Subscriber only. ‘Superman’: The original superhero is back, with a brisk new attitude
It’s been almost 50 years since Christopher Reeve starred in Superman , the 1978 movie that opened what is now an endless spigot of superhero movies. It didn’t invent the tropes of messiah-like figures with supernatural powers or the building of elaborate on-screen worlds only to reduce them to apocalyptic rubble, but its contours have now been imitated, elaborated, iterated and just plain stolen so often that the original looks wan and generic by comparison.
