you explain super-Great-Wall-Of-China-rebuilding-vision if not magic?
Anyway, I always felt the Salkind movies, on some fundamental level, never really understood what Superman was about (super-cellophaning, anyone?) and for me it all started with that Peter Pan takeoff. That's probably just my hang-up, I don't know.
Interesting points. On reflection, some of the elements of Superman did feel "mystical" in nature - and everybody can safely agree that the powers lost/regained is pretty goofy.
One specific incident of mysticism creeping up: before the Donner/Reeves film, any similarities to Jesus were incidental; afterward, they were explicit.
And like you said, the Singer film, for all of its many strengths, does choose to take some of the earlier film's missteps, and among them is the idea of Superman as a holy or Christlike figure - for instance, Brendan Routh falling to earth in a sort of "stained glass window" posture. This always made me squirm
just a little bit in my seat for two reasons:
1) the pretention of it always bugged me. As I said earlier when people were comparing Superman to mythological characters: Superman doesn't NEED to be compared explicitly to holy men and mythological heroes. Just have Superman be who he is, and if the stories are good, the comparisons suggest themselves.
2) Previously, before the Donner films, Superman was a Jewish figure created by two Jewish guys, who, not because of any conscious choice on their part, had Superman have incidental similarities and comparisons to Jewish folk heroes, and gave Superman Jewish "themes" like exile and special identity. None of these things were the creator's deliberate intention, but they were there just the same: the evil Amalak, Len Wein writing a story called "Let my People Grow" and so on.
On the other hand, watching non-Jews turn around and make Superman EXPLICITLY Christian gives me the same feeling I'm sure black people must feel when they see white people doing hip-hop.
Now the concept of flying is making me think...to me, in the original feature cartoons, and even the live action serials, Superman flew in a direction, like an airplane (and he landed with a "whoop" sound in the Alwyn series), and that was even more true of George Reeve's jump and whirl of air effect...the Superman floating or levitating seemed odd to me at the time, even if he was doing that high in the sky all the time in the Silver Age comics...
Actually, I was thinking that Superman levitating slightly over the ground one be one of the things that really would be neat to see in a movie. This is something that couldn't be done with wireworks unless you had a convincing actor, because then their legs would just "dangle."
Like Nightwing said, though, it would be interesting if they came up something to make the power look like it's got "power." Perhaps when Superman levitates, there's little gusts of air beneath him, like being beneath a helicopter.
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