After waiting and standing in line for a little less than 2 hours I went with 2SXC to watch “Superman Returns” last night. The place was packed as I thought it would and we got outta there at 1 AM from a 10:10 PM showing and I must say… fucking mierda, man. I loved the movie. Letting it sink in overnight and this morning I’ve come to realize that structure and story-wise, Superman Returns and Batman Begins are essentially the same movie: awesome characterization, sets, story and execution, with a flaky third act that once you get to it you’re so jazzed about what you’ve seen before that you’re willing to forgive it. What makes these two movies stand apart from each other though is the characters in the titles themselves. Batman and Superman are so alike yet so much polar opposites that even though they, just like the movies, share a template of values (as characters) and story structure (as movies), because they’re so different from one another each on their own for totally different motives: Batman is grit and drama while Superman is ideals and hope. They’re both lonesome characters, and they both believe in truth, justice… and all that stuff. But it’s their approaches that make them so different from one another and it shows in these movies once you put them right next to each other.

I don’t want to go on spoiler territory whether you’ve seen it or not, but I’ll tell you this: if by the first half hour mark the movie hasn’t clicked with you, it just won’t. But chances are that you will… I had a problem believing Brandon Routh as Clark Kent in the opening scenes, let alone Superman. For a moment there, I panicked. But by the time he dons the costume for the first time in the flick (in the unbelievable, awesome plane sequence you’ve seen in the trailers), after that? If you’re not sold by then, well… sir or madam, you have no soul.

The movie’s great. Watch it. It’s the perfect date movie: Your girl will go for the love story with a man in tights, and your boy will go for, umm… the action with a man in tights. I will also recommend you watch Batman Begins, another superb comic book adaptation that reboots the franchise as swimmingly as this one has done. Personally, I don’t know why Americans are so up in arms about. Oh, right. American values and all that. Superman representing America and what not. A godlike character that can stop bullets and fly and all that jazz. Of course they’d be pissed since now that Superman’s a global thing. But I’m not from the United States, so I automatically liked it. A lot. Does that make me a terrorist?

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