Cinematical has a really fun post that talks about all the various plotholes and inconsistencies in the recent Superman Returns. Some of the stuff they mention could be easily explained away by a bit of comic-geekery, but there are a few that bug the living crap out of me, namely:
Bullets bounce right off Superman. We all know that. But they also
bounce off of his costume. It never tears and we see that on the roof
sequence. However, Lex is able to stab right through it?[ ... ] why was it so easy for the doctors in the hospital to rip of supermans costume?
I really have no answer to this. I’m assuming that Superman’s costume is actually an alien symbiote that leeches off the Kryptonian’s strength to make itself invulnerable … but that’s just me.
And some more:
Superconception: If the Superhump that went down in Superman 2
is the one that created the new kid, then the kid shouldn’t have any
powers at all — since Supes and Lois did the horizontal fortress-dance
while our hero was completely without powers. And anyway, since
Superman ended up deleting Lane’s memory of the Supertryst, she’d have
no way of knowing that the kid belongs to Superstud in the first place.
My personal thoughts on the super-hump: Superman lost his powers briefly in Superman 2, and promptly had his way with lady Lois. His body is actually "recreated" here, making him completely human. Now I’m of the opinion that this was the one and only time that Lois and Supes got together, because human and kryptonian DNA could never combine to have offspring … even in a badly explained comic-based movie. So the one time that Superman gets some, he doesn’t remember to wear a rubber and ends up getting Lois pregnant.
Here’s the flaw in the theory though: if he was completely human at the point of insemination, how could super-kid have those latent super-abilities? Guess the transformation wasn’t as complete as the movie made it sound, huh?
And some existentialist thoughts on the whole Superman/Clark Kent dichotomy:
My big beef with the Clark Kent thing is that it even exists. How many
people DIE every day because Superman is writing bylines and gutter
copy??Isn’t it high time they killed "Clark"?
Hear, hear. Clark Kent has been in Metropolis for God knows how long, and he still doesn’t have any friends (at least, none that bother to look at him long enough to realize that he’s the spitting image of a certain well-known superhero). There was this interesting writeup some years ago about the difference between Superman and the other alter-ego-type superheroes (Batman, Spidey, etc). Whereas Batman and Spidey hide their true identities to protect the people that are close to them, Superman’s true identity is … well, Superman. It’s "Clark Kent" that is the facade, not the other way around, and while it was stylistically fun to have a mild-mannered journalist transform into an all-powerful demi-god back in the 50’s, the Kent identity doesn’t really serve much of a purpose anymore these days. (They did away with Clark Kent in the comics already I believe; whether or not the movie version will catch up remains to be seen though.)