Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow

.

I come at Man of Steel as a general supporter of its director Zack Snyder - his remake of Dawn of the Dead is better than it has any right being, and I will go full-on death-match defending 300 as a really smart propaganda satire a la Starship Troopers (only minus Verhoeven's innate wink attached). From there things get more complicated - I liked Watchmen a lot at first but a little less so with time (I still want to watch his Director's Cut though), and Sucker Punch felt capped at the knees by its rating. And I'm not touching that owl movie. Point being, I was fairly enthusiastic about him getting the Super gig.

If all of this sounds like a lead-up to a let-down, then we're halfway on the right track. I walked out of Man of Steel pretty satisfied, and I am still am, but the niggling concerns that bothered me while watching it seem to be spreading virus-like the more I think about it. Especially hearing that the first cut was apparently over three hours - Man of Steel's biggest problem is bloat, and the sense that a decision was made to just throw more at everything, as if that would make it better. It's a sense I get from all the Summer movies as of late, even more than usual, and I'm a little disquieted by it. 

I generally think of Snyder as a great director of action - when I reviewed Sucker Punch I praised just that. His speed-up slow-down trick gets mocked but I love it, and I really missed it here. What I got in its place were endless upon endless shots of hyper-sped up characters dragging each other's faces through cement - and why show it once when you can show it twenty times? The last hour or so became entirely mind-numbing and repetitive - something can be cool once, twice maybe, but you keep showing it happen several times and you just seem desperate. Say what you will about The Avengers - at least Joss understands that each showdown needs to have its own character, its own playlist, its own notes. Man of Steel is like the Hulk smashing Loki into the floor for an hour straight.

And real thematic issues arise from some of the film-makers choices. (And I've spread this out to "the film-makers" from just ragging on Zack Snyder because, having turned on Christopher Nolan post-Inception and The Dark Knight Rises I see some of his worst instincts infecting the Superman mythologizing here.) In a vague sense, I don't mind them having Superman kill Zod. I know Superman purists are up in arms about it but it, along with the change in Pa Kent's death scene, seem like not half bad ways for them to get at making Superman more complicated a figure than he might've been - of dirtying him up for modern audiences. The problems for me come from the sheer laziness on display with it. They seriously couldn't come up with a better scene than what felt like twenty straight minutes of two invincible characters punching each other through skyscrapers (and we're gonna come back to this in a second) followed by Zod suddenly aiming his heat vision at a family and Supes having to snap his neck? It was eye-rolling and cheap - it reminds me of the ever esteemed Bane's death scene in TDKR in its apathy. Oh I guess we've gotta wrap this shit up now, boom.

And the film doesn't care about handling the weight of that moment either, or any of the implications of its conclusion - sure, Supes screams an anguished scream for his fallen Kryptonian comrade and I guess for his own do-good-nature, but post-spittle it's tra la la, nothing to see here. Relatedly, back to my point about that forever-taking fight scene across the skyscrapers of Metropolis (as well as the exact-seeming one that ripped Smallville a new one) - there never seemed to be a moment where Superman was trying to take the fight out of the way of the innocent civilians. It really wouldn't have been that hard to do and it would've made the scene about a hundred times more interesting, giving it some tension - Superman keeps tossing Zod away from the crowds, and Zod keeps throwing Superman back into the crowds, using him as a weapon. In a vague sense that's there, you can maybe read that into the scene, but the film is so smash smash smash with no interest in putting any life or character into the smashing that it's all on us, the viewers, to do the work for it. As is it's perfectly acceptable to read into it that Superman doesn't give a shit about the buildings being torn down around him - buildings no doubt filled with human beings, of which after a certain point he never spends a second trying to actually save. Imagine if the scene had been of him flying around trying to rescue the people who were the very real fall-out from this epic battle as the battle rages around him? How much more thrilling and and lively and dangerous that would have seemed? There are people in the middle of all of this, we all know it, but the movie itself, and its supposed hero along with it, seems to stop caring.

So those are the brunt of my issues with the film, and they feel a little bit more and a little bit more the more I think about them. I thought the mid-section of the movie was pretty strong - the back and forth between adult Clark figuring out his way while flashing back to the lessons his parents taught him was a lovely way to spice up his well-worn life story, and everybody - Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Henry Cavill and the two actors playing the young Clark - was on point in the scenes. I wasn't all that enamored with Amy Adams as Lois to be honest - she seemed a little bit sleepy in the role to me. I suppose I'm still just bitter that the role didn't go to my pick Lizzy Caplan (and yes I'm not-so-secretly hoping Lizzy can show up as Lana in the sequel), but Adams seemed to me the half of the romance not doing the heavy lifting. I liked the script-stake on Lois but Adams played her half-narcotized, I thought. (And I generally like Adams so it's nothing personal; just apart from me not thinking she was right for the role she seemed unsure how to play it and -insanely - didn't seem to have much interest in Herny Cavill either. I guess she's not into physical perfection, or whatever.)

And the movie's funnier than it's getting credit for... but not funny enough. I think maybe its hard to recognize that the usually humorless Russell Crowe is actually giving a delightfully knowing camp performance as Ghost Dad - the way he'd pop up all over the places and those waves of his hands to open doors was all some silly business indeed and he was in on the joke. While the entire Krypotnian prologue went on too long (as did it all) the Avatar-lite design choices were really funny and fun - those floating computer vaginas! The penis prisons! Yeah it was all a lot Giger-y but with a wink wink that was definitely humor-intended, I thought. I really doubt that anybody who got a load of those giant black flying dildos didn't totally know what exactly they were doing.

.