“Placed aboard this vessel is an energy module, all that remains of a once powerful civilisation: Krypton, your mother planet. It is my last gift to you. Once removed, the ship will grow cold and silent, and you will be finally alone.”

Is there any more evocative suggestion of the sad and sorry state of the classic Superman movie franchise than the early scenes of The Quest for Peace that find Clark wandering through the dilapidated remains of the old Kent farm and desperately scavenging anything of value from the remains of the ship that brought him to Earth. The farm is for sale, the soil ruined, whatever valuables remained tossed out into the dirt with no sentimentality.

It’s somewhat ironic that the film franchise would find itself so rundown. After all, Superman II had codified a lot of what we take for granted with the modern superhero sequel, so it’s disappointing that Superman III and The Quest for Peace should fall back into the old model of sequel production that sank franchises like Jaws or Planet of the Apes, the “take the money and run” approach that pushed for more sequels at a higher rate and a lower cost, trying desperately to wring whatever value remained in the property before discarding the remains. By the time that The Quest for Peace came around, the franchise rights had passed from the Salkinds to Cannon Films, suggesting that the race to the bottom was already well underway.

Indeed, there are reports that The Quest for Peace was a swindle in a much more literal manner. Cannon Films had been given a budget of $40m to make The Quest for Peace, but reportedly invested the bulk of that in other projects. The budget for The Quest for Peace came in at $17m. Including the likely generous salary packets for Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman, that perhaps explains why The Quest for Peace somehow looks cheaper and less impressive than the original Superman, produced a decade earlier.

“You're young, you're single, you're successful.”
“I'm usually in bed by 10:30.”

Well, it took four films, but we did finally get a Superman movie where the woman are allowed to be as horny as the man himself. That said, the sound mixing is terrible. The dialogue is mixed so that it’s hard to hear the characters talking over the soft core porn music playing in the background. It’s a staggeringly amateurish production for the third sequel to one of the biggest blockbusters ever made. It’s an interesting case study in how little Hollywood used to care for these franchises, a stark contrast with the way in which these intellectual properties have eaten Hollywood from the inside out.

To give some credit, Furie is a fairly reasonable director given the constraints with which he’s working. The edit is terrible, with The Quest for Peace often feeling like it’s been frantically cut down in the hope of clocking in at under ninety minutes. (Mission accomplished, even if it feels much longer.) However, Furie’s camera drifts and glides through the film’s sets in a way that Donner and Lester rarely allowed theirs to do. Of course, Donner was making a classical sort of film, while Lester was a much less adventurous director. Furie’s direction feels a bit more indie, in keeping with the lower budget and practical limitations; characters walk and talk, the camera glides through large spaces.

“You remember, don't you?”
“I remember everything.”

Of all the continuity to reference, it seems spectacularly ill-judged to not only acknowledge the “kiss of forgetting” from Richard Lester’s Superman II, but to double down on it. The Quest for Peace implies that Superman has been using that technique on Lois with some frequency, whenever he’s feeling depressed and in need of a confidence boost. It’s super creepy. What exactly has Superman been doing with (or to) Lois before wiping her memory? How many times has he done it in the past? What are the long-term effects of this process on her? Does Superman even care?

Again, one of the weirder aspects of the Christopher Reeve movies is the growing sense that Superman is a deeply creepy and entitled manchild with severe boundary issues, occasionally straying into the “nice guy” trope. Then again, given that an entire generation of young men seem to have latched on to this version of Clark Kent as an epitome of American masculinity, this might explain a lot. Rewatching these movies, Superman Returns doesn’t feel like quite the aberration that I used to think that it was.

“Oh, wow. I'm break dancing.”

Again, this probably speaks more to the weird naïvety of how Hollywood used to handle these sorts of franchises, but Superman III and The Quest for Peace demonstrate remarkably little faith in the concept of Superman to carry his own movie franchise. Superman III focused on a new character played by Richard Pryor, while The Quest for Peace tries awkwardly and desperately to appeal to “the kids” with the introduction of Lex Luthor’s “totally radical” nephew Lenny who makes reference to breakdancing and speaks as if he’s written by somebody who has never encountered a teenager in the wild.

“Don't be concerned, blue boy. Only you can hear me. It's my own private frequency. You might call this Lex TV.”

To be fair, given the film’s anti-nuclear messaging, it only makes sense that The Quest for Peace should commit itself so thoroughly to recycling. There’s no sense of any truly original ideas here beyond Reece’s own pet concerns about nuclear disarmament. Instead, The Quest for Peace feels like a consent retread of familiar set pieces that were executed better in the previous films.

A nuclear weapon launched into space unleashes a monstrous enemy, like Superman II. Superman fights an evil copy of himself, like Superman III. Lex breaks out of prison in a comedic and elaborate plan, like Superman II. Superman reveals his identity to Lois and wipes her memory, like Superman II. Lex taunts Superman via radio waves with a phone bomb threat, like Superman. Superman and a similarly-powered opponent square off in Metropolis, throwing landmarks and harassing civilians, like in Superman II. A reference to the flag on the moon from Superman II.

As a result of all this, The Quest for Peace feels like a lifeless and monstrous husk, a grotesque clone grown from the DNA of the Superman franchise. The Quest for Peace is very much the Nuclear Man to the original Superman.