It’s basically like Footloose, if everybody in Footloose was a glowing space angel, and instead of dancing it was saving your civilization from a global cataclysm. I suppose when you think about it, it’s not really that much like Footloose.

But it’s striking, after a first scene that was specifically constructed to establish that Jor-El is the primary representative of the Krypton way of life, to go straight into a scene where all of a sudden he’s the wild one, a teen rebel trying to get through to the jive turkeys who are running the place. They refuse to listen, of course; that’s standard practice for jive turkeys. Everything on Krypton seems to be either crystalline or circular, but if there’s such a thing as a square on this planet, then these people are the squares.

And this appears to happen immediately after Jor-El’s successful prosecution, when you’d think everybody would be high-fiving him. But he’s changed out of his black executioner gown, and into his white heavenly-host staff meeting gown, and now he’s in trouble. Jor-El does not get a lot of downtime.

It’s the gowns, really, that elevate this scene into the realm of art. The comics pictured Jor-El a bunch of times between 1939 and 1978, and he was usually dressed in a sci-fi tunic with a cape, in some combination of red, green and yellow. The 1948 version pictured above was an outlier in having a red shirt with a yellow circle; the many late-50s appearances were remarkably consistent, with a green tunic, yellow circle and red accessories.

This look is obviously intended to reflect Superman’s circus-strongman costume, but tweaking the bold primary colors by replacing the deep blue with a more alien green. It looks standard-issue outer-spacey, as seen in Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and the thousand copycats that followed, with accents at the shoulder that evoke a military uniform.

In contrast, the impossibly shiny white costumes worn by the film’s Kryptonians look like nothing on earth. I’m just going to go ahead and assert that the whole point of a superhero movie is to show us things we’ve never seen before, and so far the movie has delivered spectacularly. There’s the revolving hula-hoops machine, the black-box-theater projected faces, the diamond Phantom Zone effect, and now these incredible costumes.

The material is used for cinema screens, and it’s made out of miniscule balls of glass. When the flying unit was testing front projection — having the actor holding still, while they project film on a screen behind him — they noticed that this material lit up with a blinding reflection when the light hit it in a specific way.

So they cut the material into little strips and made the costumes, and mounted a front projection box on each of the cameras. The light from the projection box bounces off a mirror and hits the glass beads, and then the beads reflect that blinding flash back to the camera. It’s both literally and figuratively brilliant, and it’s the kind of trick you can only use once.

They had to use cotton gloves to handle the material, because it would lose its shine if you touched it by hand — and unfortunately, now that I know that, I get nervous when I see the shot of Jor-El putting his hands on the other guy’s shoulders, because I’m thinking, dude, don’t touch the material! But maybe Marlon Brando’s hands are made of star stuff, and it doesn’t matter.

Another remarkable thing about this scene is how still Jor-El is. He knows that everyone on the planet will die if these science quacks don’t listen to him, and if there was ever a moment for spluttering frustration, this would be it. But Brando moves slowly through the scene, absolutely assured of his facts.

“This planet will explode within thirty days, if not sooner,” he patiently explains, not raising his voice. Asked to be reasonable, his response is, “My friend, I have never been otherwise. This madness is yours.”

He’s not yelling at them, because he knows how this meeting is going to end, and how their world will end. He speaks the truth, knowing that it won’t change anything. These people are already dead. He’s just sad about it.

This atmosphere of stillness and resignation is a break from previous versions of the scene, which often have the council either laughing (as in Superman #53) or shouting (as in the 1940 radio show). There’s usually some kind of uproar when Jor-El goes into his Cassandra routine.

But these people aren’t laughing. These people are terrified of him.

As in the previous scene, Jor-El is the most important person in the room, the man who commands all available attention. Whether he’s the hero or the goat, everything else exists in relationship to him.

It’s not clear what they think he will do, if defied, but they are desperately worried about it. They act as if a single word from him could bring down the planet’s entire power structure. When they all stand together on the opposite side of the room, it could look like they’re threatening him. Instead, it looks like they’re huddling together for safety.

And that’s why you need a real A-1 bonafide movie star in this role, even if you have to pay him ridiculous money to do it. You need a guy who’s spent the last three decades actually being the most important person in any room he’s walked into.

The heavenly host is arrayed against him, and he concedes the point. And then their entire world is consumed in fire, as they feared it would be, if they crossed him. Stay tuned for the biggest “I told you so” in galactic history.

Tomorrow:
Why did they need five writers
to get a decent script?
1.10: Crazy Little Thing Called Love

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Movie list

— Danny Horn