I saw Zack Snyder’s new Superman movie over twenty four hours ago, and I’m still struggling to sort out my feelings.
I saw Zack Snyder’s new Superman movie over twenty four hours ago, and I’m still struggling to sort out my feelings. The movie had a lot I walked away enjoying, a lot I walked away hating, and a lot that I found hard to categorize. It had moments of brilliance, moments of stupidity, and a strange lack of emotion. The ensuing mess of thoughts I had after watching it made my head a complete mess. It made my head a jumble of opinions, emotions, thoughts, hypothesizes, questions and more. Then I read some other reviews and my thoughts turned into a fucking jungle. I had to sit down and nail out these unwieldy thoughts; burning down the forest, mining for the rough ores, then refining them into actual sentences worth sharing. Both my emotional reaction and my critical one required separate, heavy, pondering. I think I’ve almost shaped it into its final form, which looks something like this: Man of Steel was a passable superhero movie and a terrible Superman movie.
Superman is just as mortal as Batman; the scale of the villains just needs to be different.
I was never a Superman fan. I always found the character bland, always considered him inherently challenging to write; the standard thoughts on the character really. Recently I’ve realized these thoughts are dumb. Is Superman super strong? Does he have to be threatened through his friends; important secondary characters who you know aren’t going to die? Does he refuse to kill people, which could be considered corny and unrealistic? Sure. Do you know who else that list applies to? The goddamn Batman. Just because Superman isn’t grim and gritty doesn’t make Batman inherently more realistic. And don’t give me the “he’s human” argument. Superman is just as mortal as Batman; the scale of the villains just needs to be different. The comic that helped me realize my Superman-related opinions were dumb? All-Star Superman, quite possibly my favorite comic ever. All-Star, for a director approaching the character, is a kind of Holy Grail. It embraces everything “problematic” about Superman and makes it work. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Superman is idealized, immortal, silly, fun, everything people say makes Superman “dumb.” And it’s beautiful. It’s stunningly effective, and horribly sad when compared to Man of Steel. There’s a scene in that book where Superman talks a suicidal woman away from the ledge with a few kind words. The Superman Snyder, Goyer, and Henry Cavill create would never do that. And that’s a disturbingly cynical way of approaching a character that’s meant to inspire the best in us.
By @Llyw on twitter: “There is no Man of Steel criticism more stark than the fact that Earth would have been better off had Kal-El died on Krypton.”
The film is stunning in its wrong-headed approach to the character. Its best moments are consistently flash-backs; the interactions between Jonathan Kent and a young Clark are wonderful. The tornado scene was brilliant, just brilliant. But they were all concerned with the character in the wrong way. The film seemed wholly concerned with addressing one question: how people would respond when Clark reveals himself to the world. This is a potentially interesting aspect of Superman’s origin, but it should not be the only one explored. And Superman never really got to make this choice. Anyone who thinks he actually had a choice to make missed the part where the movie plainly (like all the dialogue, which was very on-the-nose) stated that Clark was “as much a child of earth as Krypton.” Zod told him to give himself up to spare earth. Superman actively cares about at least two people who would die in the promised disaster. He doesn’t really decide to protect earth; he just decides to save the people he loves. The thing is: Superman loves everyone. Every, single, person on this planet. In the Man of Steel Superman only occasionally saves people when they are sort of within arm’s reach. Superman (barely) decides to save the earth, and he never decides to protect it. The movie never even answers its own question, making it very unsatisfying. The film never explores why Superman wants to do superhero things, it’s just an assumption he will. So in a situation where the pros of appearing obviously outweigh the cons (the earth already knows there are aliens of there) it completely counters any attempt at deriving tension from this question. A great example of a film avoiding this kind of thing is Batman Begins, which never addresses if Batman will do Batman things; instead it explores his moral lines, how much of his personal life he will sacrifice, and the nature of fear. Man of Steel on the other hand bases everything on a question the audience not only knows the answer to but also gets forced upon the main character. It’s a strange approach to the character and it affects everything. Take when Superman first puts on the suit for example. He wears his costume for no real emotional reason. His dead father gives it to him and tells him to test himself. That’s it. Wouldn’t it have been a hundred times more powerful if that moment was when Superman decided to help humanity, not from any specific threat, but as a whole? Wouldn’t that have been the more pertinent decision? Or that decision should be so inherently obvious, so blatantly the only way Clark Kent would act, that they should’ve focused on something else that actually had the potential for drama. Instead they create the illusion of a decision and decide to ignore the most important aspect of the character, the part where he does good deeds.
Man of Steel feels devoid of compassion, devoid of joy, and devoid of consequences.
The problem with the actual plot of the story was neatly summed up by @Llyw on twitter: “There is no Man of Steel criticism more stark than the fact that Earth would have been better off had Kal-El died on Krypton.” The vast scale of the destruction feels like something straight out of a Warren Ellis comic. I kept expecting the giant mushroom monster from Supergod to wander out of the rubble. In fact I was reminded of this line from Supergod: “the compression wave caused by their first exchange of blows would have imploded the eyes of anyone in a one-mile radius.” Except in Man of Steel there are people around. The destruction was so extreme it made me seriously question Superman’s morality. Building after building crumbled, killing, at the very least, thousands of people. And Superman is nowhere to be seen. Not once are we given any reason to believe Superman cares about the citizens of Metropolis. We aren’t shown that many actual deaths, but there are a few, enough to know the city is full of people. People are getting crushed, burnt, and blown apart. I couldn’t help but think of a panel from Watchmen. The one where two people, in their final moments, share an embrace as they turn to ash. I hate to sound melodramatic, or manipulative, but there is no other way to interpret that scene. Children, families, people, are being killed. Where is Superman? Dicking around in the Indian Ocean. And because Superman seems largely unconcerned with the death toll on his hands, the ending, and those who’ve seen the film will know exactly what I mean, feels particularly false. Man of Steel feels devoid of compassion, devoid of joy, and devoid of consequences. Thousands of people die and most audience members will care as little as Superman seems to.
Either the actors, or the script, failed to sell the Lois-Clark relationship.
Even divorcing my emotional response, my associations with the character, and my distaste for the direction the movie opted for; I found little to redeem it. The best beats came from a series of flashbacks that, at about the halfway point, stop being relevant. The characterization comes to a grinding stand-still in exchange for punches. The plot itself felt a little wooden. Superman’s battle with the World Engine was boring and too long. The movie has moments that are breathtaking; the aforementioned tornado scene, the wonderful (if hugely problematic) action, and the cast all come to mind. The script, however, was crude and simplistic, and the cast wasn’t given much to do. Either the actors, or the script, failed to sell the Lois-Clark relationship. Only Cavill and Michael Shannon get a chance to really shine. Mainly little story beats show off the talented cast; Cavill’s smile is perfect (just hidden in the film’s gloom), Lois Lane’s (Amy Adams) little smile when she thinks she’s avoided the FBI does more for her character than any dick-joke could, if Perry White (or the Daily Planet) had been even remotely relevant to the plot I’m sure Laurence Fishburne would have been great. Unfortunately for the film all these moments and actors were completely lost to the unwieldy script. (There were a lot of changes to the origin, and shots, meant to highlight the Superman as Christ metaphor, which I found annoying. And it’s just a dumb comparison.) It’s no coincidence the best scene in the movie is a wordless beat; David S. Goyer is much better at plotting films than he is scripting them. His films seem to live or die on the shoulders of his collaborators. Nolan’s plotting doesn’t appear to be as flawed as Goyer’s writing; which fails to sell or connect the larger story beats. The movie does look pretty, so there’s that?
Ultimately the movie, purely as a movie, is just okay. As a Superman movie it’s terrible. The sad part is none of the story beats had to be so ineffective; it was the actual scripting that broke this movie that completely tainted the character they were supposedly adapting. The entire thing felt wrong-headed, joyless, and crude. It took some great moments, some great action, a great cast, and solid ideas and assembled them all wrong. It’s like someone carved these beautiful wooden legs for a table, then let someone else put them on with superglue, and they put them on crooked. I said earlier I couldn’t imagine Man of Steel’s Superman acting as purely good as All-Star’s Superman and I’ll stand by it. In fact, I’ll go further: the thought of All-Star’s Superman behaving like Zack Snyder’s is literally saddening. Imagine that smiling, altruistic Superman winning a fight the same way Man of Steel’s Superman does. This isn’t Miracleman: the Movie. A Superman who doesn’t seem to want to help people isn’t Superman, and the movie never convinces me its approach is any good at all. I can immediately think of fifteen Superhero movies I’d take over Man of Steel. Movies with worse casts. Movies with vastly inferior visuals. Movies with vastly inferior action. Movies with better scripts, satisfying plots, and that stay truer to their source characters. Man of Steel, from an objective standpoint, is, at best, a B Minus. At best. From a personal standpoint? I have very little interest in seeing it again. Maybe the sequel will redeem some of these flaws, but I won’t make the mistake of going in hopeful next time.
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Posted on June 21st, 2013
Category: RAMBLINGS FROM THE THIRD WALL
Tags: Clark Kent, DC Comics, Harry Edmundson, Lois Lane, Man of Steel review, Ramblings from the third wall, Superman, Zack Snyder, Zod