It’s really hard to make a good Superman movie. The bar is high, and well-established: Richard Donner’s 1979 Superman the Movie and its 1981 follow-up have, thus far, proven timelessly definitive in a way no other Superman film has been able to touch.
But the biggest problem with tackling such an iconic character–especially when he’s been around for almost a century in countless iterations–is that you will never ever be able to capture everything that makes him resonate with your audience, because my definitive Superman is not necessarily your definitive Superman. Still, there are consistent threads that have defined the character throughout that time, things Superman represents in the larger superhero landscape that matter.
And the overwhelming impression I get from Man of Steel, the latest cinematic reboot of Superman’s origin story that opens in theaters tomorrow, is that someone, somewhere along the line, thought that the core concept of Superman needed to be souped up: made edgier, darker, grittier, more violent, more explosive. Every change in Man of Steel serves that end rather than the story, or even a plausible reboot of the character and continuity.
I’m not saying that superheroes—however iconic—are inviolate, or that it’s never worth shaking up an established character’s defining traits, but when you’re rebooting a character as thoroughly embedded in cultural myth and collective consciousness as Superman, the ends have to justify the means.
That’s the question Man of Steel demands: What do its changes to the character of Superman give us that was missing before? What value does this add?
Not much, as it turns out.
It’s worth noting that there are lots of superhero characters who grit up well. Batman is one of them: He’s a fundamentally dark character with a dark premise, a man whose humanity has been utterly subsumed by his mission. Grim and gritty are part of the Batman base set. But apply the same formula to Superman, and he stops being Superman in any of the ways that matter.
Superman is about hope. In the wrong hands, that casts him as bland; in the right hands, it’s a powerful and poignant statement about what heroism can and should mean. Superman’s all about finding—or, in its absence, being—the light in the darkness. He’s the hero the other heroes look up to, not for his superior power set but for his unflagging decency and compassion. And—no matter how quotable David Carradine was in Kill Bill—the best, most persistently definitive Superman stories are about hishumanity.
This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to tell a dark Superman story, but it takes more nuance than the standard grim and gritty surface treatment. “A story where Superman kills people” isn’t an edgy Superman story; it’s a lazy one, taking the shortest, most obvious path to define this Superman as different from that one. It’s yelling “Look at me! Look how transgressive I am!” so loudly that it distracts the audience from the fact that there’s no actual innovation going on.
In case it’s not obvious from the preceding paragraph, Superman straight-up kills a guy in Man of Steel. He also pretty much commits genocide, or at least heavily and knowingly abets it, although I’m genuinely unsure that the filmmakers realized the latter part, or that they considered it a moral event horizon more significant than—spoiler—snapping the neck of his Kryptonian nemesis, General Zod.
Director Zack Snyder (Watchmen) and screenwriters Christopher Nolan and David Goyer (the Dark Knight film trilogy) can’t seem to wrap their brains around the idea of Man of Steel containing tension without violence, or a meaningful victory based on anything but martial strength. This is surprising from Nolan, but it’s a problem endemic to Snyder’s work, and part of what makes him such a baffling choice to helm this movie: He’s all flash and no substance. This is the guy who felt the need to add rape to a Frank Miller story, and played Rorschach in Watchmen as an unambiguous antihero. (I’m not even going to touch Sucker Punch.) And somebody decided it was a good idea to give him Superman.
Well, they got what they ordered: spectacle and gore at the cost of resonance. Superman’s father, peaceful scientist and politician Jor-El, is replaced with a gunslinging badass who can outgun trained soldiers, and the destruction of Krypton takes a distant backseat to Zod’s abortive, nonsensical rebellion.
Superman’s adoptive Earth-Dad, Jonathan Kent, changes just as dramatically. Remember the dad who was proud of Clark no matter what, who coached him on being a good person and true to who he was, doing what he could to help people?
Remember how crushing it was when he died, and how significant it was that he died of a heart attack—the one thing his son couldn’t have saved him from no matter how hard he could hit or how fast he could fly?
Remember how profoundly human Superman was in that moment of heart-wrenching helplessness?
SUCKER. Heart attacks are for chumps. Spoiler: in Man of Steel, Jonathan Kent is killed by a suitably cinematic tornado, twenty feet from his adopted son, who simply stands by and watches.
Why doesn’t Clark save him? Pa tells him not to, because people are looking. Note: This is the man who is traditionally held up as the source of Superman’s moral code and imperative to heroism. So what kind of a Superman do you get without Jonathan Kent—or, rather, with a Jonathan Kent who raises him with more paranoia than pride, and actually disapproves when Clark risks discovery to rescue a school bus full of kids from drowning?
Well, ideally, you’d get a Superman whose central character conflict was between protecting the world and protecting the people he’s close to, who struggles to overcome his ingrained paranoia. You could get a pretty interesting examination of the question of secret and split identities in the information age.Man of Steel briefly sort of touches on this—I appreciated how quickly Lois Lane was able track down Clark Kent with a mix of basic computer savvy and common sense—but quickly forgets about it, given that it seems unlikely to lead directly to large explosions.
Instead, what you get is a 33-year-old Clark Kent who acts like a petulant teenager because that’s how you make someone edgy.
And still, all of that might be forgivable if Man of Steel were otherwise a well-made movie. It’s not. In the rush to make everything exciting, Snyder has forgotten to make it interesting. There’s very little substance supporting the spectacle, narratively or artistically: it’s like walking up to a building with a beautiful facade, opening the door, and discovering that it’s a theater flat.
There are a few places where Snyder’s spectacles work: Clark, wreathed in flames, breaking down a door to rescue workers on an exploding oil rig, and, of course, the beautiful clothesline flashback we saw in the trailer. He’s got a pretty good eye when he lets himself slow down enough to actually notice the emotional core of a scene—or maybe it’s just that moments with any emotional resonance are rare enough to read as exceptional just by contrast.
But more often, Snyder is so profoundly enamored of his visual effects that he derails the progression of the story over and over to linger on them, like a kid holding guests hostage as he exhaustively explains the contents of his toy chest. The fight scenes were so long that I stopped caring who won—I just wanted them to be over. Ditto, lovingly-shot sequences of Superman flying, and then changing the position of his arms, and then flying some more, and then flying toward the camera, and then flying past the camera, and then flying toward the camera again.
This is a two-and-a-half hour movie with 90 minutes of plot, which may go a way toward explaining whyMan of Steel is riddled with novice-level continuity and timeline errors, like an evidently weeks-long montage that, based on surrounding events, can’t take place over more than a day, and Kryptonian technology that has gone virtually unchanged over 18,000 years.
This isn’t just bad writing; it’s also an unforgivable waste of talent, because Man of Steel, for all its many flaws, is very, very well cast. For the most part, the acting is fantastic—under different circumstances, Henry Cavill and Amy Adams might even have given Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder a run for their money—but the ham-handed direction and abysmal script don’t leave them a lot to work with.
Lois Lane is by far the worst victim here. She starts out wonderful, scintillating and fearless, every bit the intrepid reporter, but by the end, she’s mostly been relegated to looking skyward while her hair blows dramatically in the wind, punctuated by occasional bouts of acute peril. She gets a brief reprieve in the form of a pretty cool action scene, and a genuinely lovely bit of closing dialogue, but it’s too little and far, far too late.
Man of Steel hasn’t killed Superman or ruined Superman. It doesn’t erase the iconic versions of the character, nor change what he can represent. It hasn’t retroactively destroyed your childhood or mine. All that good stuff is still there: the first two Christopher Reeve movies, the three-part premiere of the 1996 animated series, the adaptation of All-Star Superman, any episode of Justice League, or even the old Fleischer cartoons.
SOURCE: Wired.com
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