Man of Steel

For a year and a half I had been waiting for that moment. Ever since the first trailer was posted on YouTube, I was very impatiently waiting to yet again see that red cape fly across the screen in a blur, and to watch one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and dazzle us all. And with hat, I was eagerly standing outside of my local theater waiting to watch Man of Steel, a reboot of the ever beloved Superman franchise directed by Zack Snyder, who incase you didn’t know (which I don’t blame you if you didn’t) directed 300 the entertaining-yet superficial action thriller that is responsible for all of the Gerard Butler memes scattered across the internet. Now that I’ve provided a little context, it is time to dive deep into the could-have-been film that is Man of Steel.

 I really wanted to like this movie. No – strike that. I really wanted to love this movie. A modern, darker twist on my favorite superhero of all-time (which worked wonders with the Batman series), written by the guy who wrote the story of my favorite movie of all time, The Dark Knight, and topped off with an all-star cast sprinkled with the likes of Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner- I mean, what could go wrong? Well it turns out, a lot could, and it did. 

Let’s just start off with the basics. Superman (Henry Cavill), or “Kal” as is ever so affectionately called in this film, was born in a far off galaxy on a far off planet called Krypton. After realizing the imminent doom of their planet, his parents, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and Lara (Ayelet Zurer) decide the only hope for their planet is to save their infant son from its destruction and send him to a planet called Earth. When he arrives via mini spaceship his birth parents build him, Kal, or Clark, or Kal-El, or CK, or Mr. Kent, or- whatever you would prefer to call him, he crash lands in a podunk little town called Smallville, Kansas. After living in Smallville for most of his life, Clark eventually realizes he must fulfill his destiny and become the savior the Earth so desperately needs and blah, blah, blah you know the rest.

SPOLIERS

So this is obviously a reboot of the series, so they should be accorded some breathing room to tweak and change Superman’s origin story to give it a different and edgier feeling, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But they did not tweak the story so to speak. They took it, put it in a blender, ran it over with a semi-truck, sacrificed it during a voodoo ritual, and buried it at sea. I will give them some credit, however. I really liked the fact that they made Kal the last natural birth on his home world, literally making him, “The Last Son of Krypton”. One other thing is how he exiled himself from Smallville and all he knew, not to learn how to be superman, but just to try and find who he really was. It gave a more robust and imperfect view on Superman.

And let’s move on to the elephant in the room: the no longer existent secret identity of Clark Kent, aka Superman, aka Kal. They undermined 73 years of comic book, film, and television cannon and threw a magical twist in there that super reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) magically discovered that Clark Kent was Superman. How, you ask? I really have no idea. After seeing a mysterious man in a crashed alien craft in the Arctic (which turned out to be a sad excuse for Superman’s Fortress of Solitude) with her amazing superpower of photographic memory to remember exactly what Henry Cavill’s looks like, Lois Lane goes on a quest to discover who that mysterious hunk was. It depicts her finding and talking to all the people he has allegedly come into contact with Clark the past, and traced him back to the whole-in-the-wall that is Smallville. My question is simple: if Clark was so hell-bent on escaping his old life, don’t you think he would have never told anyone he was from Smallville, let alone Kansas? And here’s another good question, wouldn’t Lois completely forget everything when they kissed? Or was that plot point conveniently forgotten as well, just like the plot itself?

Speaking of Lois Lane, was I the only one who thinks that the entire film could have gone without her character at all? Throughout the entire film, Lois was there, whether it was gaining access to a top-secret military site, or sitting in the co-pilot’s chair as a C-17 barreled toward an alien craft ready to drop a bomb made of who-knows-what on it, Lois Lane, reporter-extraordinaire was on the case. So as I was saying, her character served quite literally no purpose in this film, except to be the one of the only people Superman actually saves. The entire film could have functioned just fine without her throughout, and they just could have dropped her in that final scene at the Daily Planet. Speaking of which, how did Clark manage to land a job at the Daily Planet in this economy without any degree or prior experience in the journalism field? I digress.

And then there’s the scene with the tornado. Oh how I despise this scene and whoever wrote it. Yes, it is the scene in which Jonathon Kent (Kevin Costner bravely sacrificed his life in order to protect his son’s secret from the world, which will be exposed anyway by Lois Lane. Or as Jonathan Kent would put it “In the ultimate dick of a father move, let me commit suicide just to prove my point that you shouldn’t tell people about your powers yet.” That scene made me so mad. It was just moronic. Why didn’t Clark just run to the other side of the overpass and run at superspeed to grab Jonathan and make it look like the wind did it? Makes too much sense? Got it.

One more thing that really bothered me is the way they portrayed Superman’s home world, Krypton. Instead of making it a hi-tech, crystal-based, futuristic Utopia, they made it look like the planet Naboo from Star Wars. I’m almost convinced they had J.J. Abrams in charge of the computer-generated effects during those scenes so he could test what Star Wars Episode Seven: Revenge of the Mouse will look like.

I’m going to lightly touch on the last third of the film: movie, you aren’t The Avengers, the battle didn’t work, and frankly, you’re trying too hard, get over it.

Moving on

In this film, they attempted to make a darker, more rustic take on Superman. Well what we got was a plot-hole ridden snore-fest with no character development whatsoever. What they should have done was create a film where the world as a whole was the dark part and Superman was the pure light that guided it back from the brink, not a dark film with dark characters and a dark plot. Honestly at this point, a line-for-line remake of the 1978 film in modern times would have been more satisfying. And I hate to say it, but I enjoyed Superman Returns more than I did this movie. It’s really a shame, they had a perfect cast with this film, and Henry Cavill would have done a great job if he was given the proper script, and director, but just like Christopher Nolan’s choice of director, this film falls short of greatness.