Superman III is not a good movie, and it's probably the subject of a few dozen YouTube videos about how awful it is (at least in comparison to the earlier Christopher Reeve Superman movies) but I've got a soft spot in my heart for this movie because it's one of the first films I ever remember seeing. Some grade-school teacher of mine decided that it would be a treat for the kiddies to watch Superman III on videotape. Maybe not the best decision, because there are some moments of genuine horror, and what grade-school kid really needs to watch Christopher Reeve throttling himself to death in a junkyard?
Detractors of Superman III point out that this is less of a Superman movie and more of a vehicle for Richard Pryor's comical performance, but I liked Gus as a kid, and even now—fully conscious of just how inane the material is—I find that I like him still. Pryor's screen presence gives Gus a sympathetic Everyman quality that I can't help but respect, even though he's playing a minor villain. His awful bosses shit on him constantly and command him to do ridiculous jobs, and Gus usually comes through for them...and he's able to make himself do these awful things, for the most part, because they don't quite seem like real crimes. He's just doing stuff on a computer.
Computers, in Superman III, are ludicrously superpowerful. Apparently you can cause a weather satellite to create weather, and explore a distant planet even, simply by tapping the right things on a keyboard. You can make piles of cash appear (or disappear) as if by magic, you can jam the traffic (and cause the STOP/WALK sign to fight itself) with a few keystrokes; build a big enough computer and it'll just come alive on you and start feeding itself off high-tension lines and turning people into robots. Oh and you can synthesize any element on a supercomputer it would seem. None of this is presented in a remotely realistic fashion of course but still, I find myself wondering if the decades-old habit of endowing computers with magical abilities in movies and TV hasn't helped foster a culture of uncritical faith in computing and programming, and the power of a single person to achieve unthinkable feats simply by typing on a keyboard.
Oh and then there's Superman turning selfish and destructive (and alcoholic, for some reason?) and eventually fighting himself, as if Kal-El had finally gotten sick of being held back by Clark Kent's boyscoutness. It's remarkably intense and even upsetting material for a movie that's largely Richard Pryor bumbling his way through various mishaps, and it's what I best remembered about Superman III from that grade-school screening. Maybe the movie predicted my future in a way...
~Chara