At the risk of alienating a few people like Andrew, I have to say that I am left cold by all the hype over the new Superman Returns film. I’ll admit I was a fan during the 60s: I can remember going to my primary school fete’s fancy dress competition as Superman and none of the judges had heard of him. Before long I got to preferring Batman, but it was a long time before I worked out why.

I think it is because Superman just has too many powers. He can fly, he has x-ray vision, super strength, heat-ray vision, super-freezing breath, he is bulletproof, super-fast, super strong. And I am sure there is more. Most comic book heroes could do their fair share of crime-fighting with any one of those powers. Having them all just seems a bit over the top.

Looking at it logically, anyone with all those abilities would be invincible and all-powerful, which would make for very short stories with not a lot of tension, so the writers had to keep inventing ever more implausible weaknesses for him. I think that with comic book superheroes it is the weaknesses and flaws which are the points of interest, and Superman just doesn’t really have any.

At the time, that was the point of course. Superman was supposed to be the all-American hero. Even in my pre-teen years I thought there was something strange about how Superman was so closely identified with one country. I used to wonder what would have happened if his spaceship had crashed in Russia or Africa and he had been brought up by locals there instead. I guess that in my ideal SF entertainment I like the fantasy/reality mix tilted a bit more towards the plausible end of the spectrum than Superman ever was.

Now the story I would really like to see is the one which starts with the premise that someone did have all Superman’s powers in today’s world and speculates on what he should do for the best and what someone might do.

Think about it. If you had all those powers would you run around firefighting or would you feel there was a moral imperative to prevent crime, accidents, war, famine and everything else bad in the world? But how would you go about doing that? Would you install yourself as ruler of the world and impose order? That is a bit arrogant and egotistic – but then with those powers a bit of pride might just be honest.

But what if all those physical powers did not come with super-human judgement? Would the right thing be to determine by some means who is the wisest person to lead and then allow yourself to just enforce their decisions? Would you bother having an alter-ego alias? If you did, do you think that just putting on a pair of glasses would be sufficient disguise?

All of that is much more interesting to me than seeing the scriptwriters jump through hoops to try and find a spurious weakness like a previously unheard of colour of kryptonite, but it would need a book to do it justice rather than a film. It would be like a 21st century version of Plato’s Republic.

Having said that, Superman II was on Sky Movies the other night and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had forgotten how much humour was in it, and Gene Hackman really did steal the show. But I couldn’t look at him without seeing Kevin Spacey. I have seen a still of Spacey as Lex Luthor and he looks great. Inspired casting as he is one of the few actors as versatile and talented as Gene Hackman.

The best thing was trying to work out how Lois could not realise that Clark Kent was Superman. When she started having suspicions and said something about how Superman always seems to be there and how Clark always disappears at the right time, Jayne and I were yelling at her “and he just happens to look exactly the same!!”

If I do go to see Superman Returns it will be because of Spacey and not because of Superman in his new muted colours.