This took me a while to finish;
I wouldn’t be surprised to find Man of Steel out of theaters already. But I
figure since I’ve already written it, I might as well post it.
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Man of Steel is a flawed
movie. That’s inescapable. You can’t watch the movie without coming to that
conclusion. But a lot of movies are flawed. If you look close enough, every movie is flawed. What, then, do I
mean by saying it’s flawed?
I mean that the writing
wrecks this movie beyond repair. But I’ll get around to that in a moment.
First, I’m going to talk about the things I like about it. And there are plenty of
those.
The casting is flawless,
from leading man Henry Cavill (who’s a Wheel of Time fan, of course) to
Laurence Fishburne as Perry White. I don’t remember even once looking at a
character and thinking, “Really? They chose that
actor?” Almost always—Christopher Meloni as Colonel Hardy in particular—I was
immediately behind the choice.
The performances that
follow are just as good. Cavill is perhaps more convincing as Kal-El than any
other I’ve seen; Michael Shannon is ruthless and compelling as Zod; Amy Adams
is solid as Lois Lane; Russell Crowe sells the part of proto-Superman Jor-El,
and Diane Lane deepens the part of Ma Kent.
The sole exceptions are
the children version of Clark Kent, who were both terrible.
Another strength is the
decision not to weaken Lois Lane. She’s more capable for much of the movie than
Superman is himself; she helps to solve more problems than he does, even if it does lead to her needing Supes to rescue
her.
The effects are awesome.
In particular, I love Superman’s first flight. I would have enjoyed the movie
if it had been two and a half hours of that
scene. Other effects I liked are the Dragonball Z-level destruction in the
fight scenes, the incredible opening sequence, and Faora’s fights—against human
opponents in particular. During these moments, I feel hope that Superman may get the movie he deserves one day.
This isn’t that movie.
Here’s why:
There’s no character
depth in this movie, no character growth. No, I’ll go further. There are no characters in this movie. There
are only vehicles for exposition.
For those of you who are
unfamiliar with the term, exposition is the part of a story that presents
information to the reader. Whether the information is factual or a revelation
of internal conflict, it is critical to the story that the reader has this information.
Everyone who writes anything worth writing uses exposition. The way the
exposition is handled is one of the main things The Avengers gets absolutely
right. It’s hard to do it well, though, and easy to do it badly.
It’s not easy to do it as
badly as Man of Steel does.
(Here’s some information
about dialogue. Exposition is a large part of what people need to learn to do
correctly. http://www.writingexcuses.com/tag/dialog/)
One of the more obvious
examples of the problem is what Superman says to one villain right before the
fight begins. He actually says these
words, mind you. “You’re a monster, and I will stop you.” No clever twist
on this 1930s comic book line. No humor, no little nod that this was an
unoriginal line. No “sorry we couldn’t think of a better one”. They treat it
like gold. Even a fool wouldn’t think it is.
Let me repeat this:
Cavill’s performance is spot-on for 99.9% of the movie. But he can’t make this
line convincing, top of his form as he is.
On the rare occasion that
the characters aren’t spoon-feeding me information, they were giving me lines
that produced this exact reaction:
Granted, there is an
exception to this. One exception.
About halfway through, when Clark Kent returns to Ma Kent after learning his
origins. This scene, 4 or 5 minutes long, has maybe 10 lines. This allows the
performances to breathe, and it pays off. Both Cavill and Diane Lane give a
depth and reality to their character that they aren’t allowed to before or
after that point.
An oasis in the desert of
horrible writing.
The plot is…serviceable.
Were it lying beneath better dialogue, it would run from beginning to end with
few spots truly stretching suspension of disbelief. It is never as weak as the
exposition or (lack of) characterization would make it out to be. The worst
part of the plot is the need for flashbacks.
And my god, the
flashbacks.
Not only are the little
Clarks wooden, but the characterizations are bizarro versions of themselves
(and not in the good way); no one has sensible motivations, and all of it feels
like it’s there because it has to be
there, even when no one wants it.
Now it’s time for the
smaller issues I had with the movie. These range from things I would have spent
pages picking on had the overall writing been better, to problems I probably
wouldn’t have even noticed.
Spoilers beyond this
point.
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Pa Kent is given a
nonsensical Uncle Ben. That is, he dies for no other reason than to hammer home
the lesson he was trying to teach. Literally, he stands there and lets himself
die when he doesn’t have to. Unlike Uncle Ben, though, Kent is teaching a
terrible lesson; essentially, “Don’t be Superman, Superman.” It goes against
Clark’s entire childhood, his entire set of morals.
Speaking of people who
just stood there and let bad things happen, Superman doesn’t have to kill Zod.
Essentially, Supes has Zod in a headlock, and Zod decides to cut down the
family in front of them with his heat vision. Not only could the family have
simply moved out of the way, but
Supes could have lifted Zod up, or flown them both the heck out of town.
In fact, Superman never intentionally
draws the villains away from civilian-populated, “target rich” environments. Not
once does he think of the destruction that will rain down on the city and act
accordingly. Never does he balance the battle against the villains with saving
individuals that the battle puts in harm’s way. He doesn’t do anything heroic
in the third act aside from defeating the villains, and never does anything
clever at all.
I wanted to put this up
to his inexperience. I mean, he’s a twenty-something still trying to discover
himself, trying to explore his powers, his origins, come to terms with who and
what he is. He makes mistakes. He’s stupid. But he’s young. What else should we
expect?
Huh? What’s that? He’s
supposed to be 33? Really? 33? Wow. Well, all I can say to that is, WHAT WERE
THEY THINKING?!
I know what they were
thinking. They wanted to turn him into Space Jesus. Anakin Skywalker, eat your
heart out. I’m not going into details as to the many ways they did this, but I will point you to the trailer for the
movie, the now-infamous crucifix pose. That’s just the beginning.
The question is, why are
all these Space Jesus people such terrible heroes?
That brings me to another
point. The depiction of Superman is always just slightly off. It was like the
writers had never watched one of the dozen animated series’ he’s in, let alone
read the comics. Every depiction of Superman that I love shows him to be
clever, to wield a dry wit, to have a slight Hollywood-esque aura around him.
It’s like nothing ever can or will go wrong while he’s present. He projects
strength. He always does the right
thing. These things define Superman for me. Making him less capable to fit the
plot might very well be necessary, but making him less him isn’t.
The tone of the entire
movie is darker than it needs to be. A conservative estimate of the deaths in
the movie is in the tens of thousands; I’ve heard the numbers as high as a
couple million. Many of them don't need to die. Many of them shouldn’t die.
Finally, in the last
flashback of the movie, Clark tells Ma Kent that he wishes Jonathan (Pa) Kent
had seen him become a hero. Ma states that Pa did see Clark this way, because they both had always believed that
he was destined to do great things. As the scene fades into that last
flashback, you have about ten seconds to think: “wow, that’s actually a pretty
great note to end on.” Then a child Clark is running around with a shirt pinned
to him like a cape. His arms are outstretched, “flying”. Then the scene ends
with him standing in the classic fists-on-hips superhero pose. That’s all fine
and good, and actually kind of cute. But then you remember that all those superhero tropes were built from
Superman, and he must thus be pretending to be a future version of himself.
That’s about it. I won’t
go into the armor designs, which everyone agrees are ridiculous, or the kiss at
the end, which everyone knows is forced, or the shaky cam, which everyone
already hates. The music, composed by Hans Zimmer, is entirely forgettable, but
never distracting. The directing by Zack Snyder is heavily stylized, slick and proficient, but
is neither a strength or a weakness to the film.
The funny thing is, I know Iron Man 3 is much better, objectively. But I’m far less attached to
Supes, and therefore far less conflicted about the movie. As awful as the
dialogue is, as inept as the character development is, as unnecessarily bleak
as the tone is, I enjoyed this film in a popcorn-movie sort of way, almost as
much as I did Iron Man 3.
Man of Steel, you get a 6 out of 10 from me.
The movie’s biggest mistake?
Writer David S. Goyer. He’s done some fine work elsewhere, but this movie kills
any good faith I had in him.
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Tell me what you thought
of the movie. Did you like something I trashed? Did you notice a problem I
didn’t mention? Put it in the comments, and we can discuss them.
