> I think both of you have missed the point. The whole (and only) purpose of such movies is to entertain. If you can suspend disbelief enough to even watch a movie that includes non-existent elements, then you ought to be able to just sit back and enjoy the story line, regardless of the degree of plausibility. The degree of plausibility is totally irrelevant to the story of such a movie that so obviously impossible in the first place.

This is going to come as a shock to everybody, but daniel78 and I disagree on something.

Imagine if at the big climax, Lex Luthor shot Superman with a kryptonite bullet and Superman just shrugged it off. "Sorry Lex," he says, "but I'm suddenly and without further explanation now immune to kryptonite." You'd feel cheated, because the rules of Superman clearly say that kryptonite weakens him. By daniel78's reasoning, such a plot twist would be OK, but is there anyone who would be happy with that sort of development?

One of the big problems with Superman, as gremlinn mentioned, is that his writers tend toward constantly creating deus ex machinas to get him out of jams. The worst of these is when all of a sudden Supes has a brand new power that was never mentioned before, and may or may not ever be mentioned again. It's lame writing and inherently unsatisfactory, because it robs a story of dramatic tension.

That Superman is obviously fantasy is one thing, but speculative fiction still requires rules in order to work. In fact, part of the appeal of this sort of storytelling is seeing what writers can do within the confines of the rules they establish. The best sci-fi and fantasy tends to show how us how people react to extraordinary situations in order to illustrate something about people. At the end of the day, all storytelling is about characters, regardless of whether or not they're superpowered.

The dramatic tension I mentioned earlier is fundamental to storytelling, and it requires the audience to believe that the characters face serious threats, and we get enjoyment from seeing those problems solved in surprising or interesting ways. If the solution is "the author reshapes the rules of the universe to the hero's favor" then we do not feel satisfied, because we are robbed of seeing the character solve his problem in an interesting way. In the case gremlinn mentioned of Superman suddenly having the power to reverse time, it completely trivializes everything else that can ever happen to him. Clark Kent got scooped on a story? Time to reverse time. Lois Lane broke a nail? Better get the ol' planet spinning backwards!

All of this is true for Hollywood movies. Spectacle is worthless if we don't care about the characters and if we don't believe they're faced with serious problems. The best action films have memorable, interesting characters and action scenes that develop in realistic ways given what we know about the rules of physics within that movie universe. The characters in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" can practically fly, but imagine if at the end of "Terminator" Arnold's cyborg assassin suddenly could.

Yes, blockbusters are supposed to be entertaining, but the most entertaining ones are the ones that cheat the least and have the most interesting characters. When I think of "Star Wars" or "Die Hard" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark," I think of the interesting characters and the problems they solved creatively, without the use of divine intervention in the form of a lazy writer's pen (even though the end of "Raiders" arguably does feature literal divine intervention, it is well within the confines of the story).

Stephen