Why Must Everything Be an Allegory?

Just recently I was reading a review for "Superman Returns", in which the critic said that the Superman character has many similarties to Jesus Christ. For example, in the scene where he's floating in space and you can hear the voice of his father saying, "I've sent them you, my one and only son". That's all fine and dandy, if the reviewer didn't insist that that portion of the film was meant to be an allegory. Not all films have a deep religious theme to them (and how come it's always Jesus.. why not Budha).

Poor Sup! A man just can't be the world's savior without immediately being compared to Jesus.

I don't know why this bugs me so much. It's just that most of this guy's review was talking about all the intentional Christian ties (which I would call universal themes, that aren't tied down to any religion) instead of actually reviewing the movie. I guess it's because I've seen far too many critics analzye these movies for some piece of possible allegory (which often doesn't even exist) instead of watching the movie! It's silly! If I tried hard enough, I could come up with five reasons why Jack Sparrow represented Christ in the latest Pirates film. Which I wouldn't, because that would be dumb.

I can understand drawing comparsions, but when you say that there is no way that the director didn't intend for the piece to draw such comparisions, then people are just being silly. Unless it's something like "The Chronicles of Narnia", where the writer actually said straight out that it was an allegory, then it probably isn't an allegory.

So if Superman is supposedly the Christ figure of the story... does that mean that Lex Luthor represents Simon Cowell? ...... I don't think that came out right.

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Yeaaaaahhh, I guess this is the topic I end up writing about when I spent my afternoon reading movie reviews. Honestly, the guys breathe way too much into these films. Not everything is meant to have this amazing christian theme to it. The themes represented in the movie are universal in many religions and stories. But of course, that means that they couldn't make a big deal about the entire "Superman represents Jesus" thing. IT'S A SUPER HERO MOVIE!