June 17, 1983--My Reactions to "Superman III"

Note: This post does have some spoliers.

     When I first saw this flick, Ross Webster now becomes sort of a offshoot of the evil Lex Luthor in the Superman and Superman II.
    With that, Ross in Superman III focuses on Gus Gorman (a computer expert played by Richard Pryor) to defeat the powers of Superman by modifying all of his regular behaviors of what Superman stands for--good, kindness, and sincerity.
    I then realized that the attack on Superman was three-prong. First, Ross forces Gus Gorman to alter the  weather satellites on a computer mainframe system, so that the altering will cause a major tropical storm in Colombia that would destroy the country's coffee crop and terribly destroy the world markets that depend on that valuable crop.
    I also see that Gus does his evil deed but was informed that Superman countered this super-storm over Columbia by his common super-strengths (like turning a twister upside down or blowing strong winds with his mouth to dry up the flooded crops), which made Ross mad.

     Then, the second prong is to find Superman's chemical qualities, which included of course, Kryptonite, made of course from the planet Krypton, which detonated completely by the super-heating sun in the first Superman movie. Gus gets back to a mainframe computer station and does find the exact chemical qualities in the Krypton, and then, that Krypton rock is sent to Superman, and then, Superman becomes two parts--one angry and drunk--called "bad Superman", and the other part, called "good Superman." 

     This leads to the final battle in a garbage dump between the two different Supermans...finally, a choke hold by the good Superman ends the bad Superman for good. When I saw that happened—it was a sigh of relief!
     The third prong attack on the good Superman (with the "bad Superman" now gone) focuses on Gus's design of a supercomputer somewhere in the desert Southwest. I then saw that Ross then beckons Superman in the final conflict, and Superman knows that he has to be stopped before the supercomputer rules Ross's goal of world conquest that could lead to worldwide chaos and destruction.
    I found that this third prong attack was in 2 stages. In stage 1, as Superman comes towards the location of the cave from the outside, he is greeted by plenty of surface-to-air rockets (part of the computer's exterior defense system) that aims toward him, but Superman does evade the destructive missiles as Ross, along with two lady assistants, uses the supercomputer as some time of video game as they were destined to kill Superman. When those regular missiles were ineffective, there was a call to fire the MX--a much bigger surface-to-air missile, which does hit Superman and he falls to the ground near the cave. At the same time, Gus Gorman goes into the cave and sees his computer creation come to life. Gus then is greeted graciously by Ross, to join in the computer's bells and whistles to try to finish off Superman.
     Superman does get up after the MX missile hit and is back to the fight quickly, and I see him go right into the supercomputer cave, and tells Ross that this game is over. This leads to Stage 2 of Ross's attack, when Ross then stops Superman with the computer's Krypton laser pulse--the chemical Gus made. As Superman is stunned in terrible pain and collapses, Gus then runs into the main power switch and pulls the plug, turning the whole computer off.
     This buys time for Superman, but suddenly, the computer goes on again, and Gus realizes that the computer wants to be something like a monster. It had gone completely mad, and one lady assistant is entrapped by the device and becomes an evil cyborg. Superman leaves the cave and comes back with a closed special acid canister that is inert. He then stops the cyborg, but then the mad computer was about the eat at Superman with shock hits and is about to fatally entrap him; at this point, I saw him open up the acid canister, and I saw the acid do its work. It eats away and then destroys the whole supercomputer from the inside out--starting with small--and then big--explosions.
      After all of the explosions were over, I now find that the supercomputer is now rubble with twisted and bent steel, and I then see that Superman comes out from the destruction, was able to find Gus alive (he hid somewhere to evade the carnage), and takes Gus back alive, out of the cave, to his original workplace. Superman says that the other people will be brought to justice, including Ross.

     From all of the seriousness of this flick, there is a lighter part of this movie where Lois Lane is introduced to a brand new writer for the Daily Planet, Lana Lane. She appears brighter in appearance than the original Lois. The ending of the movie was, I thought, something that Superman had which wasa new trait—the ability to bring a historic structure back to its normal place, and that is what Superman did to bring the Tower of Pisa, which went straight up when Superman turned bad, back to its original leaning position. The Italian clay makers who saw Superman, as I see it, realize what happened and I see the makers use sledgehammers to destroy those uprighted statue replicas of Pisa….well, that made me laugh too.