: Man of Steel
Director: Zack Snyder
Boy, am I befuddled by this movie. I’m a Snyder fan and hoped he’d finally give me the Superman I’ve wanted. Unfortunately, I really hated this film. I’ve been wrestling with why I not only didn’t like it, but actually despised it. That’s the puzzle, because there is a lot of good.
The cast is great. Henry Cavill is wonderful as Superman, and Amy Adams, despite seemingly being miscast, was a great Lois Lane. Everyone is good. The special effects are fantastic. A lot of the action is well-done. Many aspects of the reboot are wonderful. I liked learning more about Krypton and getting to see more of it than just it blowing up. The serious tone of the movie is good. The flashbacks to key points in Clark’s childhood is good. There’s a lot of good writing. Even Snyder’s direction is good, and much restrained from his stylistic excesses of 300 and Sucker Punch.
But none of it worked for me.
A good metaphor is imagine that you go away for a few weeks and when you return home, all your furniture has been rearranged. A few pieces have disappeared and others replaced with different versions. It would be frustrating, right? That’s the way this movie felt to me.
It’s basically the classic Superman origin story… but different. It’s choppily presented. Details are changed. New stuff is added for no reason. Throughout the first half of the film I kept getting more and more annoyed and depressed. It seemed at every turn the writers wanted to change things just a little bit, but for no clear reason. Tons of details are left unexplained. A few are presented later, which was good, but far too late, because by that time my sour mood’s already been set.
Let me give one example of this. It’s a minor spoiler, so don’t read if you hate any kind of spoiler, but trust that this is a tiny point in the whole film. The film opens with Kal-El being born. We’re later told that this is the first “natural” birth on Krypton in hundreds of years. Apparently babies are normally genetically engineered with nothing left to chance. Now I liked this detail. That’s a terrific concept and an excellent example of Krypton’s self-corruption that contributes to their civilization’s downfall. But the way this concept is presented is ham-handed. We’re first shown the birth with no context. We aren’t aware that it’s anything special. We later are told it’s the first natural birth, and it’s hinted that this is in brave defiance of the laws of Krypton. That’s a wonderful conflict with great drama. But nothing is done with that. It’s just verbal exposition.
While I was watching the film my instinct is screaming at me, “Why not use that drama? Why not show this conflict? Show us Jor-El and his wife sneaking off to have a baby in secret. Show her terror that someone will find out and take her baby away. Show them as rebels, taking a stand against their government though it may cost them dearly. Why not make them heroic and brave?”
Instead, this film just verbally tells us about the event after it happened. There’s no drama, no suspense, no rebellion, no nothing.
That’s the way this entire film is handled. There are hints of greatness: Clark Kent working as an ordinary laborer, hiding his super powers, and refusing to fight bullies and reveal his powers. That’s wonderful stuff, but it’s treated as an afterthought, scarcely worthy of our attention. (All totaled, his migrant worker scenes are probably no more than one minute of screen time.)
So many other things are similarly dealt with: the childhood flashbacks often feel rushed and incomplete, mere tokens of melodrama rather than heartful emotional memories; the entirety of the alien spaceship discovery, from the military presence to Lois Lane wandering off on her own to follow Clark, is full of odd, missing elements and skips of logic; the aliens threats to earth and greeted as fact with no evidence to back them up — wouldn’t the nations’ governments demand proof of the aliens’ superior weaponry before capitulating so easily?
Then we get to plot holes and illogic. Those are my pet peeves in films, and here there are too many to count. Here are just a few (and they might contain spoilers):
Despite Krypton about to explode, the bad guys are not killed, and the planet uses a space ship to send them into fantom space (sort of a black hole). Should the space ship be used to, uh, evacuate people? Seems an odd use of precious resources. Why not keep them on the planet so they can die with everyone else? Why save a handful of murders when millions of innocent citizens are left on Krypton to die?
We’re told that Superman’s “S” logo is a symbol that means “hope” in Krypton. So why is the bad guy wearing the same symbol?
How do both Clark Kent and Lois Lane just happen to know how to use the “Superman key” to activate the Kryptonian computer? It didn’t look anything like an earth key, yet both seemed to know just how to use it.
Superman’s outfit — tights and cape — are apparently left by his father. Huh? He planned on Clark being a super hero? And how did he know what size outfit to leave? Kal-El was a tiny baby when he last saw him. How did he happen to know the exact height and weight Clark would be when he found the spaceship?
There’s no explanation given for Jor-El’s re-appearance after he’s dead — we’re not even told if he’s a hologram — and both Clark and Lois show little surprise at his presence or even seem to question his being there or wonder how he can answer questions and interact with them.
If the bad guys have the tech to display their own broadcast and override our entire planet’s TV signals, then why is their video so staticy with a crappy picture? (Bonus idiocy: the woman who explains that the aliens did their global interruption via RSS feeds. Huh?)
How do Jor-El and General Zod and the other Kryptonians all speak English?
How did Clark shave? He starts out the film heavily bearded and ends clean-shaven. Did he have a special Kryptonian razor? Wouldn’t an earth razor just break when he tried to use it?
Why does Superman’s cape flutter in the “wind” when he’s in outer space?
That’s just the beginning, of course. There are hundreds more, but you get the idea. The film is swiss cheese with plot holes and filled with utter nonsense.
I really hate it when the writers have to resort to making the superhero’s opposition being super-powerful just like him. It feels forced and artificial. Granted, it’s hard to make an action film without a powerful antagonist, but a much stronger story could involve Clark trying to protect his friends, save the human race, or wrestling with moral dilemmas. The true agony of a super-being is that despite all his might, he cannot save everybody.
Instead we have two equally indestructible forces battling which is just boring, since we know the eventual outcome. I dozed off during the grand battle, it was so tedious.
Yet despite my distaste for the film, it’s far better than Superman Returns which was really bad. I liked many things that were attempted with this film, but the whole just didn’t fit together for me. It felt disjointed, a patchwork of a story. Very disappointing and a tragic waste of potential.
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