From the Vault: Man of Steel

In which I review a movie from my collection.

With all of this Dawn of Justice talk in the air, I figured that it was high time to revisit a movie that I never actually thought that I would like going into it: Man of Steel.  I've never been a big Superman fan; he's basically always struck me as an infinitely less interesting Captain America: a boyscout with no discernible personality other than being a decidedly good guy.  The first movie with Christopher Reeve was solid, but the series quickly spiraled into stupidity from there.  Man of Steel was DC's first real crack at the character in years, and they had a lot to prove given the competition.

In the last days of Krypton, Jor El and his wife Lara commit treason by giving birth to a son: Kal, who is sent to Earth where he will live on as the last son of Krypton.  When General Zod's opportunistic coup is put down, however, he swears vengeance on the Kal, vowing to track him down to the ends of the universe for what his parents did to him.  But a greater destiny awaited him on Earth: to become the hero that the planet desperately deserved.

I will readily admit that I never expected to enjoy a Superman movie this much going into it.  There was actually more to this version of the character than "a genuinely good guy masquerading as a buffoon."  He's a troubled young man desperately trying to find his place in a world that he knows he doesn't belong to.  After discovering where it is that he really came from, however, he steps up to become a beacon of hope to his adopted people and save them from a decidedly Kryptonian threat.

Besides that, the movie featured some incredibly top-notch action sequences.  In particular, the final fight between Zod and Superman was some of the best stuff that I've seen in superhero movies to date.  While it's not quite "Battle of New York" good, it's a savage smack down that's everything I ever wanted to see from what essentially amounts to a battle of gods.

That being said, though, the movie is really flawed in a few fundamental ways.  As I've already enumerated on, Man of Steel neither looks nor feels like a Superman movie.  That's not to say that I miss the comic-looking Reeve movies, just that a Superman movie aught to look like, well, a Superman movie.  It needlessly adopted a gritty, Dark Knight aesthetic that was completely wrong for the franchise because that's what Warner Bros figured would sell.

While I do appreciate the new direction that they took with the character - trying to actually make him dynamic and interesting - they didn't fully succeed at that task.  He definitely has a Hell of a lot more to work with than Supermen of the past, but it all came off as more than a little heavy handed and vaguely adolescent.  And while there's always been a religious aspect to the character (basically having Moses' childhood and Jesus' adulthood, only with more punching), the ways in which the movie manifests this subtext is far too blatant and overbearing.

Zod is an incredibly one-note villain, given life through an absurdly over-the-top performance.  While I really liked the literal twist of his life's purpose - that he was raised to protect Krypton specifically and nothing less than an actual, factual Krypton would do - that comes up so far into the movie, and preceded by so much over-the-top screen time, that it's pretty much a case of too little, too late.

I also never cared for its needlessly non-linear story-telling on the Earth side of things.  Now, I love Memento and The Imitation Game as much as the next guy, but those movies worked precisely because they demanded that kind of non-traditional editing.  Man of Steel is a big budget action movie where aliens punch each other until the world around them is leveled into dust.  The arrangement of the film is both unnecessary and distracting to the actual story that it's trying to tell, and I can't help but feel like it was utilized at least partly to hide a substandard coming of age narrative under its superheroic dressing

Upon rewatching the movie, I was surprised at how little Clark's soul searching quest held up in retrospect.  Sure, none of it's bad, but it's never quite interesting enough to really care about.  On top of that, Jonathon Kent is probably the worst father in the history of cinema: telling his godly son that he should have let his entire class die because saving them might draw a bit of unwanted (and decidedly local) attention to himself.  I agree that his altruism should be tempered with caution, but what he was talking about was standing by and watching dozens of innocent children die for the most thinly justified of reasons.

And for as awesome as the first half hour is on Krypton - seriously, at one point we watch Jor-El fly a dragon through an alien apocalypse - the terrestrial half never quite held up to that opening sequence's promise.  It had a good cast, good director and a bloated budget, but never quite came together into the Superman movie that it was trying to be.

If this is the best that we can expect from DC, they should quickly prove to be no competition for Marvel cinematically.  I can only hope that from here on out, they'll make Superman feel like Superman, Batman feel like Batman and have everybody else fall somewhere in between the two.  That's not to say that Man of Steel is a bad movie, just that it's it's a reasonably solid one that simply fails to hold up as well as it should on repeated viewings.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  If you can look past its glaring flaws, there's a pretty solid movie there.

So what did you think of Man of Steel?  Does it make you excited for the nascent DC Cinematic Universe's future outings?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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