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Man of Steel (review, spoilers)
Jun. 17th, 2013 10:38 amFor a while after Revenge of the Sith came out I'd pop the disc into the machine about once a year and re-watch it in a vain hope that it might have become a good film. All the ingredients were there, you see. Great effects, and solid cast*, the scenes I'd been waiting for most of my life to see, and in my heart I harboured a hope that through some sort of quantum alchemy this time when I watched it, it might not suck. I was always disappointed and eventually sometime about 2009 I gave my copy to a charity shop to blight someone else's life.
For similar reasons I recently re-watched The Dark Knight Rises and, once again, was disappointed that the film I recalled as being really very ho-hum in the cinema remained resolutely very ho-hum on my television. Fortunately I don't have to go through the multiple re-watching experience as I learned my lesson from George Lucas' epic and I'm not making that mistake again.
It was the same sort of irritable disappointment which I felt after watching Revenge of the Sith and The Dark Knight Rises that I felt as I trudged out of the cinema after sitting through Man of Steel last night. You see, the latest iteration of Superman gets all the ingredients right - look, actors, ideas, design, etc &c, but ultimately it's just not a very good film. I'd really like it to be, but at least this time I don't need to see it again to know that my disappointment isn't mistaken. It's just... okay. At best.
Like Revenge of the Sith and Dark Knight Rises, there's a lot to the film which on the face of it is good. Possibly my favourite things were the design work (Krypton has a high-tech art-deco aesthetic which I found delightful, especially one animated historical sequence which beautifully referenced 30's Flash Gordon-eqsue design whilst simultaneously being mad space technology) and the visualisation of superpowered fights; the flickering super-speed assisted punchfests which make up much of the last third of the film, with characters trading blows at supersonic speeds and immense power**. However, in counterpoint there's some stuff I just fely, well, wrong for Superman. In the same way that in the 2006 film we had Superman hanging round outside Lois Lane's house using his X-Ray vision to watch her in her underwear didn't feel much like the sort of thing the character would do, this film also has some jarring character moments.
The point of Superman, you see, is that he's an immigrant to the United States who loses himself in the endless plains of the midwest and there learns what it mean to be human and, more than that, the exemplar of the "Shining city on the hill" that would be a beacon to all mankind. The myth of Superman isn't just a story about a strong flying bloke who can punch villains through the moon; it's the story of America itself, and how America sees itself - and when you watch this iteration of the myth you really have to wonder what it's saying about that self-perception. In the normal origin story, we have honest, salt of the earth farmer Jonathan Kent showing his adopted child to do good with his power and not to count the cost. In this version we have a scene in which the young Clark saves a busload of kids from a watery grave and gets seen doing it. This doesn't result in Jonathan telling Clark to be more careful so people learn of his powers, but instead we get a conversation which goes like this:
Jonathan: "you were seen saving those kids. I told you not to be seen!"
Clark: "Should I have just let them all die?"
Jonathan: "Maybe..."
Thereby teaching the young Superman the contemporary American values of Truth, Justice, and Only saving people if it isn't overly inconvenient.
It's this sort of tonal quality that the film just gets wrong about the character. In the final extended fight sequence between Superman and baddy General Zod, the two punch their way through the middle of one of the most densely-populated urban areas on Earth. Buildings topple and fall before their wrath and - get this - not once does Superman show the slightest concern for the untold thousands of people unable to escape who are undoubtedly being squashed into jam by the destruction in their wake. Normally, the rules say that if you're a superhero battling an indestructible foe you do your best to take it somewhere where all those inconveniently easily-squashed civilians aren't going to be, well, squashed into jam by your fight. Here we just get a live-action remake of Team America, as wholesale destruction and their inevitable massive causalities aren't so much glossed over as instantly forgotten about. The fact that the fight footage deliberately visually references the shots of people fleeing the wall of dust in 9/11 just adds to the wrongness of tone. I mean, WTF, Superman?
And that brings me on to General Zod. Michael Shannon, who plays Zod, does gimlet-eyed staring lunacy very well, which is ideal for the character. Zod was, we learn, genetically engineered to be the perfect soldier to command the Kryponite army and after the destruction of Krypton he travels to Earth looking for Superman in an attempt to rebuild his race and homeworld. As an objective this is actually pretty laudable but there's yet another tonal problem here.
You might recall the 2009 Star Trek film where, if you stopped for one second to think about it, the baddy's plan only made sense if he was hopelessly insane. I can just about live with that as a motivation, but the 'bad guy plan which only makes sense if you're a nutter' seems to be a standard of blockbuster films (Skyfall, Dark Knight Rises, Star Trek Into Darkness, etc) and I'm getting tired of it. However, Man of Steel goes one step further. It isn't the case that Zod's plan would only make sense to a nutter. His plan would only make sense if you were a dribbling moron.
Allow me to explain. Zod arrives on Earth looking for Superman to retrieve information encoded into his cells which will allow him to start cloning Kryptonians and replenish his race. Having gained this information, he then sets about terraforming Earth into a 'New Krypton', a process which will result in the deaths of every human.
Now, Zod is supposed to have been bred to be a military genius, but at no point in his whole military genius upbringing did anyone ever gave him copy of The Art of War because the first rule is "Don't pick fights you don't need to have." When Zod explains that he's going to build his new world on Earth, my immediate reaction was "Why?". He has a terraforming machine which would allow him to turn any planet into his new homeworld and a spaceship which will allow him to travel anywhere in the universe pretty much instantly, but instead of getting the information he wants and leaving to, say, a nice little uninhabited planet orbiting Aldebaran and just getting on with it, he and his handful of goons pick a fight with a notoriously inventive and violent species who have access to Superman, Strategic Air Command, Nuclear Weapons and John Wayne - and then he acts all surprised when it doesn't work out for him.
That's not military genius. That's not even being a loony. That's being an outright imbecile. I don't know about you but I find it difficult to emotionally engage with a film where the person who is set up as the baddy is actually educationally subnormal. Perhaps the sequel will feature Superman punching some Downs Syndrome kids in the face whilst ignoring a combine harvester trundling through a crowd, because that's about as heroic as what he does here.
Like I said at the start, the story of Superman is the story of America and how it sees itself. An immigrant who grows to being something greater and becomes a beacon of hope to the huddled masses. From the evidence of Man of Steel, the way America now sees itself is as a beacon who saves people so long as it isn't too much trouble and rather than making helpful suggestions to people who need them ("Why don't you terraform a different planet? Then we won't have to kill you?"), they just kill them instead. And that's not a great way of seeing yourself.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Russell Crowe does really well. It needs saying as normally I don't like him, but he underplays his role as Jor-El wonderfully and he was definitely one of my favourite things in the film. The scene with him as a ghost in the spaceship**** with Lois Lane was delightful as he was clearly happy to let other people have the limelight - a very generous bit of acting.
*With the exception of Balsa Boy, but I don't suppose I needed to say that after all this time.
**It's just a shame that having visualised the fights so well, the director then combines the exciting and interesting*** filmic techniques of jump cutting, lens flare, shakycam and heavy shadow to ensure you never really get to see any of it.
**sarcasm
****You'll know when you see it.
For similar reasons I recently re-watched The Dark Knight Rises and, once again, was disappointed that the film I recalled as being really very ho-hum in the cinema remained resolutely very ho-hum on my television. Fortunately I don't have to go through the multiple re-watching experience as I learned my lesson from George Lucas' epic and I'm not making that mistake again.
It was the same sort of irritable disappointment which I felt after watching Revenge of the Sith and The Dark Knight Rises that I felt as I trudged out of the cinema after sitting through Man of Steel last night. You see, the latest iteration of Superman gets all the ingredients right - look, actors, ideas, design, etc &c, but ultimately it's just not a very good film. I'd really like it to be, but at least this time I don't need to see it again to know that my disappointment isn't mistaken. It's just... okay. At best.
Like Revenge of the Sith and Dark Knight Rises, there's a lot to the film which on the face of it is good. Possibly my favourite things were the design work (Krypton has a high-tech art-deco aesthetic which I found delightful, especially one animated historical sequence which beautifully referenced 30's Flash Gordon-eqsue design whilst simultaneously being mad space technology) and the visualisation of superpowered fights; the flickering super-speed assisted punchfests which make up much of the last third of the film, with characters trading blows at supersonic speeds and immense power**. However, in counterpoint there's some stuff I just fely, well, wrong for Superman. In the same way that in the 2006 film we had Superman hanging round outside Lois Lane's house using his X-Ray vision to watch her in her underwear didn't feel much like the sort of thing the character would do, this film also has some jarring character moments.
The point of Superman, you see, is that he's an immigrant to the United States who loses himself in the endless plains of the midwest and there learns what it mean to be human and, more than that, the exemplar of the "Shining city on the hill" that would be a beacon to all mankind. The myth of Superman isn't just a story about a strong flying bloke who can punch villains through the moon; it's the story of America itself, and how America sees itself - and when you watch this iteration of the myth you really have to wonder what it's saying about that self-perception. In the normal origin story, we have honest, salt of the earth farmer Jonathan Kent showing his adopted child to do good with his power and not to count the cost. In this version we have a scene in which the young Clark saves a busload of kids from a watery grave and gets seen doing it. This doesn't result in Jonathan telling Clark to be more careful so people learn of his powers, but instead we get a conversation which goes like this:
Jonathan: "you were seen saving those kids. I told you not to be seen!"
Clark: "Should I have just let them all die?"
Jonathan: "Maybe..."
Thereby teaching the young Superman the contemporary American values of Truth, Justice, and Only saving people if it isn't overly inconvenient.
It's this sort of tonal quality that the film just gets wrong about the character. In the final extended fight sequence between Superman and baddy General Zod, the two punch their way through the middle of one of the most densely-populated urban areas on Earth. Buildings topple and fall before their wrath and - get this - not once does Superman show the slightest concern for the untold thousands of people unable to escape who are undoubtedly being squashed into jam by the destruction in their wake. Normally, the rules say that if you're a superhero battling an indestructible foe you do your best to take it somewhere where all those inconveniently easily-squashed civilians aren't going to be, well, squashed into jam by your fight. Here we just get a live-action remake of Team America, as wholesale destruction and their inevitable massive causalities aren't so much glossed over as instantly forgotten about. The fact that the fight footage deliberately visually references the shots of people fleeing the wall of dust in 9/11 just adds to the wrongness of tone. I mean, WTF, Superman?
And that brings me on to General Zod. Michael Shannon, who plays Zod, does gimlet-eyed staring lunacy very well, which is ideal for the character. Zod was, we learn, genetically engineered to be the perfect soldier to command the Kryponite army and after the destruction of Krypton he travels to Earth looking for Superman in an attempt to rebuild his race and homeworld. As an objective this is actually pretty laudable but there's yet another tonal problem here.
You might recall the 2009 Star Trek film where, if you stopped for one second to think about it, the baddy's plan only made sense if he was hopelessly insane. I can just about live with that as a motivation, but the 'bad guy plan which only makes sense if you're a nutter' seems to be a standard of blockbuster films (Skyfall, Dark Knight Rises, Star Trek Into Darkness, etc) and I'm getting tired of it. However, Man of Steel goes one step further. It isn't the case that Zod's plan would only make sense to a nutter. His plan would only make sense if you were a dribbling moron.
Allow me to explain. Zod arrives on Earth looking for Superman to retrieve information encoded into his cells which will allow him to start cloning Kryptonians and replenish his race. Having gained this information, he then sets about terraforming Earth into a 'New Krypton', a process which will result in the deaths of every human.
Now, Zod is supposed to have been bred to be a military genius, but at no point in his whole military genius upbringing did anyone ever gave him copy of The Art of War because the first rule is "Don't pick fights you don't need to have." When Zod explains that he's going to build his new world on Earth, my immediate reaction was "Why?". He has a terraforming machine which would allow him to turn any planet into his new homeworld and a spaceship which will allow him to travel anywhere in the universe pretty much instantly, but instead of getting the information he wants and leaving to, say, a nice little uninhabited planet orbiting Aldebaran and just getting on with it, he and his handful of goons pick a fight with a notoriously inventive and violent species who have access to Superman, Strategic Air Command, Nuclear Weapons and John Wayne - and then he acts all surprised when it doesn't work out for him.
That's not military genius. That's not even being a loony. That's being an outright imbecile. I don't know about you but I find it difficult to emotionally engage with a film where the person who is set up as the baddy is actually educationally subnormal. Perhaps the sequel will feature Superman punching some Downs Syndrome kids in the face whilst ignoring a combine harvester trundling through a crowd, because that's about as heroic as what he does here.
Like I said at the start, the story of Superman is the story of America and how it sees itself. An immigrant who grows to being something greater and becomes a beacon of hope to the huddled masses. From the evidence of Man of Steel, the way America now sees itself is as a beacon who saves people so long as it isn't too much trouble and rather than making helpful suggestions to people who need them ("Why don't you terraform a different planet? Then we won't have to kill you?"), they just kill them instead. And that's not a great way of seeing yourself.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Russell Crowe does really well. It needs saying as normally I don't like him, but he underplays his role as Jor-El wonderfully and he was definitely one of my favourite things in the film. The scene with him as a ghost in the spaceship**** with Lois Lane was delightful as he was clearly happy to let other people have the limelight - a very generous bit of acting.
*With the exception of Balsa Boy, but I don't suppose I needed to say that after all this time.
**It's just a shame that having visualised the fights so well, the director then combines the exciting and interesting*** filmic techniques of jump cutting, lens flare, shakycam and heavy shadow to ensure you never really get to see any of it.
**sarcasm
****You'll know when you see it.
