Review of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) by Donald W — 17 Sep 2015

The fourth Superman movie is not as good as the first two and only a little better than the third. It's got less drama and more comedy. They had a very low budget so the special effects are crude and they reused some of the flying scenes from the first movie.

They also stole the basic plot too. This time Lex Luthor clones his own super villain to fight Superman. Mariel Hemingway plays the daughter of a media mogul who buys the Daily Planet and tries to turn it into a tabloid scandal newspaper.

Her main purpose is to be a romantic rival to Lois Lane for Clark Kent's attention. The movie was made when President Reagan was negotiating arms reduction treaties with the USSR. The writers of the story decided to use the arms race to push the anti-nuke agenda and to use as the main story plot line.

They made the same mistake the comic book writers made in the 1940's and 1950's. During World War II there was no real Superman to defeat the Nazis and the Communist. During World War II and the Cold War Superman in the comics battled aliens from outer space but never confronted real world bad guys.

When they tried the public didn't buy it. It doesn't work here either. The other problem was Superman is so powerful it's hard to find a bad guy to oppose him. That's why in the comic books they used space aliens.

In this movie Lex Luthor builds a villain for him to fight. That turns the movies into Superhero boxing matches. In the comic books Lex Luthor was able to match Superman because of his superior intellect.

In this movie he only tries to use a substitute to battle Superman's strength. The old Superman TV shows from the 1950's had better stories because they concentrated on Clark Kent. On TV Clark Kent was a serious character who solved crimes and only came in as Superman to save the day at the end of the show.

The movies made Clark Kent into a clown. The only good thing about this movie is that Christopher Reeve was the best actor to ever play Superman and this was his last Superman movie.