philosoraptor42 | The Best Things About "Man of Steel" Are The Effects And Kevin Costner... Characters? Not So Much...

Man of Steel (2013)

I was not really terribly interested in seeing "Man Of Steel" until I saw a clop from one of the fight sequences on Youtube. there's a female evil Kryptonian working for the villainous General Zod who seems kind of cool and we get to see her throw Superman through a series of buildings, only finally stopping when he hits a reinforced safe door. I found the way the speed, strength and brutality of these extraterrestrial immortals was portrayed so beautiful and exciting that the cheesy yet well-delivered lines in that scene failed to put me off. I felt disinclined to miss the film, especially considering that I don't always agree with the popular opinion on films. (And heck, opinions aren't wholly negative. While only 56% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked the film, it has a score of 7.4 on IMDB right now.)

Another reason why I was interested is because of the director Zack Snyder. I've generally enjoyed most films of his I've seen. I think "300" is beautiful and engaging even if a little silly and I love everything besides the Queen of Sparta scenes in that movie. I actually prefer Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" remake to the original (which I've always felt was by far the worst paced of Romero's initial zombie trilogy). On top of that, I think the director's cut of "Watchmen" is one of my favourite superhero movies of all time (even if this genre isn't exactly brimming with masterpieces). So overall I've been a bit of a Zack Snyder fan and the only films of his I haven't seen are the cartoon about warrior owls ("Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole") and the glorified music video ("Suckerpunch").

As I sat down to watch "Man of Steel" I had mixed feelings about the opening. On the one hand, Krypton is now a fantasy wonderland with "Dark Crystal"-esque animals wandering around and some liquid metal technology all over the place. It's fairly pretty, but Krypton ends up feeling less like less a mysterious and allegorical location like it seemed to me in the original "Superman" movie and more like a real place. The additional background information provided about Krypton this time around makes it all the harder to accept the bizarre political situation going on there, which has now been made more convoluted than ever.

But before we get to all that Kal-El, the boy who will become Superman, is born, immediately seems to look about five years old (probably more because newborn babies always seem to be nowhere near newborn in films rather than because of alien physiology) and, what's more, is born entirely bloodlessly. Clean as a whistle! (Kryptonians do HAVE blood, right?) His father, Jor-El (played by Russell Crowe), has decided to send his son off-planet to grow up on Earth. As in the original movie, Jor-El is entrusting his son with a hologrammatic version of himself - only this time the magical crystals are replaced by... a memory stick?

So anyway, let's discuss the politics in this opening section. In the original movie this element is rushed through pretty quickly. Zod and friends are sentenced to the phantom zone for their crimes against Krypton and then the council discusses the planet's imminent destruction. For some reason the council has decided that no one should be allowed to leave the planet and Jor-El is unable to convince them that the planet is doomed. For that reason he decides to send his son to Earth.

In this reboot, the council seem to fully recognise that the planet is about to die, yet we seem to be expected to believe that it is due to both depleted natural resources AND artificial reproduction methods. At this early stage Zod actually seems pretty sensible since he objects to the council for dooming the planet and rebels against them for that reason. Seems like he has a pretty good reason for complaint and a good rationale for desperate measures. The decision to make Zod a megalomaniac and genocidal psychopath seems rather forced after these initial scenes.

But with everyone recognising that Krypton is doomed it's confusing as to why absolutely nobody leaves the planet. An evacuation of the planet seems like such a clear and obvious decision and yet nobody attempts it.

Things are further complicated since we are told that there are Kryptonian outposts across space, but apparently they have withered and died and it is not very obvious why. In the original movie it seemed accepted that Kyptonians were all settled on Krypton. In "Man of Steel" there's actually a thousand-year-old Kryptonian spacecraft buried in the ice in the Antarctic, suggesting widespread space travel by the Kryptonites. So why did the Kryptonian outposts perish? They died of homesickness?

The high quality visual effects carry on throughout the film and the action scene I saw before, along with several others, is as gorgeous as expected. Nevertheless, in the context of the movie it was hard to engage with because it was so hard to assess the motivations of the characters. This is not least because we do not have much in the way of characters with genuine believable personalities here.

There's very little in the way of 'character moments' throughout the entire film. Our new Clark Kent feels like a blank slate. Amy Adams' Lois Lane character tries to come off tough a few times, but mostly just seems like a damsel in distress figure. Russell Crowe's Jor-El pulls off his role well enough as an enigmatic goody-goody figure, but there's seemingly no space in the plot for a long term mentoring role to his son here. Michael Shannon's character of Zod, as already mentioned, nearly has a personality before he is reluctantly twisted into the more traditional 'evil' figure we were expecting.

I'd have to say that there was only one actor in a major role who I felt had any real genuine character moments where I thought the performance had some resemblance to an actual person. That actor was Kevin Costner, who plays Superman's adopted human father. I never one thought when I put this DVD on that I would be heralding Kevin Costner as the best thing in the film, but I have to say, I was impressed. It can't have done him any harm that everything else felt flat and fake, but I think he deserves some credit for what he managed to achieve. He had the same lame dialogue as everyone else, yet somehow he seemed to be able to give a performance with gravitas anyway.

In the second half, Superman just feels like one action sequence after another, but we never seem to have much at stake. Superman attacks Zod because his adopted mother's life is at stake, but we soon forget about that as the battle sequence moves to the local town. Superman needs to stop some giant gravity machine, but luckily for him, he knows how to create a mini-black-hole (somehow). Also in the context of the movie, the lines from female Kryptonian I saw in that little fight scene clip were even less impressive than ever. She says some twaddle about how morality is an evolutionary disadvantage and "evolution always wins". The problem is, we know from the early scenes that Kryptonians haven't been doing any evolving at all. They've been born artificially for generations - so no natural selection was involved at all.

Here's my biggest problem with this: I've long felt that the original Superman movie was more of a Jewish allegory than a Christian one. Certainly it allows for Christian interpretations too and this is undoubtedly intentional, but it is a story of a figure whose race has been decimated and who finds a safe haven in America. The central character establishes a new identity in America and becomes as much an American as anyone else, but ordinary people would never know the awesome power he holds nor the tragic history he carries. It is easy to see the parallels with Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution. But here, the eugenics program is held by the Kryptonians themselves, not just the villainous Zod and his supporters. What's more, Zod and his fellow rebels hold their identity due to their commitment to the roles the eugenics program has given them. In "Superman II", the Christ metaphor essentially posed Superman as battling demons, Kryptonian 'angels' fallen from grace. But here in "Man of Steel" the evil Kryptonians have a whole Nazi-esque ideology connected with their status as genetically-engineered soldiers for Krypton. The idea of changing Superman's own people into born and bred Nazis makes me very uneasy. But perhaps I'm taking this all too seriously. Perhaps I should be rather more upset by the fact that writer David S. Goyer seems to have no idea what "evolution" means...

Like "Superman Returns" before it, "Man of Steel" is an impressive showcase of Superman-related effects. Most of the movie is highly visually impressive, asides from one small scene where Amy Adams is screaming in a kind of pod that is falling to Earth, with the camera spinning in a circle to indicate that she is tumbling through space. The visuals here actually looked extremely cheesy. But as a general rule what "Man of Steel"'s effects have over and above the "Superman Returns" effects is how visceral they are. We can really feel how Superman reacts with his environment when he flies and it's these effects which make the action sequences between the Kryptonians so exciting even without the character motivations to hold our interest.

But in the end I'd rather be watching "Superman Returns" with Kevin Spacey and Brandon Routh parroting lines from the original seventies Superman movie, than watch this hollow sugar-coated eye-candy garbage. When Kevin Costner's character in the movie dies it was the one moment that I had any kind of emotional attachment in "Man of Steel" and it was less because of the scenario ("save the dog!") and more because it depicted the demise of the most interesting character in the film.

David Goyer has proven himself to be a pretty dreadful writer with no co-writers to tidy his work up (see "Blade") and an absolutely dire director (see "Blade Trinity") while Zack Snyder has proven himself to be best at directing someone else's good quality material (see "Watchmen" and "Dawn of the Dead") and much less impressive when he tries to write for himself (see "Suckerpunch" and any scenes not completely lifted from the comic in "300"). So I find it hard to get excited about the upcoming "Batman Vs Superman" movie co-written by David Goyer and Zack Snyder (and starring Ben Affleck). After this train wreck I have a hard time expecting anything but an unmitigated cinematic catastrophe - and about the only upside left now is that the computer generated effects will most likely be absolutely gorgeous.

D-