Directed by Zach Snyder
Starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe, Morpheus, Antje Traue, Diane Lane, Kevin Cosner, and Christopher Elephantdick Meloni
** MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**
I was super excited for the new Superman. That’s
saying something. That carries more clout that fanboy mouth-frothing, because I’ve
never had any interest in the character, the movies, the comics, etc. I think
Superman is boring, both in the cape and the eyeglasses. For me to be excited
about this movie speaks to my faith in Chris Nolan, Zach Snyder (who I’m more
willing to defend than most), and David S. Goyer, and the effective marketing
campaign preceding the film’s release.
In addition to the strong production team behind this
feature, Man of Steel benefitted from the bar being set at an all-time low. There hasn’t been a good
Superman movie in 35 years and the last attempt, 2006’s abysmal Superman Returns, was, as Kevin Smith so
gloriously put it, ‘the whiny emo version of Superman where Superman doesn’t
even throw a punch.’ From the get-go, it seemed pretty hard to fuck this up,
but I guess Zach Snyder is the type of guy who really relishes a challenge
because he fucks this one up hard.
The film is an origin story. It opens with the
crumbling of Krypton. The planet’s advanced and hyper-regimented civilization has
taxed natural resources beyond reason, but the Kryptonian elders refuse to
admit fault or take necessary steps to preserve what remains. As the abidingly
patriotic General Zod (Michael Shannon) stages a coup, warrior/senator Jor-El
(Russell Crowe) defies the government by having a natural-born son and sending
that progeny in a capsule bound for Earth along with Krypton’s digital
archives. Jor-El gives his life to protect his son’s escape and, he feels, the
survival of his civilization.
Flash-forward 33 years and Kal-El (Henry Cavill) has
been raised in Kansas as Clark Kent, now wandering the Earth, keeping a low
profile, and using his Kryptonian superpowers to rescue people. Before long,
though, Zod comes looking for him and Krypton’s ‘codex,’ stopping at nothing to
reclaim what he feels is the final hope for rebuilding the home he swore to
defend. Clark now has to choose sides between his Kryptonian blood and his
adoptive planet, the fate of which hangs in the balance.
I understand that you don’t have all day and there are
about 230,000 things I don’t like about this movie, so let me just (for now)
highlight the most important ones.
The film’s core failing is Zack
Snyder not understanding how human beings work. If you’re going to make a movie
focusing on an alien, and the crux of his character arc is finding or defining
his humanity, then you should probably understand how human beings work. There’s
an early scene wherein Clark gets into a rowdy bar dispute trying to protect a
female colleague from harassment. He gets a beer poured over him; he shows
restraint while the crowd looks on. The problem: the crowd includes two CF
soldiers. There is no universe in which two CF guys in uniform don’t come between a trucker and the waitress he’s
sexually harassing. I promise you that.
Then there’s a scene where Clark reveals to his aged
mother Martha (Diane Lane) that he uncovered relics from Krypton’s past and
knows a bit more about his family history. She gets emotional and starts
crying. He just chuckles (a bit condescendingly, I thought) and says ‘Aw,
shucks, no worries Ma’, I’m still your son.’ Or some shit like that. As an only
son who loves his mother, I can tell you when your mom starts to cry, you start
to cry too. That is hard-wired. To simply laugh that shit off means you’re a
sociopath. Seriously.
Later still, Zod’s spacecraft lifts off out of the
desert in front of a company of soldiers and FBI agents. The craft’s propulsion
turbines kick up a giant dust cloud and not
one of the dudes covers his face with his hand. They may as well be like:
 |
| I love you, sand! Come into my eyes, sand! |
It’s fair to argue that these are minor points and
that I’m nitpicking. I bring them up for two reasons. First, I don’t want to
re-hash the same comments that other critics have made, so I probe a bit deeper.
Second, at fear of sounding like a broken record, if you’re going to make a
movie about a dude discovering his humanity, you need to populate that movie
with flesh-and-blood humans. Real people, not robots. The devil is in the
details and they need to ring true, no more or less than the major arcs. Every
character in this movie behaves like a robot except for Christopher Meloni, who
fuckin rules shit.
The film’s second fatal flaw is its failure to capitalize
on one of its most interesting plot points: the existential dichotomy between Superman
and Zod. MoS sets it up brilliantly:
it posits Superman as the first natural, non-engineered Kryptonian birth in
centuries (hence, the first in centuries to have a blank slate and agency in
the course of his life), and Zod as a guy who was designed and programmed to be
the guardian of his civilization, which is now on the brink of extinction.
Right there, you have a template for one of the most profound moral and philosophical
explorations of free will and utilitarianism in the entire superhero canon. It
gets tread over for a cumulative three minutes, maybe. Superman = good; Zod =
bad, they punch each other, guess who wins. Such waste.
My third quarrel is with the actual punching. The
action in this movie sucks huge amounts of camel dick. I read a great
review that described action as consequence. Action is made meaningful by
the audience’s emotional investment in the characters and genuine concern that
they are at risk. As per point one, none of these people are actual humans so
your investment is zero. The only minute of action in this movie that made my
dick even remotely hard was when Meloni survives his helicopter being shot
down, escapes the wreckage, and fires about 50 rounds point-blank at Kryptonian
baddie Faora (Antje Traue). Upon seeing the bullets bounce off her like Nerf
darts, Meloni practically fuckin YAWNS, pulls out a buck knife, and stands up
all like: ‘Alright let’s dance, E.T.’
 |
| 'Hope you brought your A-game, 'cause I trained at Fort Yolo, motherfucker.' |
I care about this
dude. Meloni for President. Klingons would surrender to this fuckin
guy. They should have made the movie about Meloni and called it Balls of Steel. People would watch that
movie and care about the action, not because things explode hugely, but because the risk of him being injured or
superkilled is significant and because you are moved by his courage and
selflessness in the face of danger and death. That is what humanity is about.
Zach Snyder clearly slept through the day in film
school when students were taught that action doesn’t have to be huge to be meaningful. Neo fights Agent
Smith three times in the Matrix trilogy.
Which is the best one? Subway in the first movie, right? Yet it covers the
least physical space, has the least FX, and is the shortest in duration. It is
the best because Neo is mortal (makes emotional stakes higher), the buildup to
it is superbly executed, and it carries weight and resonance in the scope of
the movie – it is more about Neo overcoming his own self-doubt than it is about
him defeating a computer-generated bad guy.
In a single sentence, MoS spends its two-hour running time shouting ‘LOOK AT ME’ without
delivering something worthy of attention other than the shouting itself. It
paints itself as a dark, brooding, character study but achieves at none of
these things.
