Runtime: 2 hours, 23 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Directors: Zack Snyder
Quick Impressions:
Normally I come out of a movie knowing what I think of it, but I’m not sure that’s the case with Man of Steel. Watching it, I was really all over the place. For a while, I felt like I was a Kryptonian trying to come to grips with the sensory overload that apparently afflicts all members of our doomed planet who attempt to make sense of life on Earth.
At one point, I thought, This is a great Superman movie, so much better than Bryan Singer’s attempt. Moments later, I realized, This is a terrible film. It’s actually much worse than the 2006 Superman outing. It’s not even good as just a movie. Then suddenly, I found myself thinking, Wow, this is brilliant! It’s really found its legs now! This is going to be awesome. Then I thought, WHAT?! WHAT?! WHAT???!!!! I cycled through these thoughts (in randomized order) for the duration of Man of Steel.
The Good:
For readers who would prefer a coherent critique of the film, I’ll say that the movie is pretty good but wildly uneven. I guess that’s nice verisimilitude for a film about a guy who’s always either flying around saving the world with his super powers or languishing like a dying cricket in the presence of a sliver Kryptonite. Nothing about Superman is middle of the road, and Man of Steel is never mediocre. Unfortunately, when you’re watching a movie in the theater, you don’t smile and say smugly, Wow this cinematic treatment of the story has the same flaws and triumphs as the man himself! Isn’t it ironic this movie is so slow? Their whole society was too slow!!! What amazing verisimilitude! It’s not always fun to watch a film that at some times careens out of control headed nowhere in particular, at others creeps along at a snail’s pace toward a predictable target.
But I’ll start with what’s good.
Here’s what I loved—Russell Crowe! If you’re going to cast Russell Crowe in your movie, why not actually have a part worthy of his talents? And since you’ve got him, why not make as much use of him as you can? I never liked him when we were both younger (Russell and I), but as he’s aging and fewer people are telling me how crazy I am for not thinking he’s hot, I find myself warming to him more and more. I’ve always acknowledged that Crowe is a talented actor, and—this will probably sound silly, but I swear—this is one of the best parts I’ve seen for him in a long time. I mean, he won’t win any Oscars, but Jor-El gets to be a key player in some of the best moments of the entire movie.
What this film absolutely does right is start Superman’s story on Krypton (though it is weird to hear people casually calling him just Kal). The opening sequence is very good. It actually excited me because—while I still found it slightly lacking in a way I can’t fully articulate—it was definitely a new, different approach to telling the Superman story on screen. Watching, I had no idea what I would see next (but I was confident it would not be a career journalist who won multiple Pulitzers, had a tumultuous, ever-changing relationship resulting in an seven-year-old child with Superman, and then married James Marsden and made him look like an old man all by the time she was twenty-two.
I realize they cast Kate Bosworth to get Kevin Spacey, but that was still the worst casting I have seen since as a teen I watched the movie Confidential Agent where Lauren Bacall plays a British socialite and Charles Boyer plays a Spanish Republican. When people cast movies this poorly, it’s not fair to the actors. Kate Bosworth is lovely, but you can’t play a woman who’s had a distinguished career in journalism and the school-aged child of someone she met while already established in that career when you’re twenty-two and look twenty-two. They might as well have cast her as Superman.)
Anyway, I’m pretty close to saying that all of my favorite scenes in the movie involved Crowe’s character. I particularly liked this film’s unexpected and inventive use of Jor-El. He’s not just reduced to a cameo. He’s a major player. (And the way this movie sets things up, he has to be, because Jonathan Kent is given a very powerful voice.)
I also really liked this film’s version of Lois Lane. As you may have gathered by now, I was not a fan of Kate Bosworth in the role (although I did love Margot Kidder as Lois as a child. She had such a unique voice and a cool name. Plus she had nice comic timing and brought humor to the role without seeming out of character.) I always like Amy Adams, and I think she’s a good fit for the character. In fact, as I was watching, I zoned out for a moment thinking, Wow, Amy Adams has chosen such versatile roles that she could retire now and be proud of an exemplary career. (I’m not saying that she should, and I’m sure she won’t. She’s hasn’t won an Oscar yet.)
I was a little frustrated at times because I felt like they created this great character and then failed to advance the story at a proper pace, so that at the end, there wasn’t much time for Lois and Superman to interact together in any kind of non-doomsday scenario. But Lois does have a pretty good (and essential) part in this story.
Martha Kent also gets a great part, and Diane Lane does an increasingly good job. (The character gets better and better lines as the story progresses.) Antje Traue, Laurence Fishburne, and Harry Lennix are all great, and it’s nice to see Christopher Meloni.
I also like the way we have a better understanding of General Zod and his motives in this film. (I can only compare it to Superman 2, which I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. I haven’t read the comics. I mean, I read lots of children’s Superman comics when I was a kid, but I haven’t read the serious adult comics.)
A very awesome element—which they should have punched more in my opinion—is that whole “You are not alone” bit. I think that should have been the teaser trailer. Instead of all these self-important tableaux, these stagey scenes from Superman’s childhood—we should have gotten a first trailer that consisted entirely of General Zod’s message. Everybody would have known what they were seeing by the end, and it would have felt cool and different. I think the phrase should have been used way more in marketing the film—the way “Why So Serious?” was used until Heath Ledger’s untimely death. This part of the movie is so interesting and cool. But it takes so long to get there, and—unfortunately—Zod’s scenes with Superman feel a bit anticlimactic. The way the film prepped us, I almost would have rather seen a rematch between Zod and Jor-El (which I realize is kind of the idea in having him fight Jor-El’s son, but still).
At first I wasn’t sold on Hans Zimmer’s score. At times, it feels overwhelming and intrusive. But then as the credits rolled, I found myself really enjoying the main theme, so the score ended up in my good graces after all.
Best Scene:
To be perfectly honest, the first scene and the last are two of my favorites. The movie begins on a high note. It’s got great visuals, high stakes, cool music, an ideal cast (except I feel like Superman’s mom is overacting), a novel approach, perfect pacing.
The last scene is good, too, because it’s like, “Finally! It’s great to see a fresh spin on things, but here’s the on screen set-up that we all know and (used to) love (in the 80s or on TV)!” I like the cute little pun in the final lines, as well. (My daughter also enjoyed it.)
Best Scene Visually:
The scene when Superman (with the Army behind him) prepares to receive General Zod looks great. I remember thinking, Zack Snyder always spends too much time setting up these intensely stagey views of things that aren’t important. For once, when a close-up of Superman’s face stood between Zod and the tanks, I actually had the feeling that we were looking closely at something both cool and relevant. I thought these few shots of Superman so positioned were the most attractively framed scenes in the entire movie.
Funniest Scene:
It depends on what you find funny. I do find it pretty funny—given the whole reason Zod is so determined to catch up with Superman—that in a flashback we see a junior high aged Clark Kent reading what appears to be selected works of Plato. But if you mean funny ha ha…
There’s a great moment when Superman gets knocked backwards into a sign that relays the number of days without an accident at a particular workplace and changes the number to 0. It goes by in a blink. It’s not the only thing that does. There is a lot going on in the background of this movie. (Sometimes I wish more were going on in the foreground.)
There is humor in this film, but not much. We get a joke, and then a hundred years of intensity before the next little joke. There were many scenes when I wanted to laugh but knew laughter was not intended (and politely refrained from being obnoxious). For some reason, the scene when Lois and Superman are sitting on opposite sides of the interrogation table just absolutely cracked me up. The first instant that I saw them, the image just looked so absurd. Several times, I had moments like that, particularly when the film’s endless portentousness just went so far that I could not take it as seriously as it was taking itself.
A very large portion of the audience laughed out loud at what the female soldier (Major Farris) says about Superman near the end of the movie. I liked that moment, too, simply because it felt refreshingly natural.
Best Action Sequence:
My favorite part of the movie happens when Lois escapes from the ship because a) it’s totally unexpected, and b) everything is happening so fast (for a very welcome change). Of course, I also have a complaint about this scene. It was pretty awesome. Meanwhile, Superman was not on screen. Shouldn’t Superman get the best and most exciting scenes? I like that Lois Lane has got a lot of moxie (and surprising integrity for a movie journalist), but I think that the best and most exciting moments of the film should belong to Superman. I’m not saying that Lois shouldn’t get to be anything more than a damsel in distress. But after all this stuff happens, I would expect Superman to then get something even more awesome. What he does next does look cool, but, I don’t know…
Maybe it looks really cool in 3D.
The Negatives:
I actually love films that advance with deliberate, stagey pacing. Steven Spielberg often tells stories this way. He takes a long time setting things up and often shows long establishing shots of key story elements, leading viewers to put together some of the exposition for themselves. By the time all Hell breaks loose in a movie like that, we’re intellectually prepared and emotionally excited.
This movie begins with a bang, but then it just stops. After the first thrilling moments, it inches along for what feels like a good forty-five minutes eking out the story’s exposition—except that nothing has happened yet. There’s not much to establish. Basically all the movie wants to tell us is that Clark Kent hasn’t really figured out yet what’s going on with his life. Watching this slowly unfold, I kept thinking of a more apt title: Even Superman Didn’t Know What to Do With Himself After Graduation. Should he work on a fishing boat? Should he go to grad school? (They never show a sequence like that, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking about it.) He wants to tell the world who he really is, but he can’t because 1) He doesn’t know who he really is 2) Kevin Costner is the master of a dramatic gesture 3) Nobody cares who he really is unless they’re in peril, anyway.
Not only is this part of the movie boring—it just has this really vague, directionless feeling—but it is also the only part of the movie that relies heavily on flashback. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m an extreme fan of detailed backstory (so much so that in my own writing by the time my characters figure out who everybody used to be, they have no time left to do much of anything together). But why use flashback if you’re flashing back from a time during which nothing is happening and nothing has been decided?
The flashbacks confused my daughter, who had watched the early scenes most attentively. She asked at one point, “Is Superman going to save that crazy little boy from the scary man who walked in the fire?” Now granted, she is four, but I was a little confused, too. Not about the plot. About the film’s execution. How did a story that began with such excitement get so ridiculously bogged down and muddled in the process of introducing a character that the entire moving going public has known all about since 1938?
This is really the only portion of the film that flat out doesn’t work. The problem is that it lasts so long. The plot points were all perfectly solid, and the characters were well drawn and exceptionally well cast. It was so frustrating.
For me, much of the viewing experience was like listening to a fascinating story being told by some bore who just drones on endlessly, not knowing how to deliver an anecdote properly. Honestly, I think I just don’t care for Zack Snyder much because I have the same problem with all his movies. He’s slow, he’s deliberate, but he’s focusing on stuff that to me seems not to matter. It’s like he doesn’t know where to linger and what to punch. (In fact, the background of this movie is loaded with Easter egg like goodies—stuff that flies by in a flash. We see stuff like a Lex Corp truck, and a sign about “no accidents.”)
If you’re telling a story, and at the beginning you’re the last hope of a doomed alien race, and at the end, you save the Earth using superpowers, you know the place where you do not linger—that awkward part in the middle when you were still trying to figure yourself out and hadn’t really found yourself, and you kind of thought you might want to work on a fishing boat, and like, you know, you didn’t want to be a farmer like your Earth dad because you thought you were cooler than that…
That’s the part where we should be skimming. We should be slowing down and lingering on the parts that are interesting and relevant to the progression of the story.
My husband had a great idea. He thought that after the fall of Krypton, the story should jump right to Lois and be told from her point of view until she encounters Clark. I am all for that. I even think going in linear, chronological order and hitting the highlights of the kid’s tortured childhood as they happened would be a better idea.
The thing is, I did like where the movie was headed. I’ve always thought that to make Superman relevant today, you have to create a situation in which we would really need him on our side. And this movie does that—eventually. But good grief! I think an entire alien civilization died while we were getting to that part. (Seriously, I think I felt their light going out. My heart was heavy.)
Basically, I think the movie has a good story, but some of it gets lost in bad editing (and maybe sometimes directing) choices. There were some other, smaller matters that bothered me, too.
The movie doesn’t have much of a sense of fun. Ordinarily in a Superman movie, you get more of a separation between Superman and Clark Kent, and the Clark Kent moments (bungling interactions with the Daily Planet staff) usually bring a bit of levity or just a change-of-pace and break to take a breath. This movie doesn’t have that. If we want to take a breath, we’re welcome to do it over and over again during the interminable aimless wandering/flashback scenes. Then once we move on, the film keeps up a fairly frantic pace.
Basically, I thought the characters all needed more time to interact together. Here’s Jonathan Kent. Isn’t he perfectly cast? Well, too bad. He’s dead now. Here’s Lois Lane. From the moment you meet her, she will be constantly in jeopardy. That woman who hangs around with General Zod seems even more sinister than he does. Well, you’ll have to fill in the gaps for yourself because we’re not going to let you get any closer to her. I think Jimmy Olsen might be a girl named Jenny now. If you want to learn more about her—too bad because she spends most of her time being fished out of a pile of debris. The movie never lets the characters mesh. They’re all such great characters. I am hoping we’ll be able to spend more time with them all together in a sequel.
Also, General Zod’s character is frustrating. Michael Shannon gives a good performance (though I was stunned to like Russell Crowe’s better), but we learn just enough about the character not to understand him well enough. In the beginning, he seems practically like a hero. Certainly he’s right that the people in charge have made bad decisions and must go. Why didn’t he act sooner?
Zod’s final monologue—the part when he’s ranting at Superman about how protecting his people was his entire purpose in life—really interested both me and my four-year-old. She was so delighted and cried, “Mom! Mom! Is that like a destiny?” (Apparently, she has been searching for an example of someone having a destiny since I defined the word for her last week.) The thing is, I didn’t think Zod’s behavior matched his statements. It seems to me that if everything he says about himself in this speech is true, then he knows perfectly well that only one course is left open to him now. I’m surprised he doesn’t take it. My husband pointed out that not every aspect of his duty has been exhausted since he can still take revenge. Maybe that’s true, but I think it’s a little bit disappointing to learn that Zod is all talk. I guess I should have known. If he were really so determined to protect Krypton, he would have acted sooner than he did in the beginning. I wish we could learn more about Zod, but there isn’t time. (That was the problem for Zod and Jor-El, too, I think. They could have worked together if they’d been able to appreciate one another’s way of thinking, but there wasn’t time for that.)
The movie also far too often seems to take itself way too seriously. (Honestly one of my favorite Superman-related movies is Megamind because it raises some serious issues but keeps a sense of fun.) Of course, this is a story about an all-powerful guy who flies around in a conspicuous red cape and calls himself “Superman.” But I’m getting tired of Superman being told that it’s up to him to be a savior to mankind, to give them an example to follow, to lead them into the light, and then seeing him fly with his arms out in the shape of a cross. There was plenty of Superman worship in Superman Returns to last me a lifetime. I didn’t need more in this film. (It makes me think of Homer Simpson. “I know I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please, save me Superman.”) Why do we want to worship Superman? He seems powerful, but he’s getting most of his energy from our sun. He’s not a god. He’s an alien with an identity crisis, and he gets most of his best ideas from humans. It’s not that I don’t think Superman is noble, but when you keep trying to make someone be a Christ motif in a cape, you make it impossible to have much fun with him. It really limits him as a human being, limits his potential to be an interesting, complex screen hero.
Oh, also, sometimes the exposition is just too awkward. There’s an adult with a successful military career who doesn’t know what terraforming is? (It’s like in films when people tell Elizabeth I, “Now don’t forget the Roman Catholics think you’re illegitimate.” I particularly like the scene in The Great Muppet Caper when Piggy asks Lady Holiday, “Why are you telling me all this?” and she replies, “It’s plot exposition. It’s got to go somewhere.” That’s intentionally funny, but sometimes Man of Steel is just as funny unintentionally.)
Our ten-year-old also offered his critique of the film on the car ride home. He thinks that Superman doesn’t use his special powers enough. He makes a decent point. There’s more to Superman than just flying around in a cape being strong and fast. Superman also has heat vision, X-ray vision, super hearing, super breath, all kinds of stuff that we barely get a glimmer of in Man of Steel. They use the X-ray vision and the heat vision, but not in a very exciting way. My stepson also thinks they should have found a way to work in Kryptonite. (Others will probably feel that it’s remarkable and about time that a Superman movie found a way not to work in Kryptonite.)
Before the movie, my stepson also pointed out that this Superman is not as attractive as “the old one.” I assume he means Brandon Routh (although given Routh’s physical resemblance to Reeve in the role, it’s kind of a moot point). He says that he has “a pushed in face.” We have to agree to disagree there. I think Henry Cavill is extremely handsome. Plus he played Charles Brandon in The Tudors, so during lulls in the film, it’s easy to daydream about Henry VIII (always a foolproof cure for dissatisfaction. You think, “I shouldn’t have paid to see this in the theater,” but then you remember, “It could be worse. I could be married to Henry VIII.”).
Overall:
I hope they stop rebooting Superman and actually continue the franchise. The entire cast is practically perfect, and I’m curious to see their pick for Lex Luthor. (Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey were probably the best ones in Superman Returns, but I wouldn’t expect them to return, and I think there will be a Lex Luthor in a future film.)
This movie is far from perfect, but the highs are intriguing enough to make them memorable, and the lows are almost limited enough to make them forgettable. This should balance out over time. The movie may not be perfect on a first viewing, but it should be fun to look back on, and it does set things up beautifully for the next installment (which had better come).
I loved seeing so much of Krypton (and of Jor-El, particularly) in this movie, I really liked what they did with Lois, and I’m excited to see what will happen when Superman Strikes Again (my four-year-old’s suggested title for the sequel). Please, please tell me Superman is going to strike again because if I have to sit through another reboot in the next five to seven years, I’m moving to Krypton. (I know that doesn’t make sense, but I don’t like posting stuff on the internet that might be mistaken for an actual threat.)