Movie Review: ‘MAN OF STEEL’

I’ve come to realize I’m really alone.  I think I may be one of the only people who actually liked and respected Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns.  I liked the look and feel of the film.  I thought Brandon Routh was a fine casting choice and gave a solid performance.  But let’s be real; the concept of taking the established world that Richard Donner created 20 years prior and resuming it as if no time has passed was mind numbingly stupid.  How did studio executives think that this was a good idea, let alone a profitable idea?  There’s nothing interesting about Superman being challenged by a bald, corrupt business mogul, so why try it again?  Lex Luthor has become a formidable foe in other incarnations and adaptations of Supes, but never has he been even close to menacing with Gene Hackman or Kevin Spacey hamming it up.  And Kryptonite??  Kryptonite is boring, and the results are always the same.  What’s been the thing that’s interesting to me about Superman is his god complex. What I’ve always wanted to see was the Man of Steel to take on those who are physically formidable as well as mentally challenging.  If you’ve felt the same, I have good news for you:  Man of Steel is the Superman film that you have always wanted.

This is a reboot film in every sense of the term, a ground zero landscape to build from.  We revisit Krypton on the verge of destruction and we see Jar-El send his newborn son Kal-El to earth.  We see Kal, now known as Clark, growing up as a man with no home.  We see him learning lessons from the Kents that “adopted” him.  We see him performing “miracles” and exposing himself to a world that he’s always known wouldn’t understand him.  All of this retread material is a bit tiresome, but such is the way of an origin story that’s needless and has been explored to death.  On the plus side, there are some exciting sequences during this, but it’s not until Clark puts on the suit left for him by Jar-El that things really pick up.  The heavy here is General Zod and his crew of Kryptonian outlaws, banished to the negative zone by their own people and resurfaced hovering over earth.  Kal-El holds the key to building a new Krypton, and Zod wants to have Krypton’s last son join them.  Zod means well and wants to rebuild their homeland, but he imagines doing so by using earth as a starting point.  His demand is for Kal-El to surrender himself or humanity will pay the price.  Of course, either way humanity is extinct.  Chaos ensues, including the absolute highlight smack dab in the middle of the movie: a massive battle in Smallville between the military, 2 of Zod’s heavy hitters, and the newly monikered Superman.  This scene is an incredible set piece of mass destruction, the kind which we’ve only seen in animated Superman adventures, and it’s reminiscent of Superman 2…just about 100 times bigger.  It’s very difficult for the film to top this no matter how hard it tries.  Though the final, inevitable battle between Zod and Superman is fairly thrilling it feels anti-climactic by comparison to what preceded it.  Nevertheless, the action is absolutely on point.

Henry Cavill is perfect, physically and in terms of defining Superman.  Amy Adams is a nice Lois Lane choice, but the two actors don’t have much in the way of chemistry.  That may not be entirely their fault though.  Zack Snyder is hot off the heels of Sucker Punch, which I absolutely loathed, so expectations were quite curbed when I discovered he was directing this.  The bad news is that Snyder has no clue how to direct actors to be serious without making it unintentionally comical.  There’s zero chemistry that he was able to squeeze out between any two characters, and with Superman and Lois Lane that’s a big deal.  Part of this is due to the script, but fault can’t be entirely blamed on the writing; a good director can make something great from what ISN’T in a script.  So while he still doesn’t quite know how to properly handle drama, his action direction is fantastic.  Everything is huge, everything gets destroyed, and there’s not a slow down-speed up fight in the entire thing – Snyder’s adopted and overused a digital zoom effect instead, but it’s not nearly as eye rolling.  Also of major strength is Hans Zimmer’s bombastic, inspiring soundtrack.  John Williams’ iconic Superman score is so impossibly hard to top, and Zimmer manages to completely eclipse it.  Goosebump moments came from hearing samples prior to seeing the film, and it’s really incredible in context.

The script is where a lot of problems unfortunately keep Man of Steel from being a genuinely great film.  The writing team of David S Goyer and Jonathan Nolan successfully rebuilt and retooled Batman into a deeply conflicted hero, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for Superman as well.  While they managed to get the characters right they forgot to patch all the leaky holes in the boat, which seems to be a habit (with Goyer at least).  Errors of logic abound such as why the Kryptonians banished Zod and company while their planet was on the verge of destruction, how Lois Lane is a globetrotting, action reporter who inexplicably is writing for a newspaper, and why Clark doesn’t act heroically at a crucial time of need.  Though we never see human death, the toll of the chaos that occurs is likely in the hundreds of thousands range, which seems rather contrary to what Superman is fighting for, and none of it is paid any mind.  Most blaring errors are massive gaps of time which are unexplained, and this deeply hampers any chance of believing of a real connection between Lois and Clark.  There are also numerous jumps into flashbacks for no particular reason in the story other than to further explain what we already know.  These are the exact same problems detractors complained about with Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, most notably The Dark Knight Rises.  It ends up at times feeling extremely rushed, as if the action needs to happen sooner or the audience will get bored.  If anything, Warner, Snyder, and the writers were determined NOT to make the same mistakes they did last time.  Instead they made entirely new ones.  What’s strange is that they nailed the characters so well and yet paid so little attention to making this an original affair.  There’s nothing we haven’t seen in a Superman film before, and unlike Christopher Reeves and Margot Kidder’s warm, glowing relationship at the core of the first two Superman films, this ends up feeling soulless and empty of any sense of humanity. Call it a missed opportunity to make Superman more relatable, as there’s nothing human enough in the film to relate him to.

Conflicted as I am, I really did enjoy the movie.  Though it’s definitely not without it’s faults, Man of Steel certainly delivers on what fans have wanted to see for decades – Superman kicking major ass.  It’s pure Summer entertainment, and not much more, but there’s a good story, and Man of Steel sets up for future conflicts in a fairly well established world.  The film is topped with a little hint by way of a Lexcorp truck demolished during a throw down toward the end.  Whether DC and Warner Brothers can actually follow in Marvel’s gigantic footprints and build a cohesive world between their characters, which will ultimately end up with a Justice League film, remains to be seen.  There’s no hint toward anybody but Superman being in this universe, but it’s not impossible.  After the dismal Green Lantern, which they’ll likely abandon and pretend didn’t exist, and a grounded in reality Batman story that not only wouldn’t fit in, but has a definitive ending, it’s been hard gaining traction toward a grand scheme.  Man of Steel is a decent first step, but Snyder and company have a lot of work cut out for them.  There’s a big Steel man here, but DC hasn’t found its Iron Man yet.