The twelve-year-old kid in me is anxious to see a Superman film filled with a near sensory overload of killer action sequences, with the emphasis on the word “ultimate” in every related description. He wants to see the Man of Steel battling giant Transformer-like robots in the midst of an alien invasion. He envisions scenes with beautiful mid-air martial arts, fists connecting on jaws with thunderous sounds on impact, and bodies slammed though buildings. He wants to see “The Passion of the Super-Christ,” with Superman rising to his feet to face the hordes, almost beaten to a pulp as he lets out a primal scream, his costume in shreds, welts and bloody cuts on his muscles, and his face partially deformed like Sly Stallone in the closing minutes of his fight with Clubber Lang in Rocky 3. He wants all that and more to justify to his friends that once and for all, Superman is the baddest super-hero of them all, ‘nuff said.

On the other hand, the adult in me is conflicted and uncertain and knows that I, and the rest of the world, need something more – maybe a parable here and there to remind me, to remind us, to hang in there because good and evil isn’t clear-cut in this world of gray. In this world you rarely get a free pass for being nice. Even in our best attempts at doing good, somehow we still manage to fail. Do unto others rarely results in a karmic effect.

With so much public cynicism, the question is “Why would anyone want to do a movie about an old-fashioned character like Superman; a throwback character to a bygone era of traditional values that truthfully never really existed except in propaganda?” Superman Returns and X-Men actor James Marsden has one answer: “If somebody gave you $200 million to make a movie that could reach the most people you could – who would it be about? The answer is either going to be about Superman or Jesus.”

That’s why the adult in me is relieved that a movie like Superman Returns exists. On the surface it’s a story about Superman, the latest adventure in a storied franchise; underneath, it’s an allegorical story about Jesus, and beyond that, the Christian struggle to walk in purity. As Bryan Singer says, “There’s definitely an allegory, a Judeo-Christian allegory that’s happening in the mythology of Superman, right up to the fact that he descends from the heavens.” And the kid in me is thankful that at least there’s enough “dadgum” action in this film to satisfy my overactive imagination.

Superman Returns is an entertaining, engaging, and emotional epic, a cinematic achievement, and a modern classic for a perilous time and a worthy tribute to one of America’s greatest cultural icons.

The plot is simple. Superman goes out on a lone outer space expedition to seek the truth about his home planet Krypton. After he discovers it has indeed been destroyed, Superman returns to earth to his adoptive mother (Eva Marie-Saint) after an absence of five years, only to find the world in greater turmoil.

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