Jun 10, 2013 John Shade Vick Movie Reviews, Movies 38
Superman turns 75, this year, and is returning to cinemas in a big way in MAN OF STEEL. Directed by Zack Snyder (WATCHMEN), written by David S. Goyer (BATMAN BEGINS), from a story co-written by Goyer and producer Christopher Nolan, this is the first original vision of Superman to hit the screens since Richard Donner’s epic SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE in 1978. That feature film made instant screen icons of both Superman and the charismatic Christopher Reeve, and both will cast their shadows over every other adaptation to follow. Having been a fan since its first run in theaters, I have high expectations for Superman movies. I was not a fan of Bryan Singer’s 2006 entry, SUPERMAN RETURNS, which aimed to pick up where SUPERMAN II left off. RETURNS is a great-looking movie, but tying your movie to a storyline that took place 26 years earlier was a disastrous move, and many of the story and character innovations that Singer contributed to the accepted mythology fell astonishingly flat with fans. Any creative team attempting another Superman film had to do something new–and yet faithful–with the story of Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman.
Unfortunately, what Snyder, Goyer and Nolan have given us is a big, noisy, charmless, vacuous, visually-ugly mess that looks a little like Superman, and a lot like a TRANSFORMERS sequel. MAN OF STEEL opens with the fate of Kal-El’s homeworld, Krypton. Gone, now, are the icy glaciers and vibrant white structures of Donner’s film; this Krypton is a hideous, brown, rocky world, filled with computer-generated creatures left over from the STAR WARS prequels. Engaged in civil war, hundreds of Kryptonians flit around on multi-winged beasts, shooting each other with laser blasters. It’s a new beginning for a new Superman, but we’ve seen it all before–and despite its bigness and loudness, it feels oddly claustrophobic and underwhelming. It is also here that we get our first taste of the shaky, quick-zooming camerawork that has become rote in modern science fiction movies and TV, and sets the cinematic tone in motion. It is so ubiquitous in this film that even scenes of people sitting and drinking coffee might make those prone to motion sickness close their eyes, and a number of fight scenes are as incomprehensible as anything in BATMAN BEGINS or QUANTUM OF SOLACE.
We soon meet Kal-El’s birth parents, Jor-El and Lara (Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer) who have broken the rules and had a baby boy via natural birth. For generations, Kryptonians have been genetically engineered and grown in underwater pods, each embryo’s destiny to serve the glory of Krypton; to create a being with no inscribed purpose is to introduce anarchy and uncertainty into the Kryptonian world. (How it could possibly make Krypton a worse place to live, I don’t know.) After arguing with a bunch of Kryptonian elders dressed like characters from a RIDDICK movie, General Zod (Michael Shannon) tries to apprehend Jor-El, who escapes on a flying creature. On his way home, Jor-El steals a small black skull with gold markings on it from an underwater cave. This skull–referred to as the Codex–contains all of the knowledge and wisdom of the Kryptonians. He puts it in the the capsule with Kal-El, and sends him to Earth, moments before Zod shows up and kills him. Zod and his cronies are then put on a ship and banished through a wormhole into the Phantom Zone. Soon after, Krypton explodes, and Kal-El’s capsule finds its way to Kansas, where it crashes in a field on the farm of Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane).
After this, the movie becomes a jumbled morass of expository flashback scenes. We first see a bearded Clark as an adult saving some guys from an exploding oil rig, and then wandering around and doing a series of odd jobs. He speaks almost no dialogue, which gives us little impression of the kind of person he is inside. Everything we learn is a result of his actions, which are not always admirable. In one scene, he turns the other cheek to the goading of an ornery truck driver in a diner; later, when the trucker leaves the diner, he finds his truck impaled on a bunch of logs. Sure, it gets a laugh out of the audience, but is this what a grown-up Clark Kent would do? The segments of Clark-as-morose-drifter are interlaced with scenes of Clark as a 9- and 13-year-old, discovering his powers and listening to the confusing wisdom of Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), who alternately tells Clark that he’s “here for a reason”…and then suggests that he should let people die in order to protect himself from those who wouldn’t understand him. What a crushing message to give to a child who has the power to help others. Just tell him to carry a ski-mask in his back pocket and don’t get caught.
These scattered Smallville flashbacks and their mixed messages continue to interrupt the flow of the rest of the movie, and come to a head when we watch Jonathan Kent commit suicide in front of his wife and son after saving a bunch of motorists from a tornado on a highway. Having herded dozens of people toward the safety of a nearby highway overpass, the twister bears down on him, flinging cars like tiddlywinks. He gets his foot caught while saving a dog (of course) and in an extended “moment”, Pa Kent smiles sadly and gives Clark a wave that says “We both know you can save me, but you can’t show these bewildered people what you can do, so just hang back and watch me die.” It’s a ridiculously contrived set-up, and it greatly undermines the performance of the one actor in the film whose emotional power manages to overcome his character’s contradictions. This forced poignancy is further diminished when he continues to pop up in flashbacks. If it’s important enough for him to die in the movie, let him be dead. Don’t just wheel him out to underscore every single moment where the hero needs motivation to do something heroic.
Another father figure who just won’t stay dead is Jor-El. A holographic computer simulation of his consciousness constantly pops up for one-on-one chats with various characters who stick a Kryptonian flash-drive (sent with Kal-El) into Kryptonian technology–most notably a spacecraft frozen in a glacier in the Canadian North (a spacecraft that looks way too H.R. Giger for comfort). Part of an early scouting mission of habitable worlds, this ship crashed and has remained in the ice for thousands of years. Journeyman Clark has somehow found his way into a salvage job that allows him direct access to this alien ship, which will ultimately become his Fortress of Solitude. He finds a port for the flash-drive, and has a chat with his birth father, who shows Clark the backstory we already saw via a kind of liquid metal puppet show, which looks more like something from a Guillermo del Toro movie than Superman. Jor-El gives him the “save the Earthlings” speech, and then hooks him up with his iconic blue and red suit, which is hanging in a closet. Since all of the other Kryptonians we see wear ugly black or mud-brown clothing and armor–some of which remind one of the Engineers in PROMETHEUS–a suit like this being in a closet on a scout spaceship sent to Earth thousands of years before Kal-El was born doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I guess you have to get him in the suit, somehow, right?
Another excellent piece of happenstance involving Clark’s discovery of the spaceship is that Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is there, too! She happens to be doing a story at the crash site, and follows Clark as he sneaks inside! Unfortunately, that’s as plucky as Lois ever gets in this picture. When she presents her story about alien spaceships and a mysterious man saving people from accidents, Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) tells her he won’t print it and potentially ruin her career. Not only does she accept his verdict–she practically slinks out of his office in shame, ultimately giving her story to a news-of-the-weird blogger who breaks it for her. As she has been in previous incarnations, Lois Lane could have been a great source of tension and humor and charm in a movie that could have used more of all three. You would think Amy Adams, who can do ”spunky” and “feisty” in her sleep, would have been perfect for the role, but she plays Lois as such a soft-spoken wuss that it becomes even more ridiculous when she’s later given an all-access pass by the military to interview Superman, and becomes an active combatant in a number of major action sequences. In one silly scene, she blasts her way out of another Kryptonian ship with a gun, Jor-El’s hologram helpfully appearing around every corner to point out immediate danger.
That other Kryptonian ship, of course, belongs to General Zod. Spit out of the Phantom Zone after Krypton was destroyed, Zod and his minions find their way to Earth to capture Kal-El and regain the Codex, which is now part of Superman’s DNA. Zod will need this information if he is to rebuild a Kryptonian civilization. Earth is the perfect place to set up shop–but first, he needs to smoke Superman out. Zod sends out an APB via the world’s television satellites, in multiple Earth languages a Kryptonian probably wouldn’t know, demanding that Kal-El turn himself in. If he doesn’t, Zod is going to wreck stuff. A lot of stuff. Zod loves his fellow Kryptonians, but he is obviously insane. And, isn’t that why you hire Michael Shannon to be in your project? He is the new go-to guy for all of Hollywood’s crazy-goggle-eyed-zealot needs, and he shouts and spits his way through MAN OF STEEL like Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin on bath salts. In his Workin’ Class Joe accent, which sounds more like Hoboken than Krypton, he tells us he’s just trying to save his race–but nothing Shannon says or does makes him an even slightly empathetic villain. Shannon also delivers the film’s biggest groaner: “On Krypton, I was trained to master my senses! Where did you train? ON A FARM?!” Shannon has his place as a character actor, and has given great performances in films like REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and TAKE SHELTER, but in the world of superheroes, I think he’d play better as Ben Grimm in the FANTASTIC FOUR reboot than as a Kryptonian general.
And frankly, I don’t have anything better to say about Henry Cavill’s performance as the titular Man of Steel. He looks good in the role, but he can be a serious over-actor in tense and emotional scenes. Having watched him in a couple of actions roles prior to this, I was already sick of all of the screaming and snarling he does when things get heated. He did it in IMMORTALS, amped it up even further in THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY, and I noticed it over and over again in MAN OF STEEL. Every time he lifts something heavy, punches something, or just gets pissed off, his eyes and neck veins bulge and he bares his teeth and roars like a psychopath. Cavill often tries way too hard to be taken seriously, and I don’t see the requisite charisma that he needs to carry him through the quieter moments in the movie’s flashback-ridden narrative. It was nearly an hour before Christopher Reeve even appeared onscreen in Donner’s first film, and yet you knew instantly what kind of guy he was. And, Reeve’s chemistry with Margot Kidder was off the charts. There isn’t a single genuine spark between Cavill and Adams in any of their interactions, and their sudden pairing is as unbelievable as the Batman/Catwoman romance in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES–just another hoop the characters have to jump through in-between long, tedious scenes of people punching each other through IHOP restaurants and stuff blowing up.
But for Grade-A tedium, nothing beats the climactic action sequence. Zod and his cohorts were conveniently sent into the Phantom Zone with a giant, tentacled terraformer–a machine designed to make other planets more suitable for Kryptonian habitation by increasing their gravity. They drop it somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and place their own tentacled ship on the other side of the world–in Metropolis, of course, even though only a couple of scenes have taken place there. As the machines push and pull energy through the Earth’s core, buildings crumble and cars fly, reducing many city blocks to rubble and ash. Since Zod & Co. have learned in battle that Earth’s weak gravitational pull actually makes them gods on Earth, this seems to be counterproductive, and I have to wonder what effect such a change would have on our Moon. But, Zod never really does anything that makes sense, and neither does Superman. Rather than draw Super-Zod out of the city to avoid more casualties and destruction in their apocalyptic battle, he keeps the fight in Metropolis and engages him in a no-holds-barred free-for-all that goes on and on and on, destroying even more of the city than the terraformer did, and setting the bar for Michael Bay’s next Autobot vs. Decepticon adventure. The damage done is truly jaw-dropping, and how Superman stops Zod is, in my opinion, a complete violation of his character. Zod had to be stopped, no doubt–but not like that.
I suspect most people will love MAN OF STEEL, and those who dislike the movie as much as I do will argue whether it was Snyder’s or Nolan’s influence that was the real problem. Visually, it looks more like a Nolan movie than a Snyder movie; both filmmakers have stated that this is solely Snyder’s vision, but it’s Nolan who gets an actual story credit, and his color schemes abound. And the hit-or-miss (but mostly miss) writing of David S. Goyer cannot be ignored; he has somehow become the William Shakespeare of dark superhero movies, when most of his work has been paper-thin schlock with the bare minimum of characterization. MAN OF STEEL is packed with characters we never really get to know, including its leads. And regardless of who was really in control of the story, in trying to make the world of Superman more “modern” and “real”, the filmmakers have only made it cynical and cold. There are a few jokes and one-liners throughout to lighten things up, but the patchwork Superman at the center of MAN OF STEEL is an outsider by choice, whose only motivation seems to be the goading of his family, friends, enemies and guilty conscience. It’s not a Superman I like, or a Superman I would want to be.
In their interview, Superman tells Lois that the “S” on his chest is a Kryptonian symbol for “hope”. I hope they can make me believe it, next time.
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