Man of Steel (2013) **/*****
Superman is one of the most beloved and recognizable pop culture icons created in the last century. Everyone knows his symbol, his powers, and his origin story. But because Hollywood never saw an origin story it didn’t want to retell, they’ve decided that in order to reboot the Superman movie franchise, the public is going to have to be retaught everything about the Man of Steel. It’s all here: the baby sent away from the exploding planet in a rocket ship, the nurturing couple who find him and raise him on their Kansas farm, the alien structure in the frozen north that teaches him about his origins, and the job in the big city that comes complete with a high strung love interest/rival. The only difference here from what’s come before is that the origin story of Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman has been mixed with the evil-Kryptonian-General-comes-to-Earth story of his 1980 sequel, Superman 2, and the results are a movie that gets pretty crowded, even with a 143 minute run time.
To be fair, the Man of Steel script by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan does make an effort to skip some of the origin story in order to get right into the meat of the conflict, but it makes the mistake of skipping over the stuff we still need to have reestablished while painstakingly detailing all of the stuff that everyone knows. To be more specific, it shows us the events on Krypton that led to his being sent to Earth, it shows us how he finds the hologram of his alien dad that explains to him who he really is, and it shows us how he gets a super suit and decides to start using his powers to be a superhero, but what it fails to do is establish for us who this Superman/Kal-El/Clark Kent is as a person. We go straight from his being an infant to his being a fully-formed man, only getting to know him through a small handful of flashbacks to life on the farm that are spread evenly throughout the film. The effect is that we’re looking at Superman the icon, the pop culture figure that exists on Underoos and lunch boxes, but it never quite feels like we’re being told a story about an actual person.
The main problems with the film come down to its focus and structure. It opens on the planet Krypton, with Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and his wife Lara (Ayelet Zurer) fretting over what to do with their newborn son Kal-El (who eventually grows up to become Henry Cavill) now that their planet is getting ready to explode and the only other person who agrees with them that they’re doomed is cutthroat military commander, General Zod (Michael Shannon), who wants to deal with the problem by killing everyone in power and taking over for himself. This is the most fleshed-out and interesting look at Krypton we’ve ever gotten — certainly in the movies, and perhaps even in the comics — and it made for a great start to the film. There was action, there were stakes, Crowe was doing his best to impersonate a Shakespearian actor, and he rode a dragon into battle against an invading squadron of space ships — we get what looks to be the beginning of a really promising sci-fi adventure. But, unfortunately, once Krypton explodes, Man of Steel largely goes with it.
Soon after we get to Earth we’re introduced to Lois Lane (Amy Adams), an enterprising reporter for the Daily Planet who’s traveled to someplace fairly anonymous in frozen Canada to report on a strange structure that the military has found trapped deep beneath thousands-of-years-old ice. When Lois enters the structure, it turns out she’s entering a Kryptonian spaceship that contains alien dangers that would have killed her if not for the intervention of a super-strong and super-handsome stranger. Interest piqued, Lane takes it upon herself to find out who this stranger was, and her investigation soon leads her to the doorstep of Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) with a great deal of questions to ask about their son Clark (Cavill again). Also, unbeknownst to everyone, the fiddling around with the spaceship Clark and Lois did set off a beacon that was picked up by that evil Kryptonian General from the first act, and it isn’t long before he and his followers make a beeline to Earth.
All of this recap has been the long way of dancing around my big problem with the movie — it has no idea who its protagonist is. For the first act it feels like this is a movie about Jor-El, even after he’s been dead for a while. Then, somewhere in the second act, it starts to feel like its a movie about Lois Lane. Before you can get too invested in what she’s doing, however, it all turns into an hour-long fight over the fate of Earth between Superman and General Zod, and they weren’t even in the movie very much up until that point. Because the film chooses to only give us isolated glimpses of the childhood of Clark Kent, it’s like he’s not even a character in it. He exists somewhere between the lines of what we see. Everyone wants to get at Superman for some reason, and there’s a lot of hemming and hawing about what he’s going to mean for Earth, but who Clark Kent the man is or why he makes the choices he does is never in doubt or of any real concern. With Man of Steel, Zack Snyder has directed a Superman movie where Superman isn’t even the protagonist, he’s the MacGuffin.
Fortunately for him and us though, while he made a movie where the side characters often take center stage, he also made a movie where the supporting cast is one of its biggest assets. This thing is packed full of strong character actors, and generally everyone does a great job. Special attention should be given to Adams and Costner though, because they’re both especially memorable. Lois Lane is a character who can come off as abrasive and annoying, because generally she’s a cocky loudmouth whose stubbornness is always causing her to rush off into dangerous situations she can’t handle, and the results are often her looking like a stupid blowhard. Here though, despite the fact that Lane gets into plenty of predicaments that predictably require her to be saved by Superman, Adams (and admittedly Goyer and Nolan’s script) is always able to make her seem gritty and intelligent enough that you never really blame her for being there. She’s swept up into a situation that’s beyond her control and that sees her in over her head, but once she’s there she does her best to contribute and survive. Or, perhaps I just like her because this version of Lane is the sort of girl who orders straight scotch at a bar.
Costner, for his part, seems to be the only person involved with the film concerned with whether or not the audience would identify with Clark Kent as a character. To be fair, both he and Lane make the best of the flashback sequences where they’re playing Kent’s parents, but Costner in particular just seems to be oozing Field of Dreams out of his pores in a superman effort to make the father/son bonding scenes he’s a part of resonate with a general audience. If there’s any reason we sympathize with Clark, or have any interest in him whatsoever, it’s because of how deeply we know Costner’s Jonathan Kent cares about him. If Crowe’s Jor-El is the real action hero of the film, then Costner’s Jonathan Kent is its heart.
Cavill and Shannon, for their parts, never resonate with you a fraction as much as the people in more supporting roles. Shannon, who is always magnetically bonkers in his performances, is playing such a personality-free villain here that he never gets an opportunity to stand out in the slightest. He’s humanized a bit toward the end, but he’s never interesting. Heck, he’s an unfeeling machine who was built for one purpose — the script even admits that to us. And, through no fault of his own, Cavill is the worst onscreen Superman we’ve ever seen. He’s got the look and it’s possible he could have been great, but he just isn’t given anything to do other than wear the suit and show off his exceptional jawline. Heck, they didn’t even have the decency to let him rock a spit curl.
Man of Steel is such a spectacle-driven action movie that most of its storytelling problems could have been forgiven if it delivered in its presentation of thrilling action scenes, but, unfortunately, this is where it makes its second biggest mistake. Snyder has more than proven that he’s a director capable of creating gorgeous, epic in scope action scenarios at this point, but he’s also proven that he’s extremely unlikely to make any of them actually engaging. Establish a character, make the audience care for them, put their life in jeopardy, and then milk that jeopardy for all the tension that it’s worth — that’s how you craft an effective action scenario. Heck, that’s pretty much the basics of storytelling. What Man of Steel does instead is throw you in the middle of world-ending insanity devastating enough to kill millions and millions of people, and then completely ignores the fact that any of them are dying. And seeing as the main characters doing battle are all invulnerable aliens who can’t be damaged in the slightest, the entire last hour of the film devolves into their beating on each other without effect, over and over again, to the point where the audience eventually becomes as numb as their steel skin. Where are the stakes in that?
Immediately coming out of Man of Steel I was thinking that probably I’d give it a middling rating. I thought that its supporting actors worked hard enough and its effects team put together impressive enough spectacle that it was at least worth one gander. But the more I sit with the memory of Man of Steel, the more I think that anything it accomplished was too overpowered by the mistakes it made to matter. That final hour of action sequences especially looks worse and worse with time. In every Superman story I’ve ever read since I was a little kid, the defining characteristic of the character was that he was humanity’s ultimate protector. Whenever he’s in a fight with a supervillain, his first thought is how he can move it to a less populated area, how he can put less people at risk. If someone is in danger, he’ll drop what he’s doing immediately to make sure they’re okay. It’s really his greatest weakness. His villains can’t touch him because he’s invulnerable, but they can constantly find ways to outmaneuver him because they know his focus is going to be too divided due to his empathy and concern. That he’s able to find a way to defeat them anyway, usually through feats of strength, is the great fantasy of the Superman mythos. It allows the viewer to indulge in the idea that everything will work out as long as they’re good and true.
The climax of Man of Steel is just a bunch of mindless death and destruction served up so we can indulge in a disturbing Romans-in-the-Coliseum lust for violence. Things get far too destructive, to the point where the Earth is basically cracked open and blocks and blocks of densely populated urban areas are decimated, and Superman doesn’t stop mindlessly fighting in order to find a way to save people more than one or two token times. The devastation in this movie gets so bad that the third act is full of quite a bit of truly disturbing 9/11 imagery, and the camera never once lingers long enough in the background to even acknowledge that the goings on are killing at least hundreds of thousands of people. If you want to invoke 9/11 to explore mortality or how humanity reacts to tragedy, that’s one thing, but to do it without acknowledging any of the stakes or consequences at all, just so a special effects-hungry international film audience can feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth from a summer blockbuster action climax is pretty atrocious, and it has precious little to do with the Superman mythos that have become so important to so many people over the past 81 years. If Superman Returns failed as a Superman movie because it never gave us that cathartic moment where Superman got fed up and punched the bad guy in the mush, Man of Steel fails as a Superman movie because it gives us a hero who becomes so focused on punching the bad guy that he forgets protecting us was supposed to be the thing most important to him in the first place.
