Man of Steel
Directed by Zack Snyder
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
In the superhero genre, there are two types of movies.
One is the very serious, gritty, and realistic movie that focuses more on the characters than their supernatural abilities. Think The Dark Knight.
Others are like junk food: they don’t take themselves seriously, and are just there to provide the audience with two hours of guilt-free fun, like The Avengers.
Man of Steel tries to be both those movies. Unfortunately, that combination doesn’t always work out well.
The movie is a re-introduction to Superman (Henry Cavill), one of the most iconic heroes to ever come out of comic books. Like in previous movies, Superman’s past as a baby sent off from a dying world to land in rural Kansas is explored. This is, until he decides to become the world’s saviour.
The first act of the movie explores Superman’s past through a series of flashbacks that tie into the present-day story, where Superman is trying to figure out who he is. The film’s start is excellently done and explores Superman’s home planet of Krypton more than any other movie has. We get to see how Krypton functioned, what its inhabitants were like, and why it was doomed.
As soon as Superman quite literally hits Earth, the story becomes much slower.
It’s not until the final act of the movie that the action really picks up. At this point the movie just becomes a big violent punch-and-fly fest, where various characters compete to see who can destroy more city infrastructure.
But this is fine. This is a man who can outrun trains and lift them: he should be destroying heavy things for our amusement.
It’s when the film tries to take itself too seriously that things go wrong.
A lot of the character development felt forced, as if to give an excuse for all the violence that would erupt later on. But Superman doesn’t need an existential crisis about what it means to be human in order to fight evil aliens: he just does that.
It also seemed like a lot of the character development was rushed through; here’s why these people feel these things, now let’s see them destroy buildings. But because the movie refuses to let go of its serious nature, those character developments stay remarkably shallow, while at the same time not allowing for guilt-free fun.
Lois Lane (Amy Adams), for example, who is an incredibly complicated and important influence on Superman in the comics, becomes an adoring fangirl with a hard-on for annoying her superiors at the Daily Planet with “journalistic integrity.” In the end, I found myself not caring for her or almost any of the characters, even though I know the movie was telling me I should.
But it’s not all bad. Once the action picks up, it doesn’t really matter who cried when and who had a really profound moment of self-doubt. What matters is that Superman is back, and he’s as awesome as ever. If you can get past how serious the movie is trying to take itself, it becomes a really great way to laugh and relax.
