In retrospect, Superman Returns‘ low-key, emotional approach is almost revolutionary, especially in light of our post-Avengers superhero movie world where most superhero movies are consistently trying to outdo each other with spectacle in the third act. There’s a lot to like in Superman Returns, despite some of its questionable choices, and it’s a movie that may have had the deck stacked against it from the start.

Superman Returns clearly wanted to appeal to a particular segment of the audience, namely Superman purists who grew up on Christopher Reeve’s films, which depicted a friendly, idealistic hero operating in a fairly black and white world. Bryan Singer famously made his broad Superman Returns pitch to Superman: The Movie director, Richard Donner, and was so excited by the prospect of directing the character that he walked away from directing X-Men: The Last Stand. After the success of Singer’s X2: X-Men United, which (for the time) was the rare superhero sequel that improved dramatically on the original, things seemed to be going the Man of Steel’s way.

The internet had spent much of the previous decade reading the developments surrounding Superman’s big screen adventure with horror. Superman Lives had seen a procession of talent that seemed mismatched to the project, with stories taking absurd liberties with the character and the legend, all in the name of modernizing Superman, killing him, resurrecting him, giving him a robotic exo-suit, selling toys, and stripping the character of the hope and optimism that he normally would embody. There was even a very different Batman v Superman movie in development. Superman Returns feels very much like a reaction against all of that, almost like a commentary on Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes mishandling of the character for a decade or more.

But even a Superman Returns defender (like this writer) is often perplexed by some of the film’s decisions. Bryan Singer set out to make a romantic, mature Superman movie, as well as one that paid homage to the world established in the films that starred Christopher Reeve, a franchise that ended in tatters with the embarrassing Superman IV: The Quest For Peace in 1987. That one proved deadlier than Kryptonite to the Man of Steel’s box office prospects for nearly 20 years. To that end, Superman Returns tells the tale of a Superman who has been absent from his world, just as he had been absent from the big screen, so the title is both about the character’s return to Earth and the franchise’s literal return to screens.