Superman Returns and Supreme Power: Hyperion
While in London, I was able to catch up on JMS' Supreme Power, by reading the Hyperion miniseries, which makes an interesting compare, parallel and contrast to Superman Returns, which I watched last night. So I'll review both, and hope it won't be confusing to readers who are unfamiliar with one of them.
I've had people on my flist who hated it - bohemiancachet - and people who adored it - buffyannotater - so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. And that's leaving out the "Bryan S., you deserted the X-Men franchise for this?" factor, which I also encountered a lot. (The fact the Byran-Singer-less X3 was, err, a very mixed affair didn't help.) When I left the theatre, I didn't hate Superman Returns, in fact, it had a lot of things I liked and/or found interesting, but I didn't love it, either. And being firmly on the X-Men side of the comic film version franchise, I still wish Mr. Singer had chosen to finish the trilogy instead.
Superman Returns is places itself squarely into the continuity of the first two Superman films, of which I have a somewhat blurred memory, due to not having watched them for a long time, but I was able to spot homages such as Superman taking Lois flying. I also thought Singer went for an interesting retcon - I'd say all the Superman films (as opposed, to, say, tv shows such as both Lois & Clark and Smallville, which though very different from each other both see Clark Kent as the core personality) see Superman/Kal-El (whatever you want to call him) as the core and Clark Kent, or at least the Clark Kent he is in Metropolis, as the mask. But in the Reeve interpretation, you got the impression that Superman has a lot of fun being Clark, especially with the clumsiness, whereas the Clark persona in Superman Returns is an expression of the genuine uncomfortableness and alienation the main character feels among humans. Indeed, alienation - alien - is the key word, and this is is where I was reminded of what JMS does with his Superman equivalent, Mark Milton/Hyperion in Supreme Power. The sense of really being other, not human. A key image in both the entire Supreme Power series and Superman Returns is Superman/Hyperion being in space, regarding Earth from space (and hearing the misery below). There are some common elements in the way the image is used - in both cases, it tells both the character and the viewer just how other he is, for example - and some significant differences, which have to do with the dark way JMS interprets the story. At times, I did wonder whether Singer or some of his fellow scriptwriters haven't read Supreme Power and were influenced by it, though in the sense of wanting to tell this as a happy story, which is a contradiction in terms.
With the emphasis of Superman-as-Alien in the movie, the existence of Jason the child makes sense. Jason is the strongest symbol for this Superman having become part of humanity - as opposed to what he thinks at the start - not just through his love for individual humans, such as Martha or Lois, but as a way that ends his sentence as being the last one of his kind. Speaking of Jason, I thought the child playing him did well, and I also appreciated that we saw only one display of Kryptonian powers, and that in extremis - more about that scene later - because after reading Supreme Power, I'll never be able to look at a fully superpowered toddler with the same eyes again.
What startled me was how strongly Singer went for a religious subtext here - or do we say the sub becomes rapidly text? Because from the way the Jor-el messages from the first movie were used ("I have sent my son to humanity, etc.") to the various crucifixion poses and the resurrection ( I didn't count whether it was the third day), this was in more than one way Superman-as-Jesus. Also doubled with Jason, because Richard White is clearly Joseph to Lois' Mary. (Okay, so he's also Jonathan Kent the second, but still. More about Richard later.) In between being Jesus, he was also briefly Siegfried, not just any Siegfried but the Wagnerian one, because the way Lex stabs him in the back - and especially the music used at that moment was a direct steal homage to Hagen killing Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. So much so that I expected Lex' minions and Kitty to sing "Hagen, was tust du?" afterwards. Of course, making your main character a saviour figure, not just in general terms but the saviour of mankind and using religious overtones while you're at it is a tricky, tricky thing, but I think Singer keeps the balance by giving us several heroic humans as well - humanity isn't just a passive, admiring (or distressed) crowd waiting to be saved. In an early scene in the airplane, Lois tries to help the publicity woman, she's the one who, using her reporter skills, tracks down the cause of the power failure everyone else disregards and finds Lex Luthor, she has the brains to find a way to notify her boys where she is once she's captures, and she saves Superman near the end. Richard, who presumably is only her fiance instead of her husband because someone at DC did not want Superman to have feelings for a married woman, doesn't wait in Metropolis, either, he saves his family and later Superman.
Sidenote: Richard White is one of the movie's best surprises, because traditionally alternate love interests for our hero's love interests don't fare well. They're either hissworthy villains, or they die, or, should they be nice and survive, we're still not meant to empathize with them or spare a thought to how they feel once the girl follows her True Love (tm). (Don't get me started on Spiderman II. The way MJ is written is a constant source of disgruntlement to me, which keeps me from enjoying the movie completely, and I hate, hate, hate, HATE the scene where she runs off in her wedding dress to Peter. I never think "MJ and Peter get together, yay!" when I see that, my sympathies are entirely with Jameson Junior who got dumped on the altar, didn't even get an explanation in person, and had to face the wedding guests etc. alone. Which obviously is not how I'm meant to react.) But in Superman Returns, Richard isn't just a decent guy who has formed a loving family with Lois and her son - never mind biology, he is Jason's father just as much as Jonathan Kent was Clark's in most versions of the Superman tale - , he's smart, he's brave, and he survives. Moreover, Lois doesn't dump him, neither early on nor at the end. Nor does she cheat on him. The picture Jason painted doesn't show Superman rescuing Lois and Jason, it shows Superman, Lois, Richard and Jason all together (with Richard being called "Dad"). I really appreciated that. And I didn't end this movie either wishing that Lois & kid would get together with Superman, or believing I was meant to; I think the movie made a good case that although Lois does still have feelings for Superman, she loves Richard as well, and is happy with him.
So, given all that, what didn't I like? Wellllllll.... for starters, I was a bit thrown by Lois' complete indifference towards Clark. I hope this isn't just the Lois & Clark fan in me, I'm aware they never were the bantering best friends and partners they are in the tv series in the movieverse, but my vague memories of Superman II are that Lois had come to regard Clark as a friend (and then she figured out he was Superman and got brainwashed by the end of the movie; poor Lois; this happens to her in every incarnation a couple of times before she's allowed to remember, it seems). Secondly, well, it's not that Kate Bosworth is too young to play Lois (as likeadeuce pointed out, she's only five years younger than Margot Kidder was in Superman, while Roush is actually one year older than Reeve was), it's that she looks too young for a woman who was a leading reporter at the Planet when Clark showed up there, with at least six years having passed since then. Then there is the Superman/Lois relationship - not the one on screen in Superman Returns, which is okay, but the implied backstory. Given that during the time Lois remembers from the first two movies, she didn't just have a crush on Superman, but was hero-worshipping him - well. To me, one of the reasons why Our Hero wants Lois to love him as Clark Kent (which he did in the first two movies, that's not something just present in Lois & Clark) is that he wouldn't exploit Lois' adoration for Superman to have sex with her. As Clark, he's her equal, and whatever she feels for him, she doesn't (hero-)worship him. Didn't she call Superman a god on screen in Superman? Add to this the religious subtext Singer brings in, and it just strikes me as wrong.
Next: while Kevin Space was an improvement on Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor (WHY is Hackman's performance called a classic in every article I've read? I was singurarly unimpressed even as a child), this generic Evil Overlord thing is something he can do in his sleep, and so he seems a bit wasted. Given that Singer retconned Our Hero's emotional state into always having felt as an alien, I don't see why he couldn't retcon his arch nemesis' motivations into something more interesting than "must crush Superman, muwahhahaaa" while he was at it. Ah, well. He did wring out something good from the traditional "gangster's moll comes around to hero's side"; I could see that plot twist coming miles away, but Parker Posey was really good, and I loved that it wasn't just her being impressed with Superman - when Lex did his traditional villain-explains-the-evil-scheme scene with Lois and Lois pointed out millions would die, you could see that sink in to Kitty, and her horror at it, which from this point onwards let her struggle with herself. Watching the kryptonite-affected Superman getting beaten and (as far as she knew) killed just confirmed it and gave her the last impetus.
Sidenote: as others have pointed out, that scene - the thugs having a go at a helpless Superman - and the earlier scene with a thug nearly killing Lois were genuinenly frightening because they weren't traditional comic book/film violence. The scene with Lois especially had a casual brutality on the thug's side and a terror on the audience's (and Jason's) which made it probably the darkest in the film.
Back to my complaints. Okay, one death and resurrection is okay. Two are overdoing it, Mr. Singer. (Unless it's Buffy and there are several seasons between death 1 and death 2.) I'm aware that Superman didn't "really" die the first time - Lois got to him just in time - but look at it this way: do we really expect this film to kill off Superman? No, we don't. So we aren't really breathless in anticipation two times in a row. Well, I wasn't. I was thinking: you know, I'd have used this screen time for some character depth. Or conversely would have made the movie shorter.
Also: it's hard to beat E.T. when it comes to death-and-resurrection-of-alien-after-loving-child-has-shown up. I sobbed, okay, I was twelve, but I sobbed. I doubt I would have sobbed had I seen Superman Returns at twelve.
Another thing I was thinking was: if you go for emotional emphasis on being an Alien, well.... then Mark Milton, aka Hyperion, is still the most interesting version of Superman (if played this way) around. Especially since recent developments make it clearer and clearer he's the main character of an unrelenting tragedy. Well, I've said before that Supreme Power is the best thing JMS has written since Babylon 5; Mark Milton might be his most tragic character since Londo Mollari.
So, Mark. Alien superpowered baby arriving on Earth, found by a kindly couple. Who keep him for all of a few hours before the goverment - who of course have registered the vessel he came in - take him. And the "kindly couple" who raises him in a Norman Rockwell idyll are actually goverment agents supervised on tv all the time, with the idyll taking place in a confined environment. Mark absorbs all-American-values not because he grows up in Kansas but because he's brainwashed on a daily basis. Not just so he'll end up as the perfect goverment weapon but because - and this is important, as it makes things not black and white but complicated - the idea of a child, and later an adult of nearly unlimited powers is genuinenly frightening, and so the generals arguing for this program aren't evil supervillains (though you can call them cold-blooded bastards), they have a point.
In the course of the series, Mark finds out his entire life was made up of lies, tries to quit, with the result that due to a calculated smear campaign, he goes from being the beloved superhero Hyperion to an evil Alien in the public's eye, and finally gets a team of other meta humans sent after him. Which is where Hyperion starts. It also starts with a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, from the section of this novel the creature - who is very articulate and as far from the Boris Karloff version as you can get - narrates. And of course, in one sense, Mark is the creature. He hasn't been loved by anyone, not even his "parents", who faked it, while the love of the public proves fickle. By fearing what he could do and treating him like a monster (when Mark asks General Casey, after finding out the truth, "why", he hears a "why not? You don't owe you anything; you're an alien, we're humans, and we have to protect humans" as a reply), humans have finally managed to make him into one. Or have they? That's the question.
Hyperion details how, after an initial fight between Mark and the various goverment-hired other superpowered heroes, they end up in what appears to be a parallel universe at first. One where Hyperion did what the generals always feared he would do: take over the world, with only a few of the remaining superheroes, such as the Batman equivalent Nighthawk, still resisting. The twist, subtly implied near the end during a meeting of the two Hyperions but not fully revealed until the final scene when Mark and the others are back in the "right" world, after he agreed to submit to the goverment again, is that this wasn't a parallel world at all, but this one, two years into the future.
JMS and his time trips, and doomed futures: of course I thought of War Without End here, and the revelation of the fate awaiting for Londo. And yet so much happened after War Without End that what we saw, while still happening, changed its meaning: there was redemption for Londo through the road he went. "I know what you're thinking," Future!Hyperion tells Mark. "Because I thought it too, once upon a time. (...) But there never will be any peace. Not for you, not for us. Unless things change. Unless we change them. Unless we save them. Every day, in their temples and churches and mosques and synagogues, they listen to the voices that tell them they are God's noblest creatures, that they are blessed, special above all others. Every day, in the temples they have erected to money and power, they listen to the voices that tell them: "The rich are rich because they deserve it. And the poor are poor because they deserve it. But we know otherwise. We know because we can hear the other voices. With our powers, we see it all. We hear it all. We have no choice. Moans of despair from bundles of rags and pain. Cries for help that fall on silent stone. And the small voice in all of them that says "Is this all I was born for? To live in pain and die before my time? To die before I have even lived?" The voice that says, this is not the world I was promised. And it's not fair - it's just not fair."
Superman in Superman Returns tells Lois essentially the same thing - he can't not hear the voices. He sees it all, he hears it all. They need a saviour. So he has to be oen. But Superman in any incarnation, canon AUs aside, does believe in authorities other than his own. He limits the saving to, flippantly said, accident damage control and the foilling of supervillains and leaves the rest to the humans. Mark, in his universe, has nothing left to believe in other than himself. Except for one thing. Future!Hyperion pointedly keeps one big secret to him - that the only true friend Mark found, Stan (aka The Blur, the equivalent of the Flash), when discovering Hyperion was going to take over the world, tried to stop him and is currently kept prisoner by him in that future world because Hyperion can't bring himself to kill or brainwash Stan. This one element of course is the counterargument to Future!Hyperion's rethoric, and as he tells Stan, that is why he couldn't tell present-day-Mark - because Mark then would not make these decisions. Stan is the argument for (self-reliant) humanity and the one tie that keeps Mark connected to it, and it might be what will make a difference. Or not.
What JMS does: when Mark for the first fights another superpowered human, Doc Spectrum (or rather, the later attacks and fights him), this results in a lot of dead elephants (they're somewhere in Africa) lying around later, and Mark on his knees, after the sight has sunk in, repeating "I'm sorry... I'm sorry, I don't know wht happened, I just, I'm sorry" to the dead elephants. The second time he fights against another superpowered man, it's a serial killer who uses bystanders as weapons. Mark initially tries to save them all but then focuses on the fight, and, with Stan's help, manages to defeat the supervillain of the hour. While Stan and Nighthawk bicker, he looks around. Sees a lot of dead corpses, again. Only this time, they're human. And he keeps repeating "God, God, God, God..." Flash forward to the future as shown in Hyperion: and you have an earth devastated by the fights between superheroes. And yet you see how Mark got there/will get there.
The repeating image, like I said, of Mark and the planet Earth as seen from space: as a child, starting to realize something is very wrong indeed with the world (as presented to him) (see icon). As an adult, after his first encounter with Nighthawk and the start of his separation from goverment. Making one last attempt, a demonstration, to convince them to leave him alone after leaving them. And finally in the speech of his future self.
There is the thing about retelling myths of a saviour with divine powers who is fundamentally separated from those he wants/needs to save: it's hard not see it ending in blood and death, either his or theirs.
I've had people on my flist who hated it - bohemiancachet - and people who adored it - buffyannotater - so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. And that's leaving out the "Bryan S., you deserted the X-Men franchise for this?" factor, which I also encountered a lot. (The fact the Byran-Singer-less X3 was, err, a very mixed affair didn't help.) When I left the theatre, I didn't hate Superman Returns, in fact, it had a lot of things I liked and/or found interesting, but I didn't love it, either. And being firmly on the X-Men side of the comic film version franchise, I still wish Mr. Singer had chosen to finish the trilogy instead.
Superman Returns is places itself squarely into the continuity of the first two Superman films, of which I have a somewhat blurred memory, due to not having watched them for a long time, but I was able to spot homages such as Superman taking Lois flying. I also thought Singer went for an interesting retcon - I'd say all the Superman films (as opposed, to, say, tv shows such as both Lois & Clark and Smallville, which though very different from each other both see Clark Kent as the core personality) see Superman/Kal-El (whatever you want to call him) as the core and Clark Kent, or at least the Clark Kent he is in Metropolis, as the mask. But in the Reeve interpretation, you got the impression that Superman has a lot of fun being Clark, especially with the clumsiness, whereas the Clark persona in Superman Returns is an expression of the genuine uncomfortableness and alienation the main character feels among humans. Indeed, alienation - alien - is the key word, and this is is where I was reminded of what JMS does with his Superman equivalent, Mark Milton/Hyperion in Supreme Power. The sense of really being other, not human. A key image in both the entire Supreme Power series and Superman Returns is Superman/Hyperion being in space, regarding Earth from space (and hearing the misery below). There are some common elements in the way the image is used - in both cases, it tells both the character and the viewer just how other he is, for example - and some significant differences, which have to do with the dark way JMS interprets the story. At times, I did wonder whether Singer or some of his fellow scriptwriters haven't read Supreme Power and were influenced by it, though in the sense of wanting to tell this as a happy story, which is a contradiction in terms.
With the emphasis of Superman-as-Alien in the movie, the existence of Jason the child makes sense. Jason is the strongest symbol for this Superman having become part of humanity - as opposed to what he thinks at the start - not just through his love for individual humans, such as Martha or Lois, but as a way that ends his sentence as being the last one of his kind. Speaking of Jason, I thought the child playing him did well, and I also appreciated that we saw only one display of Kryptonian powers, and that in extremis - more about that scene later - because after reading Supreme Power, I'll never be able to look at a fully superpowered toddler with the same eyes again.
What startled me was how strongly Singer went for a religious subtext here - or do we say the sub becomes rapidly text? Because from the way the Jor-el messages from the first movie were used ("I have sent my son to humanity, etc.") to the various crucifixion poses and the resurrection ( I didn't count whether it was the third day), this was in more than one way Superman-as-Jesus. Also doubled with Jason, because Richard White is clearly Joseph to Lois' Mary. (Okay, so he's also Jonathan Kent the second, but still. More about Richard later.) In between being Jesus, he was also briefly Siegfried, not just any Siegfried but the Wagnerian one, because the way Lex stabs him in the back - and especially the music used at that moment was a direct steal homage to Hagen killing Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. So much so that I expected Lex' minions and Kitty to sing "Hagen, was tust du?" afterwards. Of course, making your main character a saviour figure, not just in general terms but the saviour of mankind and using religious overtones while you're at it is a tricky, tricky thing, but I think Singer keeps the balance by giving us several heroic humans as well - humanity isn't just a passive, admiring (or distressed) crowd waiting to be saved. In an early scene in the airplane, Lois tries to help the publicity woman, she's the one who, using her reporter skills, tracks down the cause of the power failure everyone else disregards and finds Lex Luthor, she has the brains to find a way to notify her boys where she is once she's captures, and she saves Superman near the end. Richard, who presumably is only her fiance instead of her husband because someone at DC did not want Superman to have feelings for a married woman, doesn't wait in Metropolis, either, he saves his family and later Superman.
Sidenote: Richard White is one of the movie's best surprises, because traditionally alternate love interests for our hero's love interests don't fare well. They're either hissworthy villains, or they die, or, should they be nice and survive, we're still not meant to empathize with them or spare a thought to how they feel once the girl follows her True Love (tm). (Don't get me started on Spiderman II. The way MJ is written is a constant source of disgruntlement to me, which keeps me from enjoying the movie completely, and I hate, hate, hate, HATE the scene where she runs off in her wedding dress to Peter. I never think "MJ and Peter get together, yay!" when I see that, my sympathies are entirely with Jameson Junior who got dumped on the altar, didn't even get an explanation in person, and had to face the wedding guests etc. alone. Which obviously is not how I'm meant to react.) But in Superman Returns, Richard isn't just a decent guy who has formed a loving family with Lois and her son - never mind biology, he is Jason's father just as much as Jonathan Kent was Clark's in most versions of the Superman tale - , he's smart, he's brave, and he survives. Moreover, Lois doesn't dump him, neither early on nor at the end. Nor does she cheat on him. The picture Jason painted doesn't show Superman rescuing Lois and Jason, it shows Superman, Lois, Richard and Jason all together (with Richard being called "Dad"). I really appreciated that. And I didn't end this movie either wishing that Lois & kid would get together with Superman, or believing I was meant to; I think the movie made a good case that although Lois does still have feelings for Superman, she loves Richard as well, and is happy with him.
So, given all that, what didn't I like? Wellllllll.... for starters, I was a bit thrown by Lois' complete indifference towards Clark. I hope this isn't just the Lois & Clark fan in me, I'm aware they never were the bantering best friends and partners they are in the tv series in the movieverse, but my vague memories of Superman II are that Lois had come to regard Clark as a friend (and then she figured out he was Superman and got brainwashed by the end of the movie; poor Lois; this happens to her in every incarnation a couple of times before she's allowed to remember, it seems). Secondly, well, it's not that Kate Bosworth is too young to play Lois (as likeadeuce pointed out, she's only five years younger than Margot Kidder was in Superman, while Roush is actually one year older than Reeve was), it's that she looks too young for a woman who was a leading reporter at the Planet when Clark showed up there, with at least six years having passed since then. Then there is the Superman/Lois relationship - not the one on screen in Superman Returns, which is okay, but the implied backstory. Given that during the time Lois remembers from the first two movies, she didn't just have a crush on Superman, but was hero-worshipping him - well. To me, one of the reasons why Our Hero wants Lois to love him as Clark Kent (which he did in the first two movies, that's not something just present in Lois & Clark) is that he wouldn't exploit Lois' adoration for Superman to have sex with her. As Clark, he's her equal, and whatever she feels for him, she doesn't (hero-)worship him. Didn't she call Superman a god on screen in Superman? Add to this the religious subtext Singer brings in, and it just strikes me as wrong.
Next: while Kevin Space was an improvement on Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor (WHY is Hackman's performance called a classic in every article I've read? I was singurarly unimpressed even as a child), this generic Evil Overlord thing is something he can do in his sleep, and so he seems a bit wasted. Given that Singer retconned Our Hero's emotional state into always having felt as an alien, I don't see why he couldn't retcon his arch nemesis' motivations into something more interesting than "must crush Superman, muwahhahaaa" while he was at it. Ah, well. He did wring out something good from the traditional "gangster's moll comes around to hero's side"; I could see that plot twist coming miles away, but Parker Posey was really good, and I loved that it wasn't just her being impressed with Superman - when Lex did his traditional villain-explains-the-evil-scheme scene with Lois and Lois pointed out millions would die, you could see that sink in to Kitty, and her horror at it, which from this point onwards let her struggle with herself. Watching the kryptonite-affected Superman getting beaten and (as far as she knew) killed just confirmed it and gave her the last impetus.
Sidenote: as others have pointed out, that scene - the thugs having a go at a helpless Superman - and the earlier scene with a thug nearly killing Lois were genuinenly frightening because they weren't traditional comic book/film violence. The scene with Lois especially had a casual brutality on the thug's side and a terror on the audience's (and Jason's) which made it probably the darkest in the film.
Back to my complaints. Okay, one death and resurrection is okay. Two are overdoing it, Mr. Singer. (Unless it's Buffy and there are several seasons between death 1 and death 2.) I'm aware that Superman didn't "really" die the first time - Lois got to him just in time - but look at it this way: do we really expect this film to kill off Superman? No, we don't. So we aren't really breathless in anticipation two times in a row. Well, I wasn't. I was thinking: you know, I'd have used this screen time for some character depth. Or conversely would have made the movie shorter.
Also: it's hard to beat E.T. when it comes to death-and-resurrection-of-alien-after-loving-child-has-shown up. I sobbed, okay, I was twelve, but I sobbed. I doubt I would have sobbed had I seen Superman Returns at twelve.
Another thing I was thinking was: if you go for emotional emphasis on being an Alien, well.... then Mark Milton, aka Hyperion, is still the most interesting version of Superman (if played this way) around. Especially since recent developments make it clearer and clearer he's the main character of an unrelenting tragedy. Well, I've said before that Supreme Power is the best thing JMS has written since Babylon 5; Mark Milton might be his most tragic character since Londo Mollari.
So, Mark. Alien superpowered baby arriving on Earth, found by a kindly couple. Who keep him for all of a few hours before the goverment - who of course have registered the vessel he came in - take him. And the "kindly couple" who raises him in a Norman Rockwell idyll are actually goverment agents supervised on tv all the time, with the idyll taking place in a confined environment. Mark absorbs all-American-values not because he grows up in Kansas but because he's brainwashed on a daily basis. Not just so he'll end up as the perfect goverment weapon but because - and this is important, as it makes things not black and white but complicated - the idea of a child, and later an adult of nearly unlimited powers is genuinenly frightening, and so the generals arguing for this program aren't evil supervillains (though you can call them cold-blooded bastards), they have a point.
In the course of the series, Mark finds out his entire life was made up of lies, tries to quit, with the result that due to a calculated smear campaign, he goes from being the beloved superhero Hyperion to an evil Alien in the public's eye, and finally gets a team of other meta humans sent after him. Which is where Hyperion starts. It also starts with a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, from the section of this novel the creature - who is very articulate and as far from the Boris Karloff version as you can get - narrates. And of course, in one sense, Mark is the creature. He hasn't been loved by anyone, not even his "parents", who faked it, while the love of the public proves fickle. By fearing what he could do and treating him like a monster (when Mark asks General Casey, after finding out the truth, "why", he hears a "why not? You don't owe you anything; you're an alien, we're humans, and we have to protect humans" as a reply), humans have finally managed to make him into one. Or have they? That's the question.
Hyperion details how, after an initial fight between Mark and the various goverment-hired other superpowered heroes, they end up in what appears to be a parallel universe at first. One where Hyperion did what the generals always feared he would do: take over the world, with only a few of the remaining superheroes, such as the Batman equivalent Nighthawk, still resisting. The twist, subtly implied near the end during a meeting of the two Hyperions but not fully revealed until the final scene when Mark and the others are back in the "right" world, after he agreed to submit to the goverment again, is that this wasn't a parallel world at all, but this one, two years into the future.
JMS and his time trips, and doomed futures: of course I thought of War Without End here, and the revelation of the fate awaiting for Londo. And yet so much happened after War Without End that what we saw, while still happening, changed its meaning: there was redemption for Londo through the road he went. "I know what you're thinking," Future!Hyperion tells Mark. "Because I thought it too, once upon a time. (...) But there never will be any peace. Not for you, not for us. Unless things change. Unless we change them. Unless we save them. Every day, in their temples and churches and mosques and synagogues, they listen to the voices that tell them they are God's noblest creatures, that they are blessed, special above all others. Every day, in the temples they have erected to money and power, they listen to the voices that tell them: "The rich are rich because they deserve it. And the poor are poor because they deserve it. But we know otherwise. We know because we can hear the other voices. With our powers, we see it all. We hear it all. We have no choice. Moans of despair from bundles of rags and pain. Cries for help that fall on silent stone. And the small voice in all of them that says "Is this all I was born for? To live in pain and die before my time? To die before I have even lived?" The voice that says, this is not the world I was promised. And it's not fair - it's just not fair."
Superman in Superman Returns tells Lois essentially the same thing - he can't not hear the voices. He sees it all, he hears it all. They need a saviour. So he has to be oen. But Superman in any incarnation, canon AUs aside, does believe in authorities other than his own. He limits the saving to, flippantly said, accident damage control and the foilling of supervillains and leaves the rest to the humans. Mark, in his universe, has nothing left to believe in other than himself. Except for one thing. Future!Hyperion pointedly keeps one big secret to him - that the only true friend Mark found, Stan (aka The Blur, the equivalent of the Flash), when discovering Hyperion was going to take over the world, tried to stop him and is currently kept prisoner by him in that future world because Hyperion can't bring himself to kill or brainwash Stan. This one element of course is the counterargument to Future!Hyperion's rethoric, and as he tells Stan, that is why he couldn't tell present-day-Mark - because Mark then would not make these decisions. Stan is the argument for (self-reliant) humanity and the one tie that keeps Mark connected to it, and it might be what will make a difference. Or not.
What JMS does: when Mark for the first fights another superpowered human, Doc Spectrum (or rather, the later attacks and fights him), this results in a lot of dead elephants (they're somewhere in Africa) lying around later, and Mark on his knees, after the sight has sunk in, repeating "I'm sorry... I'm sorry, I don't know wht happened, I just, I'm sorry" to the dead elephants. The second time he fights against another superpowered man, it's a serial killer who uses bystanders as weapons. Mark initially tries to save them all but then focuses on the fight, and, with Stan's help, manages to defeat the supervillain of the hour. While Stan and Nighthawk bicker, he looks around. Sees a lot of dead corpses, again. Only this time, they're human. And he keeps repeating "God, God, God, God..." Flash forward to the future as shown in Hyperion: and you have an earth devastated by the fights between superheroes. And yet you see how Mark got there/will get there.
The repeating image, like I said, of Mark and the planet Earth as seen from space: as a child, starting to realize something is very wrong indeed with the world (as presented to him) (see icon). As an adult, after his first encounter with Nighthawk and the start of his separation from goverment. Making one last attempt, a demonstration, to convince them to leave him alone after leaving them. And finally in the speech of his future self.
There is the thing about retelling myths of a saviour with divine powers who is fundamentally separated from those he wants/needs to save: it's hard not see it ending in blood and death, either his or theirs.