In one of the most anticipated movies of the summer, Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel fails to live up to its high expectations. It is a rather dull film that is too dependent on visual effects, but what else would you expect from Snyder whose previous films include 300, Watchmen and Sucker Punch.
With the very successful The Dark Knight Trilogy it is no surprise that Warner Bros. wanted to adopt a similar style with the Superman movie. They even brought in Christopher Nolan to produce and help write the story of Steel. While this film is grittier and more grounded into reality compared to the other Superman movies, this one is the most uninspiring (well perhaps it is more so compared to Superman III and IV).
The story remains relatively true to the origin story of Superman as we start off on a dying Krypton as baby Kal-El is being sent off to Earth. From there we are introduced to the all grown up Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) who makes his way by doing all sorts of odd jobs. The most compelling aspect of this film involves Clark’s flashbacks when he was a child and was first becoming aware of his powers. As a child and learning that you can see through people and have an incredible strength can be more of a curse than a blessing, and that is what this film captures well. With so many superheroes and super villains in this film, the most interesting character is Clark’s father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner). Jonathan believes that Clark shouldn’t display his powers because people may not be ready to see something like that. After all, he is an alien. Clark goes around saying that he obeys his father’s wishes, but his actions say otherwise.
Clark ends up meeting Lois Lane (Amy Adams) because, well, they have to. Lois is interested in Clark because she has never seen anything like him before, and Clark is interested in Lois because she is pretty and nice.
With any superhero movie comes a super villain, and in this movie it is General Zod (Michael Shannon). This Zod is one of the weaker villains compared to the other superhero movies. He wants to destroy Earth and punch everybody in his way, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, I’ll stop anyway.
It is right around the halfway point in the movie where it turns into a long fight scene as we watch a countless number of buildings collapse. I honest think that they had to digitally add more buildings just because they ran out of real buildings they would show falling over. At times it felt that I was watching leftovers of Transformers or Star Trek. It started to become boring and got to the point where I didn’t even care who won the battle, as long as it ended soon. And when it finally does, it is about as anti-climatic as it could get that will leave you thinking, “Really?”
There are some neat little explanations that the film goes into such as why Superman wears the “S” on his costume and how he got the costume in the first place. But not even the mind and insight of Nolan could save this movie from Snyder’s hands. It seems like Snyder is more interested in post-production than anything else. There are some shots where he is trying to be Terrance Maillick-like with his random shots of nature, then he turns into Michael Bay and blows everything up. It makes for a very uneven style. The problem is that the nature of theSuperman story should not be told in a very realistic fashion. It is hard to take it too seriously when there are aliens flying around through different dimensions. Clark Kent is an interesting enough character that the movie doesn’t need to be engulfed in CGI, that is what Nolan understood with his Batman movies, perhaps Snyder should have sampled more of the style of Nolan.
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