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Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent in the Daily Planet newsroom

Spacey, at least, makes for a promising Luthor, at first. The early scenes of Luthor and his entourage (including Parker Posey as a deadpan ditz named Kitty Kowalski) are quite amusing and do a good job of stoking our anticipation. Luthor goes up north to steal the Kryptonian crystals that built Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and then he plans to exploit their properties. His first experiment, conducted within a large model town complete with train tracks and tiny mountains, is filmed like a disaster movie with toys—and it turns out to be much more interesting than the actual disaster that follows, when Luthor finally puts his plan into motion.

Indeed, when Luthor's plan is ultimately revealed, it is something of a letdown. For one thing, it is basically a retread of his real-estate ambitions in the first movie—an overblown, hyperbolic, special-effects-heavy retread, to be sure, but a retread just the same. For another, the film increasingly tries to impress us with the sheer hugeness of Luthor's plan, but never makes it awe-inspiring or majestic; instead, the plan is rather dull and lifeless, and increasingly, so are Luthor and his team, too.

There is a fair bit of God-talk in this film, not all of it Christian. Luthor, for example, compares his theft of Kryptonian technology to the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the Greek gods and gave it to mankind; after he succeeds, Kitty sings, "He's got the whole world in his hands." This line is echoed in a later scene, when the giant globe atop the Daily Planet building falls to the street and Superman catches it, holding the globe on his shoulders in a way that recalls certain depictions of Atlas—another Titan who, like Prometheus, was punished by the Greek gods.

Other scenes invite us to think of Superman as a Christ figure. His father Jor-El (the late Marlon Brando, here portrayed via footage from the first film and sound clips that were originally recorded for Superman II) says he sent his "only son" to Earth to be a "light" that would show us how to be "a great people." Superman floats in the air and listens to the sounds of the city, before deciding where he should intervene. And when Lois, bitter after Superman's absence, tells him that the world doesn't need a "savior," he replies, "Every day I hear people crying for one."

But we shouldn't make too much of this sort of thing. The Superman movies have never shown anyone actually following Superman's inspiring lead; if anything, they have shown people waiting passively for Superman to rescue them. What's more, the Superman of the movies has shown a remarkable tendency to shrug off his responsibilities—first abandoning his powers (and thus the safety of the world) so he could sleep with Lois in Superman II, and now abandoning the world altogether for several years prior to the events of Superman Returns.

In addition, whereas the first film had an almost mystical sensibility that lent itself to religious allegory, the new film does not. The Kryptonian crystals that seemed to keep Jor-El's spirit alive long after his physical death are just a form of technology here. (Indeed, Luthor quotes a famous line from atheist sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who said any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic.) And that bit in the first film where Jor-El talks about the father and the son living in and through each other—a line that many Christians have seized on for its Trinitarian overtones—is now nothing more than a poetic ode to paternity.

Still, the film's weaknesses aside, there is no denying that Singer has pulled out all the stops in his bid to make the biggest, loudest summer blockbuster possible—and he sprinkles the movie with welcome grace notes of visual beauty and comic absurdity, from a startling moment of weightlessness aboard an airplane before it plummets to the ground, to a hilarious scene involving a thug, a hostage, and a grand piano. And have Superman's flights to the rim of space ever been more breathtaking or seemed so dangerously high? It's enough to make you really, really wish—if you didn't already—that Singer hadn't left the X-Men so soon.

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