“This is not from this world, Clark. And neither are you.”

Flinthart’s review: I rarely bother to attend the cinema any more. We have only one cinemaplex in Launceston, and it shows nothing but the shiniest and latest and crappiest and Hollywoodest movies. Of course, sometimes I wouldn’t mind seeing those — but since it costs me well over a hundred dollars to do so with my children (taking into account parking, tickets, fuel, food, and incidentals) it’s not usually worth my time. I’ll probably catch the new Hobbit flick at the cinema when it comes out. That will make… maybe the third time I’ve been, this year. Maybe. Might be the second.

Obviously, I didn’t go to see Man of Steel. And with the tenor of the reviews that followed, I was quietly pleased with that decision, no matter how much I like the Superman character from my earliest days of reading as a child. Instead, I bought the DVD for less than $20, and we watched it the other night in the comfort of our home cinema loft… with plenty of gin and tonic on hand for yours truly.

Maybe it was the G&T, but I found myself enjoying the film far more than I expected. From the critical noise, I was expecting something worse than Superman Returns, the slow, charmless and vapid 2006 clunker of a movie with Brandon Routh in the eponymous role. What I got was — well, not conventional Superman, no. But frankly, I felt it was the better for all that.

To me, the major flaw in this film lies in the attempt to do too much. The writers and director couldn’t manage to back away from the ongoing and highly irritating Christ metaphor: the Son sent to save us all. (At least poor old Supes didn’t die for our sins this time, as he did when Kevin Spacey dumped all that Kryptonite on him back in 2006). And then there’s the inevitable relationship-with-Lois, because you can’t make a Superman film without perky Lois Lane popping up, can you?

What interested me most were precisely the parts that most reviewers loathed. There’s the infamous mass-destruction fight sequences, of course, and the fact that the Superman character is, by the end, driven to deliberately kill another being. For most viewers, it seems these two things were completely unacceptable. For me, on the other hand, they seemed like a deliberate and very nearly interesting effort to offer a side of Superman never really explored elsewhere.

(As an aside — who has read the famous Larry Niven essay “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex“? If you haven’t, then follow the link. It’s a hilarious look at another aspect of the problem I’m about to cover.)

During the film, the director Snyder repeatedly shows us what it costs Kal-El/Clark Kent to grow up in a society of people without his powers. Early in his school years, he loses control of his super-senses, and he is bombarded by images and sounds that threaten to overwhelm his young mind. He desperately restrains himself when antagonised by a pack of school bullies; and we see how much effort it takes to do so in the shape of a steel fence-post deformed by his straining grip.

At the beginning of the film, Clark/Kal-El is a loner and a drifter, moving from job to job in anonymity. Oh, sure: he does the obligatory heroic stuff, but he has to move along, and hide from it. Most importantly, he makes no real friends, develops no lasting relationships.

And to me, Snyder’s point is clear: he can’t.

Ask yourself this: how do you form friendships if you can’t carry out the simplest of social behaviours? Play sports? The slightest lapse in concentration might send a ball into orbit, or irretrievably mangle an opponent. And what about handshakes, or embraces? Try to imagine that everyone — everyone! — you ever touched in any way was made of wet tissue paper. Try to imagine that even sneezing might kill them. And no, you really can’t have a few drinks tonight. Oh, and sex? Better see that Larry Niven essay, eh?

This is the Superman Snyder was trying for. And I think he almost got there.

The grand smash-up battle sequences aren’t just CG-Eye candy. They’re important. You’re meant to be shocked by the scale of the destruction. This is what it means to let Superman off the chain, folks. This is what happens when he doesn’t pull his punches. Does it look like he revels in the battle? Not as much as he should. For the first time in his thirty-three years (sigh… enough with the Christ crap already!) he can push himself to his fullest, unleash everything he’s got. For the first time ever, he’s got a reason to stop pretending, stop holding everything back, and be himself.

Is Henry Cavill’s performance wooden? I’ve heard it called that. Maybe it was. But I’d argue that it was meant to imply absolute and utter restraint. Cavill’s Superman has to be calm and measured, or the people around him will die. Yes, it’s possible Cavill himself (and Snyder) didn’t have the chops to suggest that. But a slightly more focused script could have made it much easier, much clearer.

Even the final sequence — the moment where Superman kills Zod — that sent the fans into a raging death spiral… even that seems reasonable to me. Superman never kills, right?

Well… why the fuck not? Are we honestly supposed to believe that it’s his aw-shucks good-guy upbringing in Kansas which produces this ironclad rule? Frankly, the death penalty is a very American thing indeed these days. The idea of Kal-El as a sort of ‘natural boy scout’ is unbelievable crap, a hangover from a period when the US had all kinds of delusions about its moral superiority. The truth is that there’s no clear reason for a modern Superman to avoid killing the bad guys who insist on coming back, over and over again, to terrorise his world and people…

…unless Superman has already had an encounter with the death penalty. Up close and personal. Say… if he was driven, against his will, to kill the last Kryptonian other than himself in hand-to-hand, unarmed combat.

Yeah. That might do it, don’t you think?

I’m not going to tell you this is a great film. But I will say this: I wish Snyder hadn’t kowtowed to the fanboy continuity crowd at all. I wish the Christ symbolism had been thrown out completely. I wish he’d had the sense to let Kal-El rail at hologram Jor-El over the terrible loneliness of his exile. I wish he’d had the sense to let Kal-El grieve at the destruction of the Kryptonian genesis chamber. I wish we’d been allowed to see a small super-boy accidentally cripple his beloved dog during a game of ‘catch’.

Because the theme of this movie really ought to have been loneliness, and the desperation that comes with absolute isolation from your fellow beings. Clark Kent, behind his glasses forever watching a world that he can never, ever be a real part of…

…some day, I’d like to see them make a movie out of that Superman. But until then, this is a rather better effort than I’d anticipated, and I don’t resent the time I spent watching it.

Eunice’s rating: “He’s one of those who knows that life Is just a leap of faith Spread your arms and hold you breath Always trust your cape”

Eunice’s review: Superman has been in my life for a long time now. I cut my teeth on the Christopher Reeve movies. During my Nick At Night days it was George Reeves’ Adventures of Superman, and I had the cartoon on VHS. I’d grab whatever comics my brothers had lying around. Then came Lois & Clark, and I watched that too. I was kinda burned out on TV by the time Smallville came around, and the way Kristin Kreuk acts through her teeth grated on me, but I kept tabs on it. I’ve seen a couple of the animated movies, and those have been pretty well done. (I’ve even seen that horrible Supergirl movie, which redefines “horrible”)

Then came Superman Returns. And that just kinda killed my Superbuzz. And the last thing I saw Henry Cavill in was my personal biggest disappointment of 2011 Immortals. I think the article from the beginning of the year summed up my feelings pretty well, “I’ll probably go see Man of Steel, but Superman Returns left such an awful, awful taste in my mouth. The franchise needs a complete restart, I just hope the final product isn’t naval gazing-y as the trailer makes it look, and I don’t know how I feel about Papa Kent telling Clark he should let a school bus full of kids die.” So was I enthusiastic about Man of Steel? Not really, to be honest.

So the big question is ‘What is Man of Steel?’ Is it a sequel to Returns? No it’s not, not even a little bit. Is it an origins movie, yes mostly, in a way (I’ll get to that in a second). If you need labels I would call it solidly a reboot. A reboot to a franchise that desperately needed it.

The movie is told in three parts:

Part One – The destruction of planet Krypton.

High scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and wife Lara have just had a son, Kal-El, who must be kept secret as he’s the first naturally born child in centuries. See on Krypton babies are genetically engineered for certain classes and incubated in a Matrix-esque baby farm using something called The Codex. The joy of new parenthood is short lived however, the planet is dying. Against Jor-El’s advice the higher ups went toying around with the planet’s core due to an energy shortage, and now it’s come back to bite them. That’s when General Zod (Michael Shannon) decides to stage a coup, in the chaos Jor-El steals The Codex and sends it off planet with his son with the hope that both he and the Kryptonians will have a chance at a future. The coup fails and Zod and his comrades are sent to the Phantom Zone, but not before Zod killed Jor-El. All is for naught since there is no stopping the planet from, literally, coming apart.

Part Two – A man on a journey

Cut to a young man (Henry Cavill) on an Alaskan fishing boat. When a SOS is sent from an oil rig on fire the man disappears, only to show up at the rig having swam through the freezing waters. He saves the men and disappears. The drifter starts over, this is a pattern. He keeps taking on odd jobs, then eventually something will happen that causes him to blow his cover and he moves on. Through flashbacks we learn the drifter is Clark Kent, and how he grew up in a small Kansas farming town hiding the fact he was an alien and adapting to Earth. In his travels he hears whispers of shadowy federal research of an unidentified object, so he gets a job on the salvage crew. Could the object (officially being called a WWII Russian submarine, but unofficially a nearly 20,000 year old vessel) give him the one thing he’s been looking for – Answers? Also investigating the object is Pulitzer winning reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams). Things happen and Lois ends up stumbling onto Clark’s secret.

Part Three – A menace from the past

Clark ends up accidentally turning on the vessel’s distress beacon. Which wouldn’t matter now that Krypton is gone right? Well, when Krypton went boom the defenses holding the prisoners in the Phantom Zone shut off, leaving a ship full of obsessively violent military born and bred Kryptonian convicts free in space. Led by Zod and his right hand woman Faora-Ul, they follow the signal to Earth looking for Jor-El’s son so they can get The Codex back and rebuild Krypton on Earth, after getting rid of all us pesky humans of course.

You get the prequel, the origin story, and the sequel all in one movie.

“…Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The infant of Krypton is now the Man of Steel: Superman! To best be in a position to use his amazing powers in a never-ending battle for truth and justice, Superman has assumed the disguise of Clark Kent…”

That above quote. Everyone’s heard it, or part of it, at least once probably, right? And that’s the inherent problem with making a Superman origins movie these days. Even if it’s a necessity (and it was), how do you pull it off without boring the life out of your audience?

Step one: Focus a little more on Krypton. Up ’til now in the movies Krypton’s been given a passing mention – it’s where Superman is from, it was about to blow up so his parents shipped him off and he landed on earth. In MoS we get a better look at this doomed planet, and instead of being a side story, seeds for plot points in acts Two and Three are sewn in to tie it all together. Exposition will get the job done, but if you can show it instead of tell it it makes a bigger impact. Also, I’m not the biggest Crowe fan, but I think he nailed being Jor-El.

Step two: Make Clark’s childhood mean something. Movie Superman’s childhood what do you think of? The Kents found a baby in a space ship. A toddler lifting the Kent’s truck right? A little gee whiz aw shucks mid-West right? Instead of showing it a linear fashion Clark’s childhood is shown in flashback as what happens around grown Clark reminds him of events from growing up as That Weird Kent Boy. Adapting to Earth and its yellow sun. Having to make the choices of saving people or keeping what he is a secret. The lessons his Earth parents taught him.

Step three: Don’t be afraid to cut out the hokeyness. What happened to the Superman movies? They got cheesier and cheesier. And I can sum this up for Returns in one quote: “WRONG!” I know some people (myself included) were worried that with Christopher Nolan being involved in the script, it would lose too much of its comic book feel. Yes Superman is still an alien. Yes he still wears the body suit and has a long red cape. But there’s nothing tongue in cheek or ham handed about it. Clark still fights for truth and justice, but the movie never makes fun of that fact. MoS goes the straight faced route, but I don’t think it lost anything. I will say though that the Clark hiding he’s an alien is more at the front than super heroism, though Clark is heroic, but since it’s an origin story and there is the fact that people would have to deal with being introduced to a god-like being flying around I’m okay with it. And when I say it’s played straight, I’m talking about how the material is handled, there are a couple of amusing moments so it’s not all serious the whole movie.

“How do you spell ‘massacre’?”

You know where Returns actually lost me the though? I can pinpoint the exact moment – When Lois Lane doesn’t know how to spell (I still haven’t entirely forgiven Kate Bosworth). I love Amy Adams anyways, but I really liked MoS‘s Lois. Since the question of “When is she going to figure out Clark and Superman are the same person?” is out of the equation we can just move forward with both characters as individuals and together. I approve. Also, and this is a problem I had with Thor‘s Jane Foster, she’s worked into the plot as more than just kidnap bait. Without spoiling plot, I appreciate the efforts made and that the execution was mostly solid. Amy has my okay to come back as Lois.

“…That’s because in his mind he didn’t just kill him, he baptized him first.”

That quote came from a discussion about Michael Shannon’s character on Boardwalk Empire. Shannon has mastered the art of playing crazy guys who believe they are doing the right thing because they believe in their cause, and have no idea that they are crazy and have no conscious that their actions are wrong. Where Terence Stamp played Zod to the hilt as flashy and mustache twirly as possible, Shannon’s Zod just cannot understand how no one else sees what he’s doing is perfectly logical and natural. I know some people weren’t okay with this Zod, but I liked this take.

“You know, I really enjoyed that. Not just comparing it to Superman Returns. On its own, it was really good.”

On the more technical side of things, this is actually the first movie I’ve seen in an IMAX theater, and I don’t regret it. The action on Krypton was really good and there’s lots of actiony stuff going on, but there’s one thing I want to highlight. Faora-Ul (Antje Traue) fight scenes are pretty cool. I just loved them. They were so violently pretty. Yay for pretty violence. Also, I’d argue that this is Hans Zimmer’s best soundtrack since the first Pirates movie. I’m not saying it was distracting or took me out of the movie, it fits perfectly with the movie, but I found myself a couple of times just listening to it and enjoying it. I’d say after Sucker Punch this is Zack Snyder’s best work.

“There was too many endings.”

Was there anything wrong with the movie? There was perhaps a little too much collateral damage in the movie? Is it possible for there to be too much action in an action movie? Usually you build up to the big smash bang ending, but as soon as the first fight between Superman and the Kryptonians happens the movie is nonstop leveling cities, for like the next hour. I’m not saying it’s bad or there’s no good moments, but there’s so much building smashing. This quote is from Elijah Wood talking about a conversation he had with Jack Nicholson about Return of the King, and it seems fitting here. Off the top of my head MoS has no less than five moments that felt like endings. I actually didn’t really mind this fact, while the movie is a little on the long side (143 minutes) I don’t see where any of it could have been cut. …Except we maybe could’ve shortened the final showdown between Supes and Zod (ending three by the way) it just kept going like the Enegizer bunny. And I’ll talk about how that matchup ended at the bottom of the page as it is super spoilery.

I’m not sure how I felt about Diane Lane’s Martha Kent. It’s not that I have a problem with her, I thinks it’s the accent they had going for her, I dunno there was just something off about it.

“Wow.”

So we’ve discussed the story and some things I liked, and some things I didn’t, but what about The Cape himself? This would usually be where I write a love note to Henry Cavill, but I’m going to be above that this time (I can’t promise I won’t put something in Intermission! though). Henry Cavill plays Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman completely earnest, completely honest. I can’t find anything that I didn’t like in his depiction of Superman. I thought it was a great performance and excellent casting.

So I actually really loved it, and plan on buying it. Seriously, check it out in theaters, it’s where you’ll get the most out of it I promise you.

I have one more thing, that I want to talk about because it’s something that’s really bugging people about the movie, but I’ll make it the last since it’s a huge spoiler.

Last chance to stop reading. Okay. So, I wouldn’t usually talk about an actual ending, but this is a big one in terms of the Superman character. He actually kills Zod, and not just a copout allows him to die ala Batman Begins, I mean he is put in a position to either kill him or watch a family be slowly murdered, and chooses to kill him. It was a little disturbing for Superman to have to kill someone, and that’s kinda how the movie treats it too in the context of scene. It was unexpected and dark, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. While Superman may have actively killed someone, it was to protect innocents, so in that way I buy it more than Batman’s “I don’t have to save you.” which was completely and definitely out of character for Bats. And then he, Supes, is all torn up over it instead of being all ‘Oh well’, apparently this is exactly the reaction that Snyder was trying to get across so… I just, I dunno.

Intermission!

• Lexcorp on the gas trucks. Wayne Enterprises on the satellite. (We all got excited and started whispering to each other. Because we’re all huge nerds)
• While I don’t remember anyone actually saying where Clark grew up, Smallville is on the water tower
• Wilhelm Scream alert
• The sign that says “Days since last accident 143” goes to zero while Superman and Zod are destroying the construction site. Ha!
• Superman “S” symbols
• Anyone else get chills when he put on the glasses?
• So Zack Snyder wanted to put in shirtless scenes “because throughout the film, you see [Henry Cavill] in a form-fitting body suit where he appears extremely muscular. He said the audience would think it was all rubber muscles, but it was important to show them it was indeed Henry Cavill’s body in that suit and that it was all real.” I just want to say how much I respect Snyder’s creative decision. Two thumbs up, Zack!
• In an interview with Jay Leno, Henry Cavill said he missed the call from Zack Snyder for the role while playing World of Warcraft. So hold on, he’s gorgeous, has an accent, talented, Superman, age appropriate, AND plays WoW? Henry, we’re meant to be! Call me!
• I want a Fortress of Solitude (Or as I call it the Mancave of Me Time)
• The way the trucker just bounces off Clark’s chest, I love it. Good luck with that, guy.
• I know there are a lot of comic book references all over, but it’s been too long since I’ve actually read the comics for me to remember specifics, and I don’t want to just repost other people’s hard compiling work, but it’s out there to find.