3 out of 5

Director: Zack Snyder

It’s a tough franchise.  While I don’t disagree with the reviews that this is a ‘modernized’ Superman, in that it’s bigger and louder and his outfit isn’t bright blue and red, he’s still a boyscout who can survive almost anything.  It’s what helped to make the comic, initially, an icon, but while movies might now be catching up to the brooding hero trend, DC and Marvel have been re-pitching their friendly characters in heavier scenarios (with beards, with survivor’s guilt, etc.) for a few decades now.  And you could argue that Superman will always get top billing on the comic racks because he’s one of those original ‘names,’ and not so much because of what goes on in his stories.  Every fan-favorite writer who’s taken a crack at the book has either gone for some kind of Golden Age reverence (which is what you could argue Bryan Singer tried to do with his Supes movie) or to give the book muscle by splattering it with blood or realism.  Through it all, despite definitely having readers who will say one arc is better than another, I don’t feel there’s been a definitive ‘you must read this.’  Because you cannot push too far outside of the basic template of Superman being a boyscout who can survive almost anything.  His battles will be massive to compensate.  Or you give him a foil like Luther who cannot be beaten with a punch.

But we just had Luther a few years ago, and where ‘Man of Steel’ does join in with recent trends is that it wants to be a reboot, not a sequel.  So we need to cover what makes Supes into the hero he is.  And this is where you get the meat for good filmstuffs, because that is a very human story, at the very core of what most go through at some point and in some form – feeling alienated and deciding what, in our lives, is worth living or fighting for.

‘Man of Steel’ thus gives us a slow and steady build-up to the donning of the suit, taking to the skies, and to smashing things.  We start on Krypton.  We must provide believable, modern-world reasons for savvy viewers who question everything as to why this alien planet is falling apart, why only this child is being sent away, why military leader Zod is so angry, why he would return to Earth to find Kal-El – Superman – so many years later.  And Goyer and Nolan and Snyder do their best to ground it all, and give Krypton a sense of alien reality and make it important, but it’s a tough franchise.  Batman and Iron Man’s origins are exciting because they must go through the paces to become who they are.  We can skip all the basics with Captain America ’cause he was in ice for all this growing up stuff and the Hulk’s drama is built in because he’s running away from himself.  Beating this horse, though: Supes, as we are shown through frequent flashbacks to different points of his childhood, always had the will and the way to do the right thing.  Only Pa Kent’s warnings that he will be seen as an outcast prevents him from becoming Superboy.

I was expecting the pacing (for all the blabber mentioned above – it’s the only way to balance a film so it’s not all loud sounds), but Krypton’s majesty and world-building has trouble making an impact because budgets allow us to create such worlds on TV now.  The creature design and architecture all have a consistent sense of design, and I will say that the beginning 20 minutes of pre-Earthness did not feel just like scene-setting shots – I did feel a sense of scope and space.  Just to say that all the light flares and fancy garb have a tough time causing awe in an era where a commercial runs for a video game as part of the trailers and the game looks every bit as stunning as an upcoming billion-dollar blockbuster.

The rocket is launched, Earth comes into view, and now Clark is a wanderin’ man searching for his past, flitting back to memories of his youth.  Which are generally good sequences, driving home that it’s a decision to use his powers.  An important crux to define.

He finds his past… and here the film stumbles.  It’s time to move on, the filmmakers know, meaning side characters now can be shuttled into roles as cogs or wrenches in the machine that is the battle-to-be, though by film’s end the whole thing’s been spruced up and well-oiled – BECAUSE HE’S A FUCKING BOYSCOUT AND WE ALL LOVE HIM.

What’s the takeaway here?  That it’s a tough franchise, and I think this crew did the best they could to structure the material in a way to make it resonate.  Henry Cavill was an excellent choice for Superman, both in look and in his believability as a humble god.  I don’t think the rest of the cast gets much time to really show if they carry weight in their roles (even Lois), but none of them felt out of place in their parts.  Snyder’s capturing of the film felt, frankly, without much personality, taking a back seat to the myth instead of trying to force a Snyder hand ontop of things.  Which is respectful, but Batman felt like a Nolan movie, and Man of Steel felt mostly like a blockbuster.  The best moments are the quiet ones, where Clark / Kal / Superman contemplates the world and Snyder can cast Kansas or the arctic (or wherever that was) in his stylized sensibilities.  Now that the film is out, the reviews have been surprisingly lacking in mentioning that the film is completely without Zack’s criticized slow-mo technique, which was a smart move.  I like the technique, so not for that reason, but because the tone made it not needed.  We’re not trying to make Superman cool, we’re trying to ground him.  And slowing things down to 1/10 speed or whatever and dodging bullets or flying through obstacles… well, it wouldn’t have fit.  But the big and loud action sequences are mostly just big and loud.  Full-scale destruction is as common as the CGI world-building.  What’s better are the chaotic fist-fights.  Those had me on the edge of my seat, wowed, at flipping between character shots and computer modeled people getting tossed around and slammed to the ground.  Those did carry power.  Regarding the score, Hans gets a thanks for not using the loud blasting sting that he helped make the ‘score to use’ technique for the past few years, but again, the best moments are the quiet ones.  The subtler themes, when Clark is just taking to the skies, or coming around to a realization, are quite beautiful and call back just enough of the original themes.  But as soon as things get loud and proud, the music becomes less definable (we can’t do the discordant sounds of Batman, all must be harmony) and mixes in with the bashing and smashing.

Besides some of the plot-skipping nuances, the only real problem I had here was with the massive amount of wreckage cause during the battles.  Thrown through / flying through / dragged across buildings, Superman and Zod wreck seemingly all of Smallville and Metropolis.  I accept that there wasn’t much choice – Zod’s troops are on the ground and you can only do a “throw ’em into space and punch ’em” move so often – but there could’ve been some appreciated dramatics with Superman at least showing concern for all the people he probably killed when he took a shortcut through floor 17 of that building, but, nope.  We get one sentence telling people on the street to “get inside, it’s not safe” before Superman wrecks all the buildings on either side.  But maybe it’s just a Smallville / Metropolis thing, ’cause Laurence Fishburne’s Perry White seems to suffer from the same syndrome, only concerned about the safety of, seemingly, two of his employees (oddly the only ones with any face-recognizing screentime, hm).

Should you see it?  Honestly?  Yes.  It is an event, and you should form an opinion on it.  It’s too easy to experience at home.  You should sit for two and a half hours and get the full effect, because everyone tried, and they didn’t fail, they just fought a tough battle.  Maybe they didn’t win by a lot, or maybe they tied, but they made it to the end, and that’s worth it to see.