While Superman Returns was a disappointment to Warner Bros., the Batman trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan was a huge success. Meanwhile, across the metaphorical aisle, Marvel’s cinematic universe was taking the world by storm, and Warner thought they should be able to do something similar.
So in 2013, they kicked off their own cinematic universe, leading off with the guy in red and blue who started it all in 1938, working off a script by the two guys (David S. Goyer and Nolan) who wrote those successful Bat-films.
Initially, the sequel to Superman Returns was also to be called Man of Steel, but ultimately Warner Bros. decided to consign that movie to the cornfield and start all over again. Particularly since that movie was so tethered to the 1978 and 1980 Super-films, they decided to start afresh so they could build up what is now generally referred to as the DC Extended Universe.
Buy the Book
Null Set
To that end, they consulted with several comics writers, among them Mark Waid (whose Superman: Birthright was mined for the movie) and Geoff Johns (whose Superman: Secret Origin was also mined). Amusingly, the script that Goyer and Nolan did based on conversations the two had about how to introduce Superman to a modern audience were predicated on Superman being the only superhero, in opposition to the cinematic universe it became the vanguard of.
Fresh off his adaptations of 300 and Watchmen, Zack Snyder was tapped to direct. For the first time, a non-American played the title role, with Brit Henry Cavill cast. He also went so far as to go through a brutal training regimen—no CGI or enhancements, and the Superman suit wasn’t padded. In addition, Amy Adams—who twice before read for the role of Lois Lane, for Superman Returns, and also for one of the development-hell Super-films that never got made—finally got the part, while two previous Robin Hoods—Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner—play Superman’s biological (Jor-El) and adopted (Jonathan Kent) fathers, respectively. Michael Shannon plays General Zod, with Antje Traue as Faora-Ul. (Amusingly, Gal Gadot was originally cast as Faora, but had to drop out due to being pregnant. Gadot will, of course, return as Wonder Woman in the sequel to this film.) Rounding out the cast are Diane Lane as Martha Kent, Ayelet Zurer as Lara Lor-Van, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Rebecca Buller as Jenny Jurwich, Michael Kelly as Steve Lombard (a Daily Planet reporter who had never been portrayed in live-action before), Christopher Meloni as Colonel Hardy, Harry Lennix as General Swanwick, Richard Schiff as Dr. Emil Hamilton (a scientist who is a longtime Superman supporting character in the comics; a S.T.A.R. Labs employee in four-color form, he’s established as being with DARPA in this movie), Christina Wren as Captain Farris, Carla Gugino as the voice of Kryptonian A.I.s, and Dylan Sprayberry and Cooper Timberline as the younger iterations of Clark Kent. In addition, several Canadian actors appear in this who also appeared in Smallville (which, like parts of Man of Steel, filmed in Vancouver), among them Alessandro Juliani, Ian Tracey, David Paetkau, Mike Dopud, Mackenzie Grey, Chad Krowchuk, Tahmoh Penikett, David Lewis, and Carmen Lavigne. (Adams also appeared in an episode of Smallville as the Kryptonite-infested villain-of-the-week in the first-season episode “Craving.”)
Cavill, Adams, Lane, Fishburne, Costner, Buller, Lennix, Wren, and Gugino will all return in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
“It’s not an ‘S’—on my world, it means ‘hope’.”
Man of Steel
Written by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer
Directed by Zack Snyder
Produced by Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas and Deborah Snyder
Original release date: June 10, 2013
On the planet Krypton, Lara Lor-Van gives birth, aided by her husband, the child’s father Jor-El. It’s the first natural birth on Krypton in centuries. Jor-El later speaks to the Kryptonian ruling council saying that the planet is doomed. Their harvesting the planetary core as an energy source has proven disastrous. Jor-El’s solution is to return to Krypton’s colonial days, to go to the outposts they established on other worlds before becoming home-bound, as it were.
Before the argument can continue, General Zod, the military leader of Krypton, starts a coup. Jor-El manages to escape Zod’s custody and go to the birthing creche, where new Kryptonian children are genetically engineered. He steals the codex, which contains the entirety of Krytpon’s genetic code and infuses that into the cells of his infant son Kal-El.
Zod’s forces attack the El home and Jor-El delays Zod while Lara prepares Kal for his journey. They’ve refitted a Phantom Zone conveyer into a starship that will send Kal to Earth. That planet’s atmosphere will supercharge his cells and his abilities, making him super-strong and with enhanced senses. Lara also leaves a jump drive with the House of El symbol (which means “hope,” but which is shaped very much like the letter “S”) in the ship.
Zod kills Jor-El and orders Kal’s ship destroyed, but at that point, the council’s forces have won the day, and the ship Zod ordered to destroy Kal’s ship is blown up. Zod and his people are taken into custody and sentenced to the Phantom Zone for murder and treason.
Krypton explodes shortly thereafter.
Cut to thirty-three years later. A bearded Clark Kent is working as a deckhand on a fishing boat in the Arctic Ocean. They respond to a distress call at an oil rig, and Kent manages to rescue the oil workers and keep the rig from collapsing long enough for the workers to be evacuated.
His boat job burned, Kent shaves and goes to work at a bar, where a trucker harasses the server. Kent threatens to throw the trucker out, but when the trucker pushes back, the server herself tells Kent not to bother. So instead, Kent trashes the guy’s truck.
We get flashbacks to Kent’s childhood, seeing how he had trouble adjusting to the onset of his X-ray vision and super-hearing, leading the other kids to taunt him as some kind of freak. When the school bus has a blowout on a bridge and careens over the side into the water, Kent uses his strength to rescue the bus and everyone inside, including pulling Pete Ross out of the water. Ross at this point goes from taunting Kent to being his best friend, but Ross’s mother is freaked out and thinks he’s some kind of angelic creature. Jonathan Kent reinforces his stern belief that Kent needs to hide his powers because humanity isn’t ready for it yet. He also finally shows Kent the starship that crashed on their farm when he was an infant.
When he was a teenager, a tornado hit. As people hide under an overpass (which was believed to be safe in the 1990s when this flashback takes place, though its efficacy as a hideout was proven false by 1999), the Kents see a woman and their dog still trapped, and Jonathan refuses to let Kent use his powers to save them, instead going in himself, and then sacrificing his own life rather than let Kent expose his powers to the public. Because, of course, it’s far better to leave your wife and kid with the trauma of watching you die on purpose.
Thirty-three-year-old Kent’s presence in the Arctic is finally explained when Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane shows up at a military base camp that’s been set up on the ice. The camp is on Canadian soil but run by the U.S. military—which is why Lane’s been allowed to report on their finding. The Canadians have no problem with her being there, and the U.S. Army is only there at the Canadians’ whim, so she gets to report on the big-ass thing they’ve found under the ice.
It’s actually a Kryptonian scout ship. Kent is drawn to it and investigates, while Lane breaks curfew and goes out on her own at night to take pictures.
Kent sees a port that’s the same size as the charm he wears around his neck—in truth, the jump drive Lara left in the ship with him—and he inserts it into the port. A holographic re-creation of Jor-El appears and tells him about his past.
Lane sets off the ship’s security, and Kent has to rescue her. She gets to see his powers up close. Kent also winds up with an outfit that looks exactly like the bodysuit Kryptonians wear under their battle armor, but with parts of it colored blue and red instead of the matte black that it was on Krypton. He also gets a red cape—a later flashback reveals that Kent used to play with his dog while wearing one—and, so caparisoned in a version of his Dad’s underwear, goes off to experiment with his powers, which Jor-El has told him is greater than he realizes. He figures out how to leap great distances and eventually fly.
For her part, Lane wants to find out who this super-strong dude is. Her boss, Perry White, refuses to run her story without corroboration—the U.S. Army’s official position is that there was no alien ship and no alien. Lane gives the story to Woodbern, an Internet journalist she has no respect for, and then tracks the various urban legends about the super-powered guy. She talks to the boat crew, the oil rig workers, the trucker, and more, tracing the stories all the way back to Smallville, Kansas.
Kent himself confronts her, telling her about his father’s sacrifice of his own life to preserve his secret. Lane’s response is not to say that that just proved his father was an idiot, and instead decides to drop the story. White suspends her for leaking the story to Woodbern.
Zod’s ship shows up in orbit of Earth, and Zod himself sends a message to the people of Earth that one of his fellow aliens is living among them and that there will be dire consequences if they don’t give him up to his forces. Woodbern goes on TV and says that Lane knows the guy personally, which puts Lane in the FBI’s crosshairs.
Kent then puts on his Dad’s colored onesie and his cape and surrenders himself to the U.S. military. He pointedly surrenders to humanity rather than Zod, and will do whatever they say. He also makes it clear that he can escape any time, but he’s choosing to be cooperative. (He also insists that he be interviewed by Lane.)
General Swanwick is inclined to turn him over to Zod, which Kent agrees to. Zod’s second-in-command, Faora-Ul, approaches Swanwick and takes custody of Kal-El, and also insists that Lane accompany her to Zod’s ship. Colonel Hardy is not happy about turning over a human, but Lane volunteers. She’s given a breathing apparatus and they go on board, Kent slipping Lane his Kryptonian jump drive for no reason that the script bothers to explain.
Kent collapses within the Kryptonian atmosphere of the ship—he can breathe, but he’s weakened. Zod informs him that the destruction of Krypton freed him and his people from the Phantom Zone. They were able to convert the Phantom Zone conveyer into a stardrive the same way Jor-El did with Kal-El’s ship. They travelled to the various Kryptonian outposts only to find them empty and filled with Kryptonian corpses. Without support from the homeworld, they all died. Zod’s people scavenge equipment, including a World Engine that can terraform a world into becoming Krypton-like. But they need the codex, and assume Jor-El put it on the ship with Kal-El. So they came to Earth to get it.
Meanwhile, Lane is imprisoned in a room that just happens to have a port the right size for the Kryptonian jump drive. She inserts it, and the hologram of Jor-El appears before her. He is able to download himself into the ship’s computer and take over various functions. He breaks Lane out and shows her how to convert the stardrive back into a Phantom Zone conveyer, thus sending all of Zod’s people back to the Zone.
He gets her out in an escape pod, and also is able to alter the atmospherics so that Kal-El can once again become Superman, and he breaks out, rescuing Lane from her pod, which was damaged by one of Zod’s people.
Zod argues with Jor-El’s hologram about his plans, which are to use the World Engine and the codex (once he finds the latter) to rebuild Krypton on Earth. Zod is able to purge Jor-El from the ship’s computers, and he then heads to Smallville. He threatens Martha’s life to learn the location of the ship, and then Faora searches it only to find no codex. Kal-El then attacks Zod, so furious at his mother being threatened that he proceeds to have an epic battle with Zod, Faora, and another Kryptonian that pretty much destroys Smallville. Hardy orders his people to fire on all three aliens, but by the time the fight ends, Hardy is on board with the notion that Kent is on their side.
However, Zod’s creepy scientist discovers that Jor-El encoded the codex in Kal-El’s cells, and said scientist now has a blood sample. Zod releases the World Engine, setting half of it up in the Indian Ocean with the other half in Metropolis. Dr. Emil Hamilton of DARPA recognizes that they’re terraforming the world.
Kent, Lane, and Hardy come to Swanwick with Jor-El’s plan. Kent flies to the Indian Ocean to trash the World Engine there, while Hardy, Lane, and Hamilton will take a helicopter into Metropolis to drop Kal-El’s modified ship onto Zod’s, which will send them all to the Phantom Zone.
The first part works fine, as Kent trashes the World Engine in Asia. However, the Metropolis part goes badly, as the jump drive won’t go all the way in for some reason. Eventually, Hamilton figures out that the panel needs to be rotated a bit, at which point Jor-El’s program starts to run. However, by this time Faora has boarded the plane and attacked everyone on board. Lane falls out the hatch right before the plane explodes, killing Faora, Hamilton, and Hardy, but also sending all of Zod’s people on his ship to the Phantom Zone.
Kent arrives in time to save Lane, and then he attacks Zod (who wasn’t on the ship when it was sent to the Zone), during which they make sure to trash pretty much every structure in the city. Buildings collapse left and right, and the city is a smoking, dusty ruin.
Finally, Zod lands in a train station, and starts using his heat vision on people. Kent holds Zod’s head steady as long as he can, but Zod is determined to kill a family, so Kent snaps Zod’s neck—turning it in the same direction that the family Zod was threatening was standing, so they probably got fried anyhow. Why the family didn’t run away (they had plenty of chances) and why Kent didn’t just fly into the stratosphere with Zod is left as an exercise for the viewer.
The world having been saved, Swanwick tries to track Superman, but he trashes the drone sent after him. Superman insists that he’s on their side—he was raised in Kansas, that’s as American as it gets—and he’ll always be there to help. Swanwick has to accept that.
Kent gets a job as a stringer at the Daily Planet, er, somehow. Lane pretends not to know who he is and welcomes him to the Planet. Or the planet. Depending on how you look at it. (How and when the Planet offices were reconstructed so perfectly is never mentioned.)
“The alien, sir—that’s what they’re calling him: Superman”
Zack Snyder directed an interesting movie about an alien who saves the Earth from his fellow aliens who want to destroy the planet and make it over in their own image.
The problem is, the alien in question is Jor-El, and the execution of his plan is mostly carried out by a U.S. Army colonel, a newspaper reporter, and a scientist, two of whom sacrifice their lives. Superman is reduced to a supporting role in his own movie. And that’s mostly because this film shows, at best, a complete and total lack of understanding or, at worst, a deliberate trashing of the character of Superman. (Tellingly, the word “Superman” is only spoken twice in the entire film.)
This is the 118th film I’ve reviewed in this feature since I started it in August 2017. I’ve watched good movies, bad movies, great movies. I’ve watched embarrassments and noble failures, I’ve watched fun romps and good efforts. I’ve watched films that unrecognizably warped the source material and I’ve watched films that perfectly nailed it. Many were fun to watch, and the few that weren’t were still fun to write about.
However, none of the prior 117 films managed to make me angry.
That streak is broken with this one, and I can point to the exact moment when I got so pissed off I almost walked out of the theatre in 2013 and yelled at my television in 2019.
It’s after thirteen-year-old Kent has saved a bus full of people and is now being called a freak. And we get this dialogue exchange, which belongs precisely nowhere in a Superman story:
Clark: “What was I supposed to do? Just let them die?”
Jonathan: “Maybe.”
No. No no no no no no no.
The whole point of Superman is that he is the ideal hero. He always saves lives, he does not take them.
But this movie reboots Supes for a 21st-century audience by utterly assassinating, not just the title character, but his adopted father as well. Instead of a role model for the greatest hero in the world, Jonathan Kent is instead a paranoid idiot and a borderline sociopath. He considers letting a bus full of children die to possibly be a viable alternative to his son revealing his powers. He considers committing suicide to definitely be a viable alternative to his son revealing his powers. And instead of a hero who considers the preservation of life to be the most important thing, Superman trashes his hometown as well as Metropolis in two brutal battles, his only regard for the innocent lives being endangered is once urging people to get inside in Smallville (not exactly a help, given that it’s probably more dangerous inside than outside in that particular situation), culminating in his killing his opponent because he’s not bright enough to remember that he can fly.
Nolan, Goyer, and Snyder were charged with doing a Superman movie, and instead did a Dr. Manhattan movie. Worse, they did it badly. The structure of this film is a disaster, with an endless opening on Krypton that is presented with no context, and then cuts to a grown-up Clark Kent on a boat with no explanation, no indication of what’s going on. And then we get a Kent who is ignorant of his background, and has to be told about it by Jor-El—thus providing Kent/Kal-El with information the viewer already has.
Snyder et al make the same mistake with this movie that Ang Lee made with Hulk in 2003: making it more a story about the main character’s father than about the main character. The title character’s journey is cut off at the knees by wasting the early part of the movie on Daddy and waiting for the son to catch up to where the viewer already is. This would’ve worked much better starting with Kent on the boat and doing the flashbacks to his childhood, and then presenting the Krypton part when Jor-El tells Kal-El about it.
As it is, the arrival of Zod’s ship and the horror-movie message that Zod sends to the people of Earth where he hides his face and reveals that there’s an alien among them is completely ineffective because we already know all about Zod. It’s supposed to be creepy and suspenseful, but we already know the truth, so it’s muted. It would’ve worked much better as our first exposure to him and to Krypton.
Snyder’s predilection for draining the color out of everything gets its most obvious workout here. The entire planet of Krypton is rendered in black and white (not really, but it may as well be, as the cinematographic color palette consists only of black, white, gray, and brown), and Earth is only marginally better. And the destruction is appalling and widespread.
The only saving grace of the film is the acting. On those vanishingly rare occasions when he’s allowed to actually play the character of Superman (the oil rig rescue, his surrender to the Army), Henry Cavill does extremely well. Amy Adams is a good Lois Lane—I have to admit that I really love the fact that she figures out that Superman is Clark Kent before she even meets him, one of the few changes from the comics I approve of. Diane Lane is an excellent Martha, and Kevin Costner does the best he can with the despicable part he’s been saddled with. Harry Lennix, Christopher Meloni, and Richard Schiff are all fine in undercooked supporting roles. (Schiff in particular is wasted as Hamilton, who mostly stands around and provides the occasional bit of scientific exposition.) Laurence Fishburne is even more undercooked as Perry White, though at least he survives the movie (not that he fares any better in the next one). Russell Crowe is a strong lead character, which is only frustrating insofar as he’s supposed to be a supporting character in Superman’s story.
The best acting job in the film is, unsurprisingly, from Michael Shannon, who is never not amazing. I first saw him in what was arguably his breakout role, as disgraced Treasury Agent Nelson van Alden on Boardwalk Empire, and I made it a point after that to seek him out in other things. He’s a phenomenal Zod, improving on Terence Stamp’s mustache-twirling turn in Superman II to bring depth and gravitas to the general. His evil has purpose, his anger a legitimate (if awful) source. Best of all is that he and Crowe sell the friendship between Zod and Jor-El that is sundered by their opposing philosophies.
This is actually a decent science fiction movie about an alien invasion. As a Superman movie, it’s an embarrassment.
The 2016 sequel would bring Batman and Wonder Woman into the mythos, thus establishing DC’s long-time “trinity” of heroes, so next week we’ll take a look at Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Planet Comic-Con in Kansas City this weekend. He’ll be spending most of his time at the Bard’s Tower booth, so come by and say hi, and buy lots of copies of his books, especially his new releases A Furnace Sealed (debuting a new urban fantasy series) and Mermaid Precinct (the latest in his fantasy police procedure series). Also at the Tower will be fellow authors Mercedes Lackey, Dan Wells, Larry Dixon, Brian Lee Durfee, and Mario Acevedo.
The portrayal of J. Kent took me out of this movie, too. I will say, though, that HC looks like he was drawn on the screen by Curt Swan…
Keith, Faora’s name became “Foara” 3 times in this article.
I remember summarizing this movie to a coworker the day after I saw it:
The first half is about how much it sucks to be Superman. The second half is Superman and Zod committing something like a hundred 9/11 attacks in downtown Metropolis. Then Lois and Superman make out in the rubble.
@2 – Fixed, thanks.
It’s a trend I’ve found consistent with Zach Snyder’s adaptations: He knows how to make a movie look very much like the source material, and completely miss the point of the story and the characters at the same time. He did it in 300, he did it in Watchmen, for all I know he did it in that Owls of Ga’Hoole movie (I’ll have to ask my son), and he did it again here.
So the title quote is implying Snyder is afraid of Superman? And probably superheroes in general?
I get it, Superman isn’t supposed to kill people. But how exactly would flying off with Zod have changed the outcome? Zod isn’t gonna say “oh, it was a fair fight so I’ll just quit and go home. What’s that? I have no home? Eff you, son of Jor-El.”
And the whole Superman being a hero who saves lives is so overworked. In any kind of real life situation, Superman can’t save everyone. Over 150,000 people die every day. Superman isn’t gonna save them all. And in that lies the essential problem with Superman. Save a busload of nuns? Hero. Everyone likes you. Pull a baby from a burning building? Hero. Kitten stuck in a tree? Hero. But . . . simultaneous car wrecks in New York and California? Can only save one? No more hero. Vilified on every social media platform there is. Superman figures out pretty quick that humans are ungrateful a-holes. Not long after that he starts telling himself that humans were fine before he came along and they can just go screw themselves. I figure he either flies off to the North Pole and becomes a hermit, or he decides to take over and turn these a-hole humans into something better.
I happened to like the world-building for Krypton and its technology, in particular the displays that used moving metal rather than screens or holograms — although their ships are also equipped with projective holograms vis-a-vis Jor-El. But a successful movie needs a lot more than interesting production design.
(Unconventional display tech also appears in X-Men (2000), Chronicles of Riddick (2004), and Black Panther (2018). Central population production is a bit Brave New World (1932), but also like the Gallifreyan family looms of Doctor Who: Lungbarrow (1997).)
The data cartridge with Jor-El’s personality — yes, it’s the size and approximate shape of a USB jump drive (or “thumb drive”), but in this context I hear “jump drive” and think “point-to-point hyperspace propulsion”. Given its color, shape and engraved end I was more immediately reminded of cast-metal movable type, or a Japanese hanko (carved ink seal).
@8
Oh so THAT’S what he meant. I read this having not rewatched the movie in years, and was racking my brains trying to remember any kind of light speed device that people were carrying around.
We call em flash drives or USB sticks.
Not having been a particular Superman fan, but still appreciating what he represents, this review makes me so glad I never saw the movie (my husband did and he didn’t really like it either).
@09 – I think jump drives is an older usage, but I definitely remember calling them that. I remember that it was kind of exciting when I finally got one.
Of course, now we have SD cards or can just send stuff to our phones or the cloud or what have you ;)
We had a similar reaction to this movie, Keith — I also nearly stormed out of the theater in outrage. But we were set off by very different things. I didn’t like the character assassination of Jonathan Kent, but I liked how it gave Clark’s journey a new context, in that he became Superman despite his adoptive father’s teachings rather than because of them. It showed that, even with a less ideal father figure, he was still Superman at heart.
That’s the problem with this movie overall — it had a great Superman in it, but it didn’t let him be Superman. It made him second banana to Jor-El, had him be passive and blindly obey whatever the nearest male authority figure tells him at any given moment (up to and including Zod’s “You have to kill me”), and inexplicably made sure that he spent the first half of the huge disaster-porn climax on literally the exact opposite side of the world so that he couldn’t actually do anything heroic. It was frustrating. My blog review of the film was subtitled “The best and worst Superman movie ever,” and part of the reason I’m so infuriated by it is because it could’ve been great (if flawed)… if not for its downright offensive climactic act.
Here’s the thing I didn’t mention in my review at the time. I watched the Twin Towers fall on live TV on 9/11/01. It was one of the most horrifying, emotionally devastating moments of my life, and I’m sure it was far more so for New Yorkers who were there that day or anyone who had friends or family in the Towers. And Zack Snyder spent a huge chunk of this film relentlessly exploiting that traumatic, awful imagery for superficial disaster porn, dragging it out incessantly past any reasonable length for an action sequence… and then starting it all up again a few moments later. That was the point when I almost stormed out of the theater. I just couldn’t stand the sensory and emotional overload of being bombarded with that imagery (and Hans Zimmer’s monotonously blaring score) for that length of time. I have never before in my life felt assaulted by a movie.
And it wasn’t just the crass, staggeringly insensitive exploitation of traumatizing 9/11 imagery. It wasn’t just that the fact that it went on forever. It’s that it was so completely gratuitous. For one thing, buildings don’t work that way. They don’t topple like houses of cards the moment something hits them — they’re specifically designed not to collapse that easily. It took hours for the Twin Towers to burn through and collapse. So the whole sequence was utterly ridiculous and insulting to our intelligence.
For another thing, it had no emotional weight in the story, because Snyder didn’t care about the people of Metropolis — he just saw falling buildings as a cool visual and didn’t give a moment’s thought to the human impact beyond a few scenes of Perry and his staff fleeing the destruction. If you’re going to exploit 9/11 imagery, it’s a gross insult to the memory of the victims to portray such destruction as effectively harmless on a human level.
There’s also absolutely no story reason for Zod to have landed in Metropolis in the first place, since Clark has never even been there yet in this version of the story. It’s a totally random story choice made only because it was expected, like many other arbitrary decisions in the script.
But the biggest thing that makes it utterly gratuitous is that the destruction of half of Metropolis has no impact whatsoever on the story (leaving aside the sequel). If you read a dialogue-only transcript of the closed captions without having seen the film, you’d have no idea that the mass destruction had happened at all, because nobody says one single word about it. You can tell that Perry, Steve, and someone named Jenny are running in fear from something and Jenny gets stuck somewhere, but beyond that there’s nothing in the dialogue to suggest that the city as a whole is being devastated, and no mention at all of any aftermath of that event in the denouement. Indeed, as Keith mentioned, the Planet offices seem perfectly intact at the end despite that entire section of the city being utterly devastated. You could cut maybe 15 or more minutes of relentless disaster porn out of this movie and lose not one single plot point or significant line of dialogue. Even aside from the awfulness of it in other ways, that is just utterly incompetent story structure and editing. It’s a massive waste of time and money on something that’s completely unnecessary and unconnected to the story. And that just makes the sheer offensiveness of it more unforgiveable.
I’ve never been willing to rewatch this film. Even the parts I loved are just too badly tainted by the utter wrongness and vileness and incompetence and aggressive stupidity of that climactic sequence. It hurt to endure that in the theater, and there was absolutely no reason for it to be there at all.
@7/Ragnar: The problem isn’t that Superman couldn’t save everyone, it’s that Snyder had no interest in showing him even try. And the whole point of Superman is to be an ideal, an inspiration. Arguments about what’s “realistic” are missing the point — the guy can fly, after all. He symbolizes our aspirations, our hopes. It’s uplifting to watch him save people. The rescues are the best parts of previous Superman movies. You don’t start Superman’s career by having him fail — by having him just surrender to the villain’s worldview and agree that he’s right. That made the ending a moral victory for Zod, even though Zod died. That might be okay to do in a deconstruction years down the road, but it’s a misguided way to lay the initial foundations of Superman’s career. Especially in a movie where Superman is passive and submissive to other men’s guidance throughout (from Jonathan to a random priest to Jor-El to Zod) and never actually asserts his own will or ideas. He’s just a blunt instrument bouncing around on Jor-El’s instructions and then giving in to Zod’s instructions. It’s another bit of really bad story structure, even aside from any moral question.
The problem is that Snyder thought all superhero movies were Watchmen. But Watchmen is a deconstruction, a response to the standard conventions of superhero fiction. Superman is the embodiment of those standard conventions. He’s the other side of the conversation.
Snyder would make a wonderful Spawn movie. He’s That Guy who thinks darkness and violence equate to maturity, although I seriously wonder if he’s a closet sociopath, as an easter egg of Olsen dying in another movie is his idea of a laugh. Apologies if that reads as armchair diagnostics, he just constantly gives the impression that something is seriously off in his worldview.
@14/Jeff: Honestly, I don’t think Snyder knows how to make a wonderful movie. He comes from commercials, and it shows — he knows how to make individual moments visually and viscerally compelling, but has no idea how to put together an entire movie-length narrative with a coherent story, to create logical connective tissue from one story element to another. Man of Steel has excellent elements but the story is full of arbitrary and structurally clumsy choices and some bizarre failures of basic storytelling competence — and yet it’s about a thousand times more coherent than the next DC movie Snyder directed (which I’ll talk about when Keith does). The only reason Watchmen holds up storywise is that it’s basically a slavish (if simplified) copy of someone else’s storytelling.
And yes, he’s very much stuck in the mentality of ’80s/’90s comics that being dark, violent, and edgy was enough to constitute being good or sophisticated. The problem was, there were two great works that used dark and violent imagery to deconstruct comic-book tropes and make a deeper statement — Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns — and everyone after that copied the surface darkness and grittiness without understanding its underlying purpose, so what they made was gratuitously, relentlessly dark and cynical but not really saying anything of substance. Comics have grown out of that stage by now, but Snyder lives there.
Compare & contrast The Battle of New York from The Avengers (May 4, 2012) with the devastation of Metropolis (June 14, 2013)
Captain America shows up, and almost immediately engages local police & emergency workers to arrange for a cordon & evacuation. Explicit attempts to narrow the scope of the engagement, and set-piece moments dedicated to saving a large group of civilians. Even with all of that, it ends with news coverage that focuses directly on a memorial wall, we see the devastating emotional impact and already talking heads are arguing over blame. For all the fist-pumping excitement of the Avengers saving the world from Loki, there’s an attempt to acknowledge the human cost.
Superman gets pissed off when his mom is threatened, and is willing to give the people of Smallville a half-assed warning before throwing down, casually wrecking a childhood friend’s restaurant. The devastation on the ground in Metropolis is saved for the next film, and only matters to fuel Batman’s pain. Making out in the ruins is just the cherry on top, because what even is search & rescue? Anyone under the rubble’s already dead right, so why bother? Here, the only personal cost is the Clark, which he reconciles himself to in the church scene before turning himself in, so none of the resulting violence is his responsibility.
The relationship between super-heroes & society starts in the MCU with Iron Man going from killing terrorists to get out of the international arms scene and ‘privatizing world peace’ through the worldwide revelations of the Battle for New York to the Sokovia Accords. There’s at least the sense of an ongoing conversation, with people having realistic mixed reactions.
Man of Steel gives us a paralytically afraid Pa Kent, whose fear is entirely unfounded given that the people of Earth will ultimately see him as a messianic figure, and we’re expected to believe that people just start calling him Superman in the background, for some reason, somehow. And at the end, he just tells the Army that he’s here, he drove a John Deere, get used to it. Public reaction to Superman, up to & including his ‘trial’ in the sequel is best left as a honeypot for the viewer.
Snyder wanted to tell a Clash of the Titans story in the Western mode, an operatic struggle between the Houses of Zod & El to shape the last legacy of Krypton, ending when Kal-El kills the man that killed his father and chooses his scrappy adopted home over the decadence of his forebears.
For the record, I thought Michael Shannon was a hundred times more terrifying in Boardwalk Empire than he was as Zod.
That line from Jonathan Kent made me angry when I saw it in the trailer. My wife and I went to see the movie anyway, because friends had said it was pretty good. Whatever. I agree with your assessment pretty much 100%. My wife would too, probably, except that she fell asleep and missed a chunk of the movie, so she can’t judge it as completely. She still calls it Man of Stool. And it’s because of this movie that we haven’t seen any of the other DC movies except for Wonder Woman, which was a pleasant surprise.
I don’t like this movie because it’s boring. The fight scenes went way too long.
Lois and Clark had Luthor engage Superman’s willingness to try and save innocents in a believable, actionable way. This Superman, thanks to J. Kent, just doesn’t care or try. I hated hated hated this movie.
Great review, Keith! Spot on. I can’t to read your take on “He’s going to kill Martha!” next week!
I feel like this movie had some pieces of a really great take on Superman but just went the wrong direction at every turn. I can buy that the Kents are terrified of discovery and raise class to keep his powers severe. It’s not like they understand he’s invincible at that point. But why take it to the “let all your friends die” extreme? And you could go in a lot of interesting directions with the government’s skepticism if Superman’s intentions. But that only works if the audience knows he’s a hero and this Superman isn’t.
You could even have the rampant destruction of the finale at least make narrative sense. Have Superman at least try to take the fight out of Metropolis only to have Zod go back to attacking the city at every opportunity because he’s so unhinged. Hell, make the fact that Zod is more focused on destroying Metropolis be the reason why the completely untrained Superman manages to defeat Krypton’s greatest warrior. And then you’re set up for a sequel where the government still doesn’t trust Superman because of all the destruction but the audience knows he tried his best. Instead we got this.
At least the scene where Clark learns to fly is outstanding.
Oh, and does anyone know why an old scout ship has a Superman costume on-board?
16. Chieroscuro
That was a great comment. I feel smarter after reading it!
This movie was effectively a complete waste of time. If it had been an alien invasion movie yeah it would have potentially been pretty decent. But thinking of all the things it could have been a Superman movie is not one of them. There was another post recently about Zach Snyder saying Batman kills and Superman kill and so forth and so on. I think it proves that Snyder really needs to stop directing superhero movies (or anything with significant source material) if all he is going to do is ignore the details.
However I do have one significant complaint about this article. Keith does not indicate if he has seen Superman Returns. It is also on my rewatch list of movies but I enjoyed it and it seemed to be a great reintroduction of Superman. Unfortunately it wasn’t the Superman movie the general population wanted which pretty much killed it. But I have no clue how they managed to get from Superman Returns to Man of Steel being a better reintroduction. And considering the script writers and the work they did on Batman it makes me wonder much Snyder changed the original script.
” this film shows, at best, a complete and total lack of understanding or, at worst, a deliberate trashing of the character of Superman.”
Given Snyder’s recent remarks about superheroes, I’d say it was the former. He just doesn’t get it. Nick Spencer deliberately trashed Captain America in the comics when he made Cap a Nazi. Snyder thought he was creating a better version of Superman for audiences. He was wrong.
I think you nailed it when you said “This is actually a decent science fiction movie about an alien invasion. As a Superman movie, it’s an embarrassment.”
@23/Austin: It’s a general-purpose clothing synthesizer — that’s how I interpreted it. It has a supply of undersuit textile and can change the dimensions, color and family crest. (In the same way, this year’s Captain Marvel shows that the Kree Star Force uniforms can switch from duty to stealth colors, and later Carol uses the capability to pick a new personal color scheme.)
David: I covered Superman Returns earlier in this rewatch series.
https://www.tor.com/2018/03/16/how-many-fs-in-catastrophic-superman-returns/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I completely agree with all the criticism. For me, Zack Snyder’s movies always feel like they used the last 10 pages of a junior high schoolboy’s notebook, the ones filled with edgy drawings of robots and ninjas and whatever, as a storyboard. Plot? What’s that? Much like the Wachowski’s, Snyder consistently manages to miss the point of the story he’s supposedly telling despite having the actual source material spell it out for him, because his only interest is cool visuals and being a total edgelord.
I liked the movie, as bad as it is, because I love Superman as a character and I really hate the dorky boy scout version made popular by Richard Donner’s flicks and the Superfriends cartoons, you know, the one where Clark is a nerd and Superman is also a nerd who rescues kitties from treetops.
For me Cavilll was awesome as Clark/Kal/Superman and easily the best we’ve gotten so far on film, even if Christopher Reeves actually looks like he’s the comic brought to life. It’s really too bad that the movie has such a bad plot, because most of the actors did a great job. Still, the best portrayal of Superman is always on DC animated movies or shows, like the Diniverse or Young Justice. I hope someday we get a movie with a characterization as good as those.
@23 Among this moviesm many flaws, I could never keep track of which Kryptonian spaceship is which.
Also, why does Zod want to terraform Earth so that the reborn Kryptonians will just be humans in funny outfits? Why not keep it as a planet where they’ll all be gods?
@22/Zodda: “You could even have the rampant destruction of the finale at least make narrative sense. Have Superman at least try to take the fight out of Metropolis only to have Zod go back to attacking the city at every opportunity because he’s so unhinged. Hell, make the fact that Zod is more focused on destroying Metropolis be the reason why the completely untrained Superman manages to defeat Krypton’s greatest warrior.”
First of all, you’d have to establish a reason why Metropolis matters to Superman or Zod at all. Like I said, in the movie, Clark has never been there, and Zod has no reason to target it. It only happens because it matters to the audience for reasons that are completely external to the story itself.
I’d suggest something that’s kind of the opposite — have Superman dealing with the destruction in Metropolis, focusing on saving people by the thousands, while Lois and the military do their job tackling the Worldkiller. It’s by trusting and working together with the people of Earth, in defense of the people of Earth, that he manages to stop Zod’s plans. And maybe that gets Zod to back down, to realize that Superman and Earth standing together are too strong for him to beat — and that maybe he shouldn’t try. It’s not just a macho contest to see who has more muscle — Superman wins by his principles and his bond with the people of his adopted home. And you get a bunch of cool scenes of Superman rescuing people, which are enormously more satisfying than just watching a hundred CGI skyscrapers collapse like cardboard.
I’ve said elsewhere that the difference between a Superman movie and a Godzilla movie is that if you see whole cities falling into ruin in a Godzilla movie, it means the title character is succeeding at his job. If you see it in a Superman movie, it means the title character is failing at his job.
@30,
Or why even Kryptonize Earth? You’ve got a spaceship and a galaxy full of planets you could use.
Andraste, this movie is terrible, though I suppose that’s only to be expected when you have an Objectivist direct a movie about a guy defined by his altruism and willingness to help others. And that’s ultimately what sticks in my craw about this film, more than Pa Kent’s self-indulgent cowardice or make-out sessions at Ground Zero x 1000; Synder not only doesn’t get the character of Superman, but clearly doesn’t want to in the first place. You can also see that in BvS, in every shot of Supes saving someone, he has this “woe is me” expression on him, as if rescuing someone from a burning building is somehow a tremendous inconvenience that’s beneath his dignity.
My two takeaways from this movie:
1. The trucker harassing the waitress was hilariously miscast. The guy is several inches shorter than Cavill and doesn’t look particularly intimidating. It clearly looks like Cavill would wipe the floor with him powers or not.
2. No one among the Kryptonians stopped to say hey why are we doing this? We are godlike on this planet, why are we terraforming it to make us ordinary?
@31 “the reason why the completely untrained Superman manages to defeat Krypton’s greatest warrior.”
Kal-El had a lifetime growing into his powers where as Zod doesn’t even know what he can really do yet.
After the fan backlash this got, I don’t know why WB let Snyder anywhere near BvS or Justice League.
A Grim-n-Gritty Batman movie works because Batman is allowed to be a Grim and Gritty character (when he’s not Goofy and Camp).
A Grim-n-Gritty Superman movie doesn’t work because Superman is supposed to be a Boy Scout.
Whenever I say Man of Steel/BvS are worse then Suicide Squad, whether in the Internet or real life, I always get a lot of arguments. The opening paragraph sums it up pretty well. Suicide Squad was terrible and made me bored, but Man of Steel and BvS made me flat out angry that THIS was the version of Superman we were getting
• If a more grounded Superman is what they were aiming for, then Pa Kent would’ve openly encouraged his son to save people. So much so they would’ve done a book tour, reality TV, talk shows — Leno, Letterman, maybe Kimmel if they had time. And the Kents would’ve bought a new house. That’s what realism looks like, folks! That’s the America I know.
• I was not as impressed with Michael Shannon. Sounded like he had a mouthful of cotton.
• My main disappointment with the finale wasn’t so much the neck-snapping (though I wasn’t crazy about that either) but the limited scope of the fight between Supes and Zod. If memory serves, they fight in the city, go up to a satellite, then fight in the same city some more. That’s it? They couldn’t invent a reason for them to take the fight around the world? Heck, Superman IV has part of the big fight take place on the friggin’ Moon! And that movie is dollar store cheap.
• Remember when superhero movies were playful instead of pretentious? Yeah, that was nice.
That would be interesting, why doesn’t Hollywood hire people like you?
Hollywood hires lots of great writers; unfortunately, writers in the feature film industry are at the mercy of directors and executives who can overrule their decisions and change their scripts into something unrecognizable.
They should be. As Larry Niven remarked: “If you don’t understand it, it’s dangerous.”
Which is perhaps why things should be done, and movies should be made, by people who understand what they are doing.
Boom, da mic drop
@36/LazerWulf: What I like about the Nolan Batman (at least in the first two films) is that he’s not just grim and gritty. His world is grim and gritty, but Batman himself is what he should be, an embodiment of hope. Batman is someone who inspires fear in criminals, yes, but who also inspires hope and optimism and civic pride in honest citizens, encouraging them to be better and make their city better. A gritty story doesn’t have to be a cynical one.
By the same token, you could tell a dark story around Superman, but Superman’s role would be to inspire, to stand against the darkness and not let it win.
Amy Adams was great as Lois lane . I loved how intelligent and competent she was as a reporter. Loved how she tracked Clark down and uncovered his identity . A very fine performance on Adams part .
the first episode of Lois and Clark features John yelling at clark about saving a bus full of people.
martha asks “what was he supposed to do, let them die?” clark changes subject.
later in the wpisode John brings it up again, martha tried to change the subject and John chastises her for it.
when people act like snyder made this conversation up. when people act like Reeves superman killin Zod AFTER taking away his powers and making him a non-threat is better than superman saving a family’s lives.
Count me in among the people who liked this film, and I’m a huge Superman fan. Yes, it has a lot of bad things (the worst is Jonathan Kent), but also a lot of great things: Cavill is a great superman, and looks amazing, the space opera Krytpon is great (and I’d love to see a Green Lantern or Adam Strange film with that aesthetic – if more colors), and Michael Shannon is a great Zod (Van Alden was great).
I enjoyed how the fights between Zod and Clark showed that the former is a trained soldier, and Kent isn’t. As John says, Clark only manages not to lose completely because he has more solar radiation in him, and a bit of trainign with his powers. Another thing I appreciated is how they incorporated stuff from various modern Superman comics. I guess since I have read so many good comics, I am able to tune out the shit parts of this films and focus on the nice scenes when Cavill IS Superman, etc.
Oh yeah, Clark getting a job at the Planet was pretty stupid.
@12 – Chris: True, the characters don’t really reacto to the destruction. It’s like they decided to add the demolition porn after they had already filmed the character scenes.
@18 – penelopecat419: “Man Of Stool”, LOL!
@25 – David: Keith has seen and reviewed Superman Returns. In fact, his first mention of the title in this article is a link to his review of that film.
@26 – James: Spencer did not “make Cap a Nazi”. Like in other stories before, he told a story where the hero was manipulated or controlled by villains. Nobody who has ever paid attention to superhero comic books could really believe that Captain America would really be a Nazi because… it has been done before!
@24 Thanks!
I really think that Zack Snyder’s take would have worked, with different direction. If you’re going to tell Snyder’s version of the Superman story, though, go all in on Lois. Keep the opening on Krypton (maybe with less action-dad) with the baby being sent away & the end of the planet. Cut to Lois in the Arctic and the discovery of the alien craft. She sneaks in, gets endangered, then gets saved by mystery man. We follow Lois, as she backtracks through Clark’s life, slowly working backwards through disaster stories & urban legends until eventually she gets to Pete Ross & the schoolbus. That gets her to the Kent family, she meets Clark at his father’s grave. Everything then is about us learning about the alien through testimonials, which means that when Lois keeps his secret, we understand why. Then, Zod shows up and everything goes pear-shaped. Portray Clark as desperately wanting to go out to help, but held back by the shackles of his father’s fear. Make the crowning moment when he decides to trust in people, does what he can to save as many as he can, and then at the end of the movie is embraced & has that trust validated.
I think I’m in a minority overall, but I actually liked the idea of Superman growing. I’ve always found him kind of boring: I mean, yeah, he’s inspirational, because he always Does The Right Thing, but the problem for us REAL mortals is that Doing The Right Thing has consequences, and the story just conveniently ends before those catch up to him. And, if I’m honest, I think the power fantasy of not having to deal with consequences — even for being a good person — is a big part of why the character is popular. (Well, that and the two-person love triangle, which this film discards. It’s kind of funny that this film is so clouded in other incompetence that this omission — which I consider central to the Superman experience — cannot be evaluated one way or another.)
Having Superman struggle with consequences (IE killing someone to save others) makes him more relatable to me. It’s nice to have inspirational figures, but if he doesn’t live on the same planet I do (the one where Mr. Incredible can get sued for a rescue the rescuee didn’t want), then I really don’t care as much. Likewise, I can forgive the idea that Supes allows destruction to happen because, simply put, he doesn’t know what the quack he’s doing. The character, as presented in the film, makes me believe he would avoid civilian casualties if he could, but he’s not at that level yet — and that’s fair, considering that he only learned to fly the other day. We don’t expect a boxer to get it right on his first match.
Does the story fail to set up the “don’t kill” thing? Does the story fail to mention his feelings of guilt over his current incompetence? Does the story have even more plot holes than that, several of which KRAD pointed out in his review (like taking Zod into space to deal with him there)? Yeah. It seriously does. And that’s a fact, one that cannot and should not be overlooked.
The execution on this movie was crap. But I think the bones of a good movie were there. (Which is how I got into this minority.)
Zack Snyder was simply not the right guy to direct a Superman Movie.
As for the movie itself, It’s not as bad as its reputation suggests but it’s definitely an early warning sign of what was to come down the line.
@44/Chieroscuro: I would love to see a Superman story told from Lois’s perspective, a saga of a great investigative reporter pursuing the mystery of who and what Superman is, with his identity as Clark Kent not overtly acknowledged until/unless Lois discovers it herself.
@47/CLB: The oil rig scene, messing with the trucker’s ride, if each of these was a flashback showing Lois running down rumors of the ‘Man of Steel’, progressively zeroing in on him, I think it would have had a lot of punch. And it’d have carried the tone that Snyder was shooting for, of a world entirely unprepared for the return of Gods & Titans. Thematically, it would be carry well into BvS, where the focus would be on Clark Kent investigating Batman, Bruce Wayne using his funding to repair Superman’s damage to Metropolis, and Lois staying on-task looking into Luthor.
It’s great to write a 1000 word comment and have it disappear into the ether . . .
The short version: the only person who died because of Pa Kent’s beliefs was Pa Kent. He was wrong and the movie showed he was wrong. The man is only human. Most of the damage is clearly caused by Zod and his followers. Superman halted the destruction by trashing the World Engine. It’s ironic that the Avengers can crash leviathans into buildings and kill 1000s of aliens, but it’s okay because shawarma. Oh, and Thor broke a guy’s neck in The Dark World a few months after this and there was zero outcry. Food for thought.
This was my favorite Superman movie. Some people say “This is not my Superman”, but this movie drew heavily from the Byrne-Jurgens era I grew up on so I can honestly say he’s mine.
Ironic choice of quote. One from BvS is more appropriate for describing how Snyder and his work have been unfairly maligned in internet culture: “People hate what they don’t understand, Clark.”
But more on that later.
Thor is a warrior god who has killed tons of people. Superman is fucking Superman.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: “But this movie reboots Supes for a 21st-century audience by utterly assassinating, not just the title character, but his adopted father as well… [snip ] culminating in his killing his opponent because he’s not bright enough to remember that he can fly.”
This is one of the best distillations I’ve read of the how badly the tone of the movie gets Superman.
My usual go-to mantra is that Snyder gets too much of the blame and Goyer not enough. I also forgot Nolan was involved in this mess. But this was the week that Snyder resurfaced with a mocking “Batman kills, Superman kills, get over it” message to fans. Very condescending and, unfortunately, burns thru any good will he may have received after his family tragedy.
Now I’m back to the default “keep this guy away from any more DC properties, please.” And add in the exec who gave the directive to avoid any humor in DC movies (who’s apparently out as well in some kind of scandal trading sex for roles).
Seems like the new Shazam movie will correct some of these cinema sins. Hopefully.
@50: True as that is, I personally like the conception where Batman will not kill and Superman will, but usually doesn’t *have* to. That gets you a Superman who can be pushed into taking permanent measures against people such as Darkseid, Doomsday, and Zod, opponents Superman can’t simply overwhelm and subdue. It also gives more texture to people harbouring doubts about him and allows for some spectacular stories, such as the Justice Lords and the consequences spinning out from that event.
This movie is a terrible version of that idea, but the thing that’s most maddening about Man of Steel is that you could tweak juuuuuuuuust a few things and it could be so, so much better.
@51. Yeah, a Superman movie without humor is like Star Trek without a bright future. I mean, an overgrown Boyscout from Kansas in the big city, who is also a gosh darn space alien, seems like a natural setting for humor. I would certainly welcome some goofball antics over this particular version of the character. This isn’t Superman. This is Somberman.
@49 It’s not okay. That’s why they show us the dead after the fight, that’s why the argument immediately starts over whose responsible, it’s what will ultimately tear apart the Avengers. Thor is a joyful warrior trying to grow out of it, that’s the point of his movies. When Coulson dies, Steve & Tony’s dialogue is about this being the first time Tony’s lost a soldier, and Tony flips out that they’re not soldiers. But everyone else in Shield is a uniformed combatant, with all of the expected dangers and having gone through a war means Cap already has the perspective necessary to grieve for casualties while continuing the fight, but death itself is still real for both of them (less so for Coulson himself). Tony Stark’s PTSD sits at the heart of his trilogy, and his inability to manage guilt from the Ultron incident is the watershed moment for his character into Civil War. Bruce hates the thought of killing Hydra people as the Hulk, and his rampage in Johannesburg will lead him to self-exile. Strange zaps an astral enemy, and immediately is disgusted with himself vowing not to kill. Spider-man refuses to let the Vulture die. In as much as they’re super hero movies, and are as a result drive by violent action, there’s a very basic thesis at the heart of the MCU:
Can you save everyone? No, but save as many as you can, and next time do better.
@51 Though the Shazam! movie looks as if it’s getting Captain Marvel about as wrong as this film does Superman, albeit in a different direction. “Big with superpowers” may still be fun, but the central fantasy of Billy Batson was to actually <i>be</i> a powerful and admirable adult (with the wisdom of Solomon), not getting laughs out of a kid play-acting in an overpowered body.
But that reversal seems as if it may be setting in, much as “Clark Kent is the real personality, Superman the costume” did a generation ago. And it’s not incompatible with decent stories, as with Billy’s turn in Young Justice.
But I’m sorry to lose one of the great wish-fulfillment fantasy superhero concepts, particularly the one who managed in his heyday to outsell Superman at his height.
(And even more sorry to lose his proper name. If DC and Marvel can both have flying blonde powerhouses in red, yellow, and blue named Danvers, I’m not sure why they can’t have two Caps share a codename the way they did in the comics for thirty-odd years.)
@52 I don’t really see much to be gained from a Superman story that says “this is too hard to defeat, so he has to kill it”. The magnitude of the threat is a story choice, and a big point of Superman’s over-the-top physical capability is that it’s generally not that impressive for him to win by main force. Which is why his arch-enemies tend to be figures like Lex Luthor who’s not physically impressive, Brainiac whose forcefield is traditionally so impenetrable that Superman has to resort to non-punching solutions, and Mxyzptlk who’s an out-of-context problem.
In particular, Darkseid shouldn’t be permanently defeated by Superman. His whole deal is that he’s a god and a thing apart, and his final defeat is a part of his myth cycle rather than relating to his dealings with Earth. A Superman movie might never touch on the whole “destined to die at the hands of his son”, but he still needs to be a step beyond being blown up or beaten down by mortals.
(The best “Darkseid defeated by superheroes” scene is probably the end of the Legion of Super-Heroes Great Darkness Saga, where All The Heroes *plus* empowerment by the ghost of Izaya *plus* an army of three billion Kryptonian equivalents is enough to… get Darkseid to admit that he’s overmatched for now. And then leave them with a curse that will work itself out upon them later.)
Zod is a Kryptonian, and subject to all the same Achilles heels Superman himself has– to defeat him Superman needs to be cleverer than he is, not more ruthless. (The Phantom Zone is the obvious answer, but there’s also kryptonite, red sun radiation, enlisting allies from the enemies who’ve spent all that time coming up with ideas to defeat Superman, etc.)
(And Doomsday was a bad idea from minute one. I don’t think there’s ever really been a satisfying story involving him.)
@52/foamy: I think that Superman, of all people, is the one who most needs an absolute rule against killing. The more powerful you are, the greater the damage any abuse of that power will cause, so Superman would have to hold himself to relentlessly high standards. To me, that’s part of what makes him an effective character — the fact that he has to be so incredibly controlled and disciplined in every aspect of his life. Think how careful he has to be at every moment of his life to avoid killing or maiming people just by casual contact. If he’s carrying someone out of a burning building, holding them in his arms, from his perspective it’s like carrying a soap bubble and making sure he doesn’t break it. He could cause a fatal car accident if he let himself sneeze while walking along the sidewalk. Superman (or Supergirl) has to be the most carefully controlled person on the planet, constantly taking care to protect other people’s lives. That’s his most fundamental, constant thought — making sure he doesn’t hurt anyone. And it must be incredibly hard for him to succeed at that.
So I can’t believe for a second that Superman would be unable to think of a nonlethal way to defeat a supervillain. Nobody in the world is more practiced at thinking of ways not to kill people than Superman. Nobody needs to be more reflexively, unshakeably dedicated to other people’s safety. It’s not just a choice for him, it’s an everyday necessity.
@55/mschiffe: The “boy in an adult body” interpretation of Shazam/Captain Marvel has been an established part of the comics’ portrayal of the character for some time now. The movie is just being true to the current version of the comics character.
Anyway, wisdom doesn’t equal intelligence or maturity. I think children are sometimes wiser than adults in a number of ways.
There was a reason Snyder showed Batman breaking his One Rule and he most emphatically does not depict it as a good thing, though that, once again, will have to wait. I am always surprised to see people mistaking an antagonistic character’s views for that of their creator/writer, like the people who somehow think the inane talking head media figures in BvS speak for Snyder, or those who believe that Kylo Ren speaks for Rian Johnson. How many people write the *villain* as their personal mouthpiece? Not many.
@42– I saw Superman 2 in the movie theaters, and yet I never heard anyone anywhere claim that Superman kills Zod and his crew until after Man of Steel came out in an attempt to justify Superman’s actions here.
It certainly wasn’t the original intent of the filmmakers that Superman had killed them, because they filmed a scene showing them all being taken into custody.
I know the pedantic thing is to say “deleted scenes aren’t canon”, but guess what? Since we never saw the bodies of the Kryptonian criminals, neither are their deaths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5dOI1div0&app=desktop
@59/Steven McMullan: I think people did interpret the scene as Superman killing Zod et al. long before MoS came out; it just became a more relevant argument at that point. But even so, it doesn’t matter, since it’s not like Superman II is the authoritative text on Superman. It’s an adaptation, and like many adaptations, it makes changes to the character and world that don’t always work. The scene of Clark going back to the diner and using his superpowers to beat up the bully is offensively out of character, if anything even more so than Snyder’s neck snap. At least with the snap, Superman thought he had no other choice to save lives. He was doing it for selfless reasons and he felt horrible about it. But the bully scene was the most powerful man on Earth being a bully himself, vindictively hurting someone a million times weaker than him just because it made him feel good, and that’s utterly unacceptable.
Zack Snyder’s so looking forward to next week’s article, he’s already been prepping his response in the media this week
One doesn’t even need to look to Superman II. In comics continuity, Superman killed the Zod Squad of a pocket universe (long story, don’t ask) at the end of Byrne’s run, which became the impetus for Superman’s no-kill rule and was a major piece of character development. At least in the days before Didio and Johns started rebooting the DCU every couple of years.
@57: i am reminded of Superman’s “i live in a world made of cardboard” speech to darkseid in the animated justice league series.
@60. Or, you know, like Superman throwing a wife-beater against the wall, as he did in one of his earliest appearances?
“Tough is putting mildly the treatment you’re going to get!” Superman says.
I’m a voracious consumer of Keith’s reviews, and I usually agree. This is the only time I’ve been moved to comment in disagreement. This *is* my favorite Superman movie, though 1978 is of course more iconic.
What narrows the scope of our disagreement and lets me understand it is your comment that it was a perfectly fine movie about an alien defending Earth against an invasion by his own people, just not Superman. Well and this is completely a matter of opinion, I’ve never been compelled by the perfecter-than-thou image of Superman. My iconic Supes was the TAS one, who made mistakes, killed Darkseid in battle, was goaded into a city-thrashing battle with Captain Marvel, and participated in some truly crust-quaking adventures overall. But he always tried to do his best, and so does this version of Superman (who I will miss if he’s truly gone).
Snyder has about a 50% hit rate with me, and I also would like to see him retired from superhero movies given his Late Comments (which deserve the context that they were spoken at a suicide benefit, and the man lost his daughter to suicide during the production of JUSTICE LEAGUE). I do think his camera reflects an ill-considered philosophy at times. But I enjoy that the movie visually confronts the impact of a set of characters with the titanic power of Superman in a 21st century superheroic action movie, rather than the fancy nostalgia of RETURNS or minimalist approach of other post-1978 live-action projects.
I’m definitely in the minority here, but I really liked this film. Krad’s first line nails it. It’s a great alien invasion film, and a bad Superman one. The thing is – I never liked Superman. I don’t care that this Superman acts totally differently than what came before. I always thought he was way overpowered and that it was dumb that his nemesis was a rock. His “boy scout” aspect was never interesting to me either, and I honestly didn’t think that kind of character would ever work until Chris Evans changed my mind. But in this film, changing the character into a super-powered being who isn’t perfect, or even a superhero at all (which is why all y’all hate this movie so much), gives the character room to grow. An actual arc. It was nice to see in a movie where I didn’t expect one.
The alien thing works really well for me (and I loved the opening on Krypton), but like another commenter said there is a little bit of a Greek myth thing going on. The destruction at the end doesn’t really offend me like it does for some of you anymore than seeing D.C. blown up in Independence Day did. Or Godzilla rampaging through a city. It isn’t supposed to be fun as much as it is supposed to awe the viewer by the sheer power of these beings. I dig that whole idea. These guys with god-like power acting like the fickle and often not-very-nice gods of myth.
That gives Supes a nice (eventual) arc too, learning to care about people, and to be altruistic despite them not really deserving it. It ends up very Jesus-y but old stories work and are re-told for a reason. (Also I can’t believe I haven’t read complaints about the overabundant on-the-nose religious imagery going on in this movie. Or am I mixing up this with the next film too much?)
On to J. Kent. He’s paranoid about the government finding out what his son can do. That is totally believable in Kansas, a place that probably has more than its fair share of Alex Jones listeners. But just because people are crazy and/or paranoid doesn’t necessarily make them bad people either, just misguided and lacking good judgment. Was the character dumb and misguided? Sure. Does he feel incredibly real? Absolutely. And his sacrifice works not because it was smart, but because he had his son’s welfare at heart. The sacrifice was worth it to the character, and Costner sells it on-screen. It works because you can tell J. Kent loves his son.
I like Shannon, but this isn’t his best performance. It was serviceable. Crowe, Adams, Costner, and Cavill are the standouts.
This version of Clark Kent becoming a reporter at the end is pretty damn stupid.
The backlash on this film reminds me of Stephen King’s hate for the Shining. Except instead of just King and a small contingent of fans, it’s nearly a whole fan-base screaming “you didn’t do it right” because it was done differently than what they thought it should be. If y’all can just look at this as a completely new take that borrowed some names and places and threw out the rest, you might be kinder to it. I’m not saying that your criticism is irrelevant, I’m just saying if you look at it from a new perspective you might find it’s not that bad of a film.
I was excited about Batman v. Superman. Oh man, what a letdown (read: f*cking mess) that was.
Have to say it blew me away when Superman could not save his dad from the tornado. WHAT? He is a hero, that’s what he does. I have been watching Superman since 1957. He fights for truth, justice, and the American way. Bring back the Superman who is hailed as hero, not some violent hero. Makes me crazy. No to Zack Snyder!
I have not seen this movie, but the synopsis of the character and the worlds reaction to him reminded me of Philip Wylie’s Gladiator. It is the movie that Snyder should have made, not Superman. It’s one dark and mean story.
Joseph McGuire
What’s really sad is that there’s a whole lot of thematic depth in Man of Steel that’s barely been explored. Individualism vs. conformity (the House of El symbol stands for hope, as embodied by the individual being a force for good, while Zod’s emblem is pretty much a Hammer and Sickle), for instance. Or the incredible life/birth/death/decay imagery in the Krypton sequence.
But instead, every discussion about it derails into people complaining about the same couple of things for the umpteenth time. Like this one. After six years, it would be nice to actually talk about Man of Steel.
That speech in JL is both iconic and, I think, supportive of my view of Superman. Certainly much of the JL continuity agrees; I believe Superman has tried to permanently end Darkseid at least three times in it.
@64/Almuric: Of course the nascent Superman character of the early years was very different from the character he evolved into in his mature form. The early comics were derived from pulp magazines and had plenty of violence, and the early Superman did frequently kill, or at least not care that his actions caused villains’ deaths. But that’s not the character he’s been for the past 90-some percent of his existence, so it’s disingenuous to claim it applies to who Superman is now, just as it would be disingenuous to argue that Lois Lane’s original portrayal as a “girl reporter” relegated to fluff and society pieces and futilely struggling to be taken seriously as a journalist is still relevant to the modern portrayal of Lois as an intrepid, award-winning star reporter.
@66/Valan: “The destruction at the end doesn’t really offend me like it does for some of you anymore than seeing D.C. blown up in Independence Day did. Or Godzilla rampaging through a city.”
But in those movies, the destruction is relevant and central to the story. In this movie, it serves no purpose whatsoever to the narrative and yet it never ends. It drags out incessantly and contributes nothing to the narrative. It’s literally never even mentioned in dialogue that it is happening or has happened. But it drags on forever, then just when you think it’s finally over, it starts up all over again. Even if it hadn’t been crassly exploiting traumatizing 9/11 imagery (and it’s not just me — my cousin tells me that other people she knew were even more troubled by the reminder), it would’ve been a bad disaster movie because it was horribly, horribly paced, spending far too long on something with no story impact, no human-level consequences. The best disaster movies emphasize how the disaster affects the characters at ground level. If Snyder had just focused on Perry and his staff running from the wreckage and reacting to the destruction, that would’ve been okay, but there were these huge long swaths of building collapse after building collapse that just had no human connection. If I hadn’t felt so physically assaulted by the sensory overload, I would’ve found it tedious as hell — and I like Godzilla movies. See what I said above about the difference between Godzilla and Superman. If a city falls down in a Superman movie, then Superman is bad at his job.
And if you have your son’s welfare at heart, you don’t saddle him with the lifelong guilt of watching you die in front of him when it was easily within his power to save you. (It doesn’t make sense anyway. Jonathan didn’t want Clark to be seen? That’s what superspeed is for!!!)
@70/Almuric: That’s just the thing. As I said, there’s a lot about this movie that I could’ve loved, but the bad parts are just so staggeringly wrong and offensive and infuriating that they overshadow all the stuff that was really good. And the fact that those awful parts ruined something that could’ve been great just makes them all the more awful.
@72: “Of course the nascent Superman character of the early years was very different from the character he evolved into in his mature form.”
Just as Clark Kent is depicted as being very different from the character he evolves into in his mature form. It’s almost as if Goyer and Snyder considered the character’s entire history
And of course there’s zero on-screen indication Clark has super-speed at that point in his life. This isn’t Smallville, after all.
I remember seeing the trailer for this and simply saying Nope.
BvS got a Nope Nope.
Thankfully there was then WW which had everything these movies didn’t – hope, faith in a future, and used the violence in the story to tell the story. It wasn’t perfect but when Steve sacrifices himself, you felt it in a way nothing in Man of Steel could.
I have not watched Aquaman yet. I am in no hurry but at least from what I’e heard of it I am not actively running away.
Justice League OTOH, became Episode IV: A New Nope.
No, just no.
Yuck, stop reading fucking Ayn Rand.
@60/ChristopherLBennett: I have to say I never heard or read the Kryptonian defeat scenes in Superman II interpreted by anyone as death scenes before MOS came out. They’re in the Fortress of Solitude — it’s surely a slip-and-slide to a cage somewhere. Falls are never deadly unless you see the Emperor explode!
The response in my theater to the “diner return scene” in II was raucous laughter; I think people were primed for that, because the Reeve films on balance are comedies that go for dramatic moments, rather than the other way around. The film definitely knows it’s transgressing in going for the cathartic laugh (hence Clark paying for damages), but it did seem to fit the general anything-for-a-laugh approach (which III took all the wrong cues from).
random22: I told you this would have a ton of comments. We’re at 75 in less than 24 hours……. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
John: just because you didn’t hear it doesn’t mean it wasn’t said. I did hear it. And also say it. :)
As for the diner scene, I’m sure it got laughs. And people cheered at the destruction scenes in MoS. That doesn’t make either any less wrongheaded.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I stand corrected! I would still estimate that “Dead Zod” was greatly the minority view at the time — 1981 being before the grim-and-gritty era for superheroes, the default interpretations were different.
Superheroes were still very much seen as adolescent power fantasies by that point, however, so, yes, I suspect a scene with a bully getting his comeuppance wouldn’t have given the studio a second thought.
I HATED this movie. As everyone knows, Superman has such a ridiculous range of powers that it would be incredibly boring to have Superman just overpower the villain every time.
So, the first trick is to have some type of equalizer, so Superman is truly challenged. Here the movie succeeds by having other Kryptonians who have the same powers as Superman.
The second (and more important) trick is for Superman to have to rely on something other than his brute strength to defeat the challenging equalizer. Here is where the movie fails in epic fashion. As others have pointed out, the last 30 minutes of the movie is nothing more than mindless destruction and violence. Never once does Superman (or the writers) stop to think and plan a strategy or solution. In the end, Superman wins by out-brutalizing his opponent.
This has never been the point of Superman or why he was a hero to us. How could the creators totally miss both the basics of the character and the appeal of a story featuring the character?
I went to college in Arkansas from 1994-99. I’ve lived in Joplin, Missouri since 2006. And in all those years I don’t remember even once hearing anyone suggest taking shelter under an overpass in case of a tornado. Before reading this, I just assumed it was a product of ignorant Hollywood screenwriters. If anyone reading this has lived in Tornado Alley, I’d really like to know whether they’ve heard that before (as a serious suggestion, not a debunked myth).
Also, I didn’t remember any trapped woman in that scene, so I found it on Youtube and rewatched it to confirm. There’s a little girl, but she’s carried to “safety” before Jonathan Kent goes back to rescue the dog. And I absolutely hated that scene — more than any other scene in the movie — because it was such a senseless death. To echo what CLB wrote @72, if he’d really had his family’s welfare in mind, he wouldn’t have risked his own life to save the family pet. Which death do you think would be harder for Clark and Martha to get over?
There were three things I did like about the movie, two of which have already been mentioned by others:
– I liked the sensawunda of the opening scenes in Krypton.
– I liked the fact that Lois figured out that Clark Kent was Superman before she’d even really met him. I thought it was a brilliant subversion of the usual superhero comic cliche of the oblivious love interest, and it makes her much more believable as the sharp, intelligent reporter she’s supposed to be.
– I liked the fact that Zod provides breathing apparatus for Lois when she goes on his ship, because it makes him a more nuanced and believable character. A lot of comic book and movie villains would have let her suffocate just to demonstrate how eeeeeeevul they were, but this version of Zod is a pragmatist. He doesn’t really care about Lois, but he has no particular reason to kill her either, and keeping her alive makes it more likely that Clark will cooperate. That gesture actually made me respect him more as a character.
I remember watching a trailer for this movie, slowly realising it was meant to be a Superman movie, and going “Oh my god, they’re trying to do Superman like the Dark Knight trilogy. You do not make Superman grim and moody, Superman’s meant to be the optimistic one.” Watching it…it’s not as bad as I thought, and definitely not as bad as some of the reviews and comments here make out. Their version of Jonathan Kent is basically a turned-up-to-11 version of the Jonathan Kent from Smallville, with his obsession with Clark hiding his powers. Some of it might make him seem unsympathetic, but at least he has the courage of his convictions: He’s sacrifices himself to protect Clark’s secret rather than going “Oh, but it’s okay to reveal yourself if it’s me that needs saving.”
And I think the main reason it succeeds is because Superman is noble and optimistic at the heart of it. Yes, the scenery destruction porn goes a bit overload, but Superman does seem to be trying to preserve life in the midst of it, including repeatedly protecting the idiots who insist on shooting at him long after it’s made clear he’s on their side. But as someone once said, if you try to save everybody, you end up saving nobody. There’s no point in the film where I think Superman doesn’t care. And yes, the film triumphs in its 21st century depiction of Lois as someone who’s an equal partner to Superman from the off.
And then that ending. I have never once heard anyone come up with an argument about what Superman should have done that hasn’t made me think “That’s stupid.” The worst I ever heard was “He could have kept holding him”: For how many years?! The film does overdo it by making it all about one family who are too dumb to live, and that possibly disguises the real dilemma: Even if Superman can come up with a way to save that one particular family, what happens after that? There’s no way to imprison Zod, there’s no way to reason with him, he’ll just turn around and try and kill someone else and probably succeed, until he’s dead. (The even more laughable thing is people whining that Christopher Reeve’s Superman would never have killed General Zod, to which the answer is “Have you ever seen what he does to him at the end of Superman II? And no, deleted scenes don’t count.”) I guess the issue isn’t what Superman should have done as a character, but what the filmmakers should have done and whether or not it’s right to end a Superman film by creating a situation where the hero has to commit the lesser evil. But I have a lot more respect for heroes who are willing to make the tough choices even if they hate themselves for it than those who let innocent people die in order to keep their hands clean.
You’ve really summed up what makes this film so problematic for me so well. The awful, awful mischaracterization of Jonathan Kent, Cavill’s solid acting and perfect look of Superman beng largely wasted, and Snyder’s utter misinterpretation and disdain for Superman (which later bleeds over to those same feelings exhibited for Batman).
I’m sure I’m essentially parroting people upthread when I say that the biggest flaw with Snyder’s direction is that while he is great at providing unique and compelling imagery, he often fails to make it MEAN anything on an emotional level. This is a film that is totally bereft of subtext.
The scene where Pa and Clark talk about whether Clark should’ve saved the kids on the bus feels like it was rewritten to dumb it down to the level of “PA KENT SAYS ‘NO POWERS’” and Snyder is incapable of directing it in such a way that it seems like Costner is even remotely conflicted at the damage it would do to his son to watch people die when he could do something to help. And I feel like the real reason that’s done is SOLELY to set up Pa Kent’s death – which we don’t really care about, because we are all too busy scratching our heads about it why Clark doesn’t just zoom over at the last possible second – obscured by the tornado – and save his dad. Then, if you’re like me, you recall the far superior scene in the first Reeve film where Jonathan’s death was a lesson that Clark couldn’t save everyone, despite all his power, but one that actually FELT really sad.
The same is true for the decision to kill Zod at the end. In my second viewing of the film, I did catch a snippet of dialogue where Zod does tell Clark that he is going to keep coming back and killing and endangering people again and again if left alive hidden among the sturm, drang and smashing steel, but it doesn’t really MEAN anything because it’s hidden amidst the carnage. One almost gets the feeling that Zod at the end is essentially doing a “suicide.by cop,” but Snyder hasn’t set that decision up well, so it just feels like Clark is too stupid or bloodthirsty to find another alternative to killing him.
Funny how the title for this article has an extra layered meaning. Snyder was trying to build towards the Superman everyone was expecting through development but he wasn’t given the chance to finish it. It was the first movie and everyone is crying he’s not Christopher Reeves living in 2013. He was testing the characters rules to get him there. It’s misunderstood. Same with BvS. I’m sure the next article will be all about Batman not being a killer and again not understanding what is actually about. There’s a reason we are still discussing MoS and BvS years later unlike things like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Justice League.
Funny how the title for this article has an extra layered meaning. Snyder was trying to build towards the Superman everyone was expecting through development but he wasn’t given the chance to finish it. It was the first movie and everyone is crying he’s not Christopher Reeve living in 2013. He was testing the characters rules to get him there. It’s misunderstood. Same with BvS. I’m sure the next article will be all about Batman not being a killer and again not understanding what is actually about. There’s a reason we are still discussing MoS and BvS years later unlike things like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Justice League.
The title of this article reminds me of ‘Wearing the Cape’ a superhero series in which Breakthroughs, like Wild Cards but different, deliberately adopted costumes and code names to make themselves less threatening and more familiar, even reassuring to normals.
@77 Yeah, but it still mostly boils down to that. I stand by my sentiment, although I acknowledge your technical accuracy [g]. ;o)
Some context (which many of you probably already know, but I know there are non-comic fans in the audience); he history of DC Comics (and thus of Superman) can be broken down into three main* chapters: Pre-Crisis (everything before 1985), Post-Crisis/pre-Flashpoint (1985-2011), and New52/post-Flashpoint (ongoing since 2011).
Relevant to Superman is that each of these eras can be seen to focus on a different aspect of him:
Pre-Crisis is about Superman, with Clark Kent as the bumbling, timid persona he adopts when in public (and “Kal-El” just happens to be his alien name). His parents aren’t really involved, none of his “friends” at the Planet know the truth, and while he’s aware of Lois’ feelings, he rarely seems to reciprocate (and Lois certainly doesn’t notice a loser like Clark). This Superman is pretty boring, not just because of his plot-resolving powers, but because he doesn’t really want anything.
Post-Crisis is about Clark Kent, who has a personality (he’s a nerd who geeks out about finding cool asteroids in orbit and brings samples back to his science-friends), goals (he wants to be a successful writer), family/friends/community (he visits his parents weekly, regularly hangs out with Jimmy, has a work-nemesis, and is actively in a relationship with Lois who knows full well who he is), musical tastes (he’s name-dropped Metallica [has every album] and Beastie Boys [a fandom he shares with Jimmy]), and a sense of humour (the real Batman v Superman would be the prank cold-war that ends up dragging in the rest of the JLA). Superman is the public/media persona that Clark puts on, and Kal-El represents a heritage that he has a complicated relationship with (and which other people frequently misjudge him for).
The New52 focuses on Kal-El, the alien castaway trapped on Earth, who uses “Superman” and “Clark Kent” both as disguises to protect his adopted home.
The movies tend to take inspiration from what’s being published at the time; the Donner movies draw heavily from Pre-Crisis themes. There’s never been a theatrical version of the Post-Crisis Superman I grew up reading (Lois & Clark was the closest, but it wasn’t in theatres). Superman Returns cheated us out of it by being a sequel to the Donnerverse, and now the Snyderverse draws heavy inspiration from Dan Didio’s darker, grittier New52 setting.
(* there are other subdivisions within these, of course; the Golden and Silver Ages pre-Crisis, the “Birthright” era toward the end of Post-Crisis [Dan Didio trying to wrest Post-Crisis back toward what he thought Superman “should” be], the current post-Convergence timeline [trying to course-correct the unpopular New52], etc.)
@80/schatzfam: “As others have pointed out, the last 30 minutes of the movie is nothing more than mindless destruction and violence. Never once does Superman (or the writers) stop to think and plan a strategy or solution. In the end, Superman wins by out-brutalizing his opponent.
“This has never been the point of Superman or why he was a hero to us. How could the creators totally miss both the basics of the character and the appeal of a story featuring the character?”
Excellently put. Clark (he’s barely called Superman) is just a blunt instrument in this movie. He’s Jor-El’s muscle, not bringing any of his own ideas to the table. And rather than beating Zod in a battle of wits, he submits to Zod’s kill-me-or-else argument without ever offering a real counterargument.
@82/cap-mjb: “There’s no point in the film where I think Superman doesn’t care.”
That’s true. However, my problem with the film is that Snyder doesn’t care. He doesn’t let Superman try to save people because he has no interest in the people, just the superficial spectacle. For him, scenes of Superman helping people are just brief visual set pieces, more about “Ooh, look at the heavy things he can lift/pull and how cool a picture it makes” than anything on a personal scale. And that makes all the 57,000 hours of nonstop destruction utterly sterile and pointless because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just noise.
” I guess the issue isn’t what Superman should have done as a character, but what the filmmakers should have done and whether or not it’s right to end a Superman film by creating a situation where the hero has to commit the lesser evil. “
Yes. It’s about the storytellers’ choices, not the character’s, because the storytellers are the ones who set up the situation in the first place and decided how the character would resolve it.
And I think there’s just something fundamentally sick about Snyder’s stated belief that the only reason someone would be unwilling to kill is because they tried it first and decided they didn’t like it. Not wanting to kill is the default position for most people. You shouldn’t need to test it first.
@85/t800: You’re not listening if you think this is just about Cavill not being Christopher Reeve. On the contrary, I and several others have said that Cavill was perfect as Superman. We love him in the role — it’s just that the script didn’t let him be Superman in any real way, and insisted on tearing down what Superman is all about before even giving him a chance to become that first.
@87/roxana: “The title of this article reminds me of ‘Wearing the Cape’ a superhero series in which Breakthroughs, like Wild Cards but different, deliberately adopted costumes and code names to make themselves less threatening and more familiar, even reassuring to normals.”
Similar to the Troubleshooters in my Only Superhuman and subsequent stories (that’s right, I’ve sold two more Troubleshooter stories, so it’s plural now). Their Asteroid Belt community consists of insular, nationalist populations who are wary of outside authority, so the transhumans who use their enhancements to protect people and strive for peace embrace the trappings of superheroes because it’s more inspiring/reassuring than looking like some kind of mercenary or military force.
Let’s look at one of the common criticisms of Snyder: “Snyder makes Superman into Dr. Manhattan”.
Dr. Manhattan:
– Becomes detatched from his humanity, cold and aloof.
– Passively allows himself to become a tool of the government.
– Kills countless criminals, Viet Cong, Rorscharch, doesn’t really care.
– Allows himself to be morally compromised by Ozymandias’s plan.
Superman:
– Never loses his connection to humanity.
– Refuses to be become a government asset.
– Kills one person, immediately regrets it.
– Does not allow himself to be morally compromised by Lex’s plan.
I suppose they are similar in that they are American males who have superpowers and fairly active love lives, though.
So why do we still hear this, even now? Good question. It’s like the accusation that Superman caused most of the damage in Metropolis (false), or “doesn’t save anyone” (despite being shown shaving people on screen countless times). It’s been repeated so often that it’s simply accepted without thought.
@91/Almuric: One more time — Superman isn’t the problem here. Snyder is the problem. Superman does the best he can to be Superman, but Snyder isn’t interested in letting him be any good at it. He even goes out of his way to contrive the plot so that Superman is literally as far from Metropolis as it is possible to get on Earth while Metropolis is being destroyed, because Snyder wanted an orgy of buildings falling down and he didn’t want Superman to be there to stop it. The whole reason you have disasters in a Superman movie is so that Superman can stop them.
@90, CLB, the superhero mythos tells us that enhanced humans aren’t necessarily a threat. That they can and will use their power to protect and defend rather than exploit. We can trust Superman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the JLA because they subscribe to the same morality we do. Our enemies are their enemies. They are On Our Side.
After reading the reviews of this movie, I decided this wasn’t a movie I wanted to see. Years later, I was home sick, watched it because it was on, and said, “I was right, I didn’t want to see that.”
I’ve never seen a Snyder-directed movie that I liked. And Warner Bros seems to have stumbled on a way to reverse alchemy, and turn gold into dross, with almost all of their movies (Wonder Woman, however, seems to have happily reversed that trend in recent months).
I don’t know Zack Snyder from a hole in the wall but one look at the darkened uniform was enough to warn me to stick to Christopher Reeve’s movies.
I am always amazed by people who passionately hate movies they have — by their own admission — never seen. Now, I dislike Donnie Darko, but that was well-earned by me sitting through the whole mess only to get slapped in the face by the ending. I will admit, the first viewing of MOS threw me, but I grew to appreciate it once I began to tune out the debate online and pay attention to what he was actually doing and saying. Now it’s one of my favorites in the genre.
-81 Matthew –
No, seeking shelter under an overpass isn’t ideal. I imagine Hollywood got the idea from this video.
I don’t know if the idea that this is somehow the incident that leads to Superman adopting a rigid “No Kill” policy comes from later movies (I haven’t seen anything else from the DCEU), or Snyder, or is just something viewers dreamt up themselves. But it’s not how I see it. I don’t think “I don’t like killing” is a lesson Clark has to learn here, he already knows it. That is why I don’t see this as a moral victory for Zod, because he doesn’t reduce Superman to his level. Zod slaughters defenceless people without remorse, Superman kills one man because it’s the only way to save lives and is still sickened by it. And I prefer to think that he didn’t decide that next time he’ll just let the innocent bystanders fry rather than kill again. I think it’ll keep him awake at night and he’ll be thinking not what else he could have done in that moment, but how he could have stopped things getting to that point in the first place: Whether he could have done something to make sure Zod ended up in the Phantom Zone with the others, for example. He does spend the movie on the back foot, reacting to threats and carrying out other people’s plans rather than being the one driving the solution, but it’s his first time out and he’s had pretty much zero preparation. It can’t be easy when your first mission is a bunch of super-strong aliens trying to destroy the world rather than catching an out of control plane. He’s got a lot of lessons to learn from this but I don’t think that’s one of them.
Oh, yeah, other point: I don’t think “He could have just super-sped in” is a valid solution to Clark not being able to save Jonathan without revealing himself. Even if we accept that Clark is somehow fast enough that he won’t disappear momentarily, if everyone can see that Jonathan’s standing in the path of the tornado, and then a split second later he’s suddenly with them under cover, then they’re going to know something’s happened and ask questions even if they don’t immediately think Clark did it.
@102 That is kinda the point. Clark has always been fairly clear, throughout his comic incarnations, that while he will do as much as he can to plausibly maintain his cover, when push comes to shove and someone’s life is at stake then keeping his identity secret comes second to saving a life. Yes there has been a fair bit of shenanigans over the years (particularly in the Silver Age) in terms of mind wiping and gaslighting afterwards, but Clark Kent saves lives first and works out how to deal with the aftermath afterwards.
@101/cap-mjb: “I don’t know if the idea that this is somehow the incident that leads to Superman adopting a rigid “No Kill” policy comes from later movies (I haven’t seen anything else from the DCEU), or Snyder, or is just something viewers dreamt up themselves.”
It’s something Snyder said in interviews to justify his decision — that he felt someone had to know how it felt to kill in order to justify swearing it off forever. Now, it’s true there have been a number of valid stories about people whose guilt at taking a life makes them refuse to do it ever again. But Snyder seemed to be suggesting that that was a necessary first step, that there was no other possible way a character could consider life precious. And that’s kind of a weird and cynical way of thinking.
“That is why I don’t see this as a moral victory for Zod, because he doesn’t reduce Superman to his level. Zod slaughters defenceless people without remorse, Superman kills one man because it’s the only way to save lives and is still sickened by it.”
Except, again, Superman doesn’t arrive at that choice on his own. He just continues his pattern throughout the film of letting older men tell him what to do and then doing it. He just accepts Zod’s premise that there’s no other way. Ignore the violence for a moment and look at it in the abstract — the climactic scene is one where the villain talks the hero into accepting the villain’s view of the situation. Which means the villain wins the argument. I don’t find that a satisfying ending. For a tragedy or a noir film, maybe, but that’s not a Superman film.
“if everyone can see that Jonathan’s standing in the path of the tornado, and then a split second later he’s suddenly with them under cover, then they’re going to know something’s happened and ask questions even if they don’t immediately think Clark did it.”
What’s wrong with that? Let them think it was a miracle or whatever — as long as they don’t know who’s responsible, it’s okay.
Whenever I think of this movie, the phrase from Monty Python “irredeemably drab and awful” leaps to mind.
Not much new to say here that hasn’t already been said by others but I have to agree with the reviewer that this is a decent alien invasion movie but a terrible Superman film. Having grown up on the Christopher Reeve-led Superman series and various other iterations of the superhero, they all shared the commonality of hope and optimism; things that are totally lacking here and it feels completely wrong. It was a bad decision for the writers to pen this movie as if it were a Christopher Nolan Batman film and entrust Zack Snyder to be the keeper of the flame for the DC Extended Universe. The few positives I see here are the exceptional cast and that Henry Cavill is an exceptionally good-looking man and probably the most handsome Superman there ever was for whatever that’s worth. I also admire his dedication in getting so jacked for the role. But I feel good in knowing that IMHO anyway, Christopher Reeve’s characterization is still the definitive Superman/Clark Kent and no one else can touch it.
Krad, I don’t think you mentioned that Cavill was the presumed lead after auditioning for the role of Superman in the aborted Superman: Flyby project before Bryan Singer took over-helming duties from McG and purposefully chose to use a more Christopher Reeve-looking Brandon Routh instead.
I dislike Superman’s dialogue in the film that he’s “from Kansas and you can’t get more American than that” because it reinforces the erroneous trope that somehow being from “the heartland” is somehow more American than if you were born and raised on either coast. I’ve always found that notion silly and elitist. I say someone working as a stockbroker on Wall Street is no less an American than a farmer in Nebraska plowing his fields.
@103: That might be true of an adult Clark, or of a pre-Crisis teenage Clark who’s already got the costume and glasses and flies around calling himself Superboy, but what we have here is a confused teenager who hasn’t committed to being a hero. I don’t think he’d have stood around and done nothing while someone died in pain and fear screaming for help, even if it meant exposing himself, but faced with someone standing there calmly and making it clear he didn’t want his help, it’s hard to condemn or criticise him for accepting Jonathan’s choice.
Like CM this protagonist bored me, being a puppet to the storytellers will.
Snyder was not the first creator to depict Superman killing someone (that would be Siegel and Shuster back in 1938). He was not the first to depict Superman making mistakes and failing to save everyone (that would be a list of virtually every single person who’s worked on the character over the past 80 years). And yet he alone, above all others, is loathed and despised. I find this . . . fascinating.
#110 nothing strange about it. Snyder neglected one thing – to tell an interesting story. All we got was gloom and doom for the sake of it like a goth obsessesed teenybopper.
@108/cap-mjb: It makes no sense to talk about criticizing a fictional character’s choices, because fictional characters don’t exist. The people we criticize are the writers who chose to make the characters act that way or chose to put them in that situation in the first place. It’s not the imaginary Clark Kent’s fault that Snyder, Goyer, etc. decided to characterize Jonathan Kent in such a poor way or have him sacrifice himself in such a dumb way.
@112/CLB: Well, then I don’t think it’s poor, unrealistic or inconsistent to characterise Clark Kent in that manner.
@113/cap-mjb: Again, the problem isn’t Clark. The problem is how Jonathan is characterized, and the pointlessness of his sacrifice. Clark was just a kid doing what his father told him, and what his father told him was terrible and wrong. To quote my blog review:
Then again, if Clark has the same motivation as Spider-Man to refuse to let someone die on his watch again, then it just makes the neck-snap ending all the more unnecessary, because he’s already got a reason to reject killing.
@110: Sure Superman has been depicted killing, making mistakes , etc. And there are good stories to be told regarding what would prompt Superman to kill a villain. There are good stories in which Superman chooses not to save someone and has to deal with the consequences.
This is not one of those stories.
One of the many things that made me dislike this movie, was that we had just seen a much more thoughtful take on the Kal El vs Zod relationship and an orphaned kryptonian race in the comics.
The New Krypton arc had Zod as military leader of a newly grown New Krypton in our solar system, but acting in good faith, and Superman settling there as a citizen to help in it’s formative years and to look out for his adopted home of Earth.
We see Zod continually assess threats and determine that a swift and deadly response would be best, while Superman tries to steer things away from killing at every turn. But you also see an amount of respect between the two, who are both trying to do their best in their own ways.
Man of Steel instead just delights in needless carnage.
The cool metal kryptonian diorama holograms were gorgeous though.
Needless carnage and terrible characterizations aside, this movie committed what I think is the worst sin an action/adventure movie can: it just wasn’t any fun. When I’m watching a superhero movie, there’s a lot of things I can forgive. Being dull is not one of them.
“a non-American played the title role, with Brit Henry Cavill cast”
Huh, I’ve only ever seen him playing Americans, I had no idea he was British.
If I was going to be snide I’d say that other Superman films are akin to how America see’s itself (ie as a force for good with no grey areas), whereas this film is more how other countries see America (collateral damage left right and centre).
heheheh…. nice
@43/Magnus: Yes, Spencer did make Captain America a Nazi. At the time you could perhaps excuse it as something like what you’re describing, although that doesn’t change the fact that it was a storyline he chose to write as an author in a time period where literal Nazis are on the rise, while claiming he was doing an apolitical work against all textual evidence. It was only three months before the murder of Heather Hayer at Charlottesville, yet even after that he still kept pushing right on under the ridiculous claim that no, Hydra weren’t Nazis so it was fine.
But right now, that’s been the case for almost two years, and everyone involved in authorship has repeatedly made firm that yes, Captain America was secretly a member of Hydra, and the version of him that came forth recently that was more akin to what was apparently his Deep-Manchurian-Candidate-self is not the original Captain America but a copy created based on that persona. They are insistent about it to the point of ridiculousness, because they really want everyone to know that original Cap was secretly a Nazi who got Cosmic Cubed into being not a Nazi.
And regardless of what might happen in the storyline later that will inevitably retcon this entire period — because yes, of course that will happen, the people criticizing it aren’t idiots and the biggest outcry is coming from comic fans who know how this all goes — that’s irrelevant seeing as how this is all fiction anyway, none of these events are real and there is no hidden truth to be uncovered eventually but just a set of narrative decisions explicitly made and put into production that could be changed at any point before the comic is printed. (Did revealing that the Monarch was Hawk mean that all the clear foreshadowing and intention towards him being Captain Atom suddenly no longer happened?) The more important thing is what those choices are, what narrative decisions are made, and not what decisions will happen in some theoretical future.
My only complaint about this is the portrayal of Kostner’s Kent as “a paranoid idiot and a borderline sociopath.” He’s a Father who is honestly scared for the safety of his son. Yeah, the tornado though…I got nothing. I much prefer Jonathan dying from a heart attack.
I’d wager that the best parts of this movie were from Goyer and Nolan and not Snyder.
@45 – CWatson: I’m in that same minority, I guess.
@96 – Almuric: Yeah, people decide they hate something just from the trailers or promotional photos.
@122: It seems people outsource their opinions to the internet these days. Me, I like to form them myself. I wouldn’t like half the things I do if I listened to other people.
At least on the subject of letting the schoolchildren die, Johnathan Kent said maybe and not yes.
I loved Man of Steel, it’s the superman I grew up with in the post-crisis DC universe. I think most of the people who hated this movie are bigger fans of the light and happy Donner films. the battle of metropolis shows what would happen if super beings were to fight in a tightly packed city, they showed this in servel episodes of JLU and several issues of Superman/Action Comics.
@125/templarsteel: No, as I pointed out, the battle doesn’t even remotely show what would happen in such a fight, because of its cartoonishly ridiculous portrayal of buildings collapsing like houses of cards at the slightest impact. Skyscrapers are specifically designed not to collapse easily. Modern skyscrapers are designed to withstand earthquakes, extreme winds, and similar structural stresses. Again, it took hours of burning before the World Trade Center towers finally collapsed, even though they were struck by objects of far greater mass and size than two adult male humanoids. And remember, 2001 was the second al-Qaeda attack on the WTC — the 1993 truck bombing in the underground garage was meant to collapse one tower into the second, but it failed to do so because the explosion was in the wrong place.
Compare it to the more disciplined and intelligently designed action in the climax of The Avengers. Multiple superstrong beings were knocking each other into buildings, giant armored monsters were flying through the air and smashing into the sides of buildings, but the buildings still remained standing. There was a clear sense of real, extensive devastation without the cartoonish overkill of Snyder’s approach. Plus it had actual dialogue and plot points and character beats and story relevance!
So this was not a remotely realistic battle. This was the multimillion-dollar equivalent of a small boy gleefully smashing his action figures into his LEGO skyscrapers and making them all fall down.
@124 If you cannot give a clear and unequivocal no to the question of “should I let a bunch of kids die” then that is a pretty clear moral fail right there. A “maybe” just does not cut it, because in that case a “maybe” is as good as a yes.
Matthew@81: I grew up in Oklahoma and left there in 1977, and I recall people saying it was safer under an overpass. I’ve thought so myself. And if it were a sufficiently tight space, then it would provide some protection from flying objects, depending on what direction they were coming from. I’d rather take my chances in a shallow ditch if it looked like it was going to hit, but for a near miss, it could have advantages.
@125: The only huge urban battle I remember from Justice League Unlimited is the Superman vs. Captain Marvel fight that happened in Lex Luthor’s planned community. Yeah, Supes and CM smashed the place up – but it was totally empty at the time and both participants knew it. Also, if memory serves, Luthor actually designed the buildings to be destroyed in the fight. That’s a lot different than the climax to MOS, in which Superman makes no effort to move the fight out of Metropolis or to steady the buildings that are falling down.
I still wonder how much the backlash to the end of MOS figured in the planning for the next film. It was completely obvious when they announced that Doomsday was trashing an abandoned part of town that they were at least paying lip service to the “what, no rescues?” crowd.
thierafhal: I’m with random22 here. There’s only one non-despicable answer to that question and Jonathan didn’t give it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I just figured out who this Jonathan Kent reminds me of…
Assaulted feels like the correct term to describe a lot of the feelings I have towards this movie. @Christopher has a point. At the time, I thought I enjoyed this film for that feeling of assault. I don’t recall many blockbusters creating this much of a physical impact on me.
In retrospect, it wasn’t the good kind of assault on a viewer’s senses. The editing is a mess, the score is omnipresent and suffocating.
I had a hard time trying to grasp where this film went wrong. It’s easy to target the Metropolis carnage. It is what it is. But @krad nailed it by bringing up Jonathan Kent’s parenting choices. It’s unforgivable for a father to tell his son to shut out his conscience and not be a hero. The tornado death feels almost comical as a result.
I don’t think Snyder is blameless in his choices, but I’d be remiss and ignore the contributions from others. Man of Steel is also a byproduct of David Goyer, Christopher Nolan and a lot of misguided WB executives who had decided to ape Nolan’s storytelling and visual sensibilities from the Dark Knight trilogy. And it just doesn’t work.
Clark being a secondary character is another noticeable problem. Back in 2013, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was a Superman film or a Jor-El one. One gets the impression the film underwent a massive rewrite to boost and maximize Jor-El’s scenes. It’s as if someone decided the movie had to be a Russell Crowe film and this would be a way to justify his high cost (and presumably his ego as well).
There’s almost a good film trying to claw its way out of this mess. You almost want to feel for Clark and his journey, but it never quite comes together. The casting is superb. I’d be willing to watch Cavill as Superman and Adams as Lois anyday, as long as the story works. And Michael Shannon is superb, not only for giving a complete distinct take on Zod from Terence Stamp, but also in making me care for someone who’s essentially a villain commited to slaughter.
There is one other plus in this film. They jettisoned the whole Clark must keep his secret identity from Lois schtick, which I always felt dragged down the Reeve films.
But overall, Man of Steel is living proof of poor executive managament. Hiring Snyder should have been a warning sign from day one. He’s a good director with a strong visual sense, as long as the material is good. He just wasn’t the right one for this endeavor. Though I think it would backfire with most other directors if they didn’t have complete control. The sequels only highlight how much WB executives had no idea how to think these films through, let alone build a coherent universe out of them. The minute Patty Jenkins got full control on Wonder Woman, that film broke out of the pack and became what it became.
@128/JohnArkansawyer: “I recall people saying it was safer under an overpass. I’ve thought so myself. And if it were a sufficiently tight space, then it would provide some protection from flying objects, depending on what direction they were coming from.”
On the contrary, an underpass is one of the most dangerous possible places to be during a tornado, because the tight space concentrates the wind and makes it deadlier, and for multiple other reasons spelled out here:
https://www.weathersafety.ohio.gov/tornadosafety.aspx
That’s one more reason that scene in the film was horribly wrong — because it perpetuated a myth that could get people hurt or killed.
@129/twels: “I still wonder how much the backlash to the end of MOS figured in the planning for the next film. It was completely obvious when they announced that Doomsday was trashing an abandoned part of town that they were at least paying lip service to the “what, no rescues?” crowd.”
Oh, definitely, and the whole plot of BvS felt like a conscious attempt to correct MoS’s mistake of ignoring the consequences of the destruction, with Bruce’s and the world’s reaction to the destruction being the driving factor of the plot — which was a nice idea in principle, but the execution was an even bigger disaster.
And having the climax take place in an abandoned part of town was definitely a reaction to the criticism, but it was just a way of dodging the issue rather than really fixing it. Snyder still only cared about seeing buildings get trashed and had no interest in the personal scale; the only difference is that instead of ignoring the inhabitants of the buildings, he made a token reference to their absence so that he could otherwise do things exactly the same. The Avengers movies got it right — don’t ignore or remove the people, focus on them. Embrace the human scale of the story. That’s something Snyder has zero interest in doing.
@133 said: Snyder still only cared about seeing buildings get trashed and had no interest in the personal scale; the only difference is that instead of ignoring the inhabitants of the buildings, he made a token reference to their absence so that he could otherwise do things exactly the same. The Avengers movies got it right — don’t ignore or remove the people, focus on them. Embrace the human scale of the story. That’s something Snyder has zero interest in doing.
To be fair to Snyder, I think that some of the emphasis on smashing things up in Man of Steel came from the ho-hum reaction to Superman Returns, in which Supes saves the day essentially by shoving a rock into outer space. I’m pretty sure there was a directive that came down from Warner Bros. to up the amount of spectacle considerably. One of the big complaints from the fanboys about Superman Returns was that we never really see Superman “cut loose.”
Still, for all its flaws, I’d take Superman Returns any day of the week over Man of Steel. Nothing in MOS compares to the thrill of Superman saving the space shuttle in Superman Returns. Frankly, even the scenes of him racing through Metropolis attending to the damage caused by the great big Kryptonite rock are more thrilling than the endless flights through buildings and people running in the streets.
That said, I actually kind of like the sequel to this one. Oh, not the abomination they released in the theaters (and that we will discuss on Friday) – that thing stinks to high heaven. The Ultimate Edition that came out on Blu-Ray a few months after is no masterpiece, but it does show the characters acting more like themselves at least – and unlike a lot of director’s cuts, the restored footage adds a ton of context that definitely wasn’t there in the theatrical version.
@134/twels: “To be fair to Snyder, I think that some of the emphasis on smashing things up in Man of Steel came from the ho-hum reaction to Superman Returns…”
Probably, but it was an extreme overreaction in the other direction. As I’ve said repeatedly, it was not only hugely excessive but very badly integrated into the story, having no plot or character impact whatsoever. You could cut out maybe 15 minutes of collapsing buildings and still have a considerable amount of action and 100% of the same plot beats and dialogue. Understanding why Snyder did it does not change the fact that he did it badly. There are good ways to add more action to a film, and this was not one of them.
And you’re right — watching Superman save people from disasters is far more exciting than watching Superman do absolutely nothing to prevent or mitigate a disaster.
I didn’t like the mass destruction, but I recognize that there has always been a blind eye turned to the consequence of violence in comic books and movies in general. Superman villains (that aren’t petty thieves) want to destroy the world or subjugate it. Blood is going to spill regardless of Supe’s feelings. Actually killing Zod violates Superman canon; recognizing that there will be a bloody, perhaps vastly bloody, cost to stop him does not.
I hated that Superman, and pretty much every DC hero before the current Wonder Woman and Flash, are so ridiculously mopey, and this movie does it to the king of DC who didn’t know his real parents or his lost planet. Clark, you can freaking fly! That alone should plaster a permagrin on your face.
@133 CLB
Re: presonalizing humanity in the face of armageddon:
Ironically, Justice League would later fail miserably at this as well with the random family that we follow during the parademon attack on the town.
@132 Eduardo Jencarelli
I also think that Goyer is under-blamed for this movie. Goyer has somehow managed to carve out a niche as one of the go-to guys for comic and super hero movies, but outside of the Nolan Batman movies I struggle to find any of his works that I actually like. Myabe Blade comes closest to being successful.
Snyder wasn’t a puzzling choice for director to me. In fact his skill at striking freeze-frame images makes him well suited for a comic book movie, just maybe not a super hero movie, and Superman movie in particular.
I think the print arm of DC should share a lot of the blame for the failure of the DCEU. I can’t stand most of Geoff Johns’ output, and most of the public-facing top brass (I’m thinking of Didio and Jim Lee here) don’t seem to be top level story guys either. The last fifteen years or so aren’t fertile ground for Superman stories, or even DC stories in general. I’m hoping Bendis will be a good influence.
@136/Bill Mynatt: The lack of consequences is exactly the problem. We’re forced to watch buildings falling down for the better part of half an hour, but there’s no acknowledgment of the death toll or the impact on society, and everything is magically back to normal 2 scenes later as if it never happened at all. The franchise only belatedly tries to fill in the gap in the second movie, and it’s little more than lip service. Snyder couldn’t care less about consequences, he just wanted spectacle.
@137/vinsentient: It’s pretty clear that the “random family” was Joss Whedon’s attempt to add some trace of human connection to the shallow, noisy destruction sequence that Snyder had filmed. There was only so much he could do in reshoots to improve on the original version. It’s clumsy, but at least it’s something.
As for Snyder, he can create striking images, but there’s nothing beneath the surface. Watchmen slavishly recreated a bunch of comic panels but missed the point of the story they told. Creating images is enough to be a good cinematographer or VFX supervisor, say, but not a good director.
twels: We’ll get to this Friday, but, just as with the director’s cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Daredevil, the restorations to Batman v. Superman are incredibly overrated. They make the movie slightly better, but only slightly, and it’s ultimately lipstick on a pig. And it does nothing to fix the fundamental flaws of the movie — which, again, we’ll get to Friday. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@138. “It’s pretty clear that the “random family” was Joss Whedon’s attempt to add some trace of human connection to the shallow, noisy destruction sequence that Snyder had filmed. There was only so much he could do in reshoots to improve on the original version. It’s clumsy, but at least it’s something.”
Did Whedon add the scenes of Jenny, Perry White and Steve Lombard caught up in the destruction in MOS too? Or the scenes of Bruce Wayne trying to save his employees in BvS?
From what I’ve gathered, at least 4-5 scenes of superheroes saving people — shot by Snyder — were excised from Justice League so we could get a lousy Russian Lit joke.
@138 The random family might be Whedon reacting, poorly, to the fact that the MCU based an entire movie on two random families who died in Age of Ultron that Joss didn’t even bother to show in his own destruction pornganza. Whedon did do better than Snyder, but so much worse than the Russos did following up to Whedon.
And I confess, I was wrong, there really is a lot of mileage in saying just how badly Snyder failed.
random22: I tooooooooooooooooooooooooold you! *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
True, very true.
@142 I think this might beat TDKR’s record of most comments (167)
Can we get a fan edit of this? Loving Keith’s suggestion here. Personally, I would remove about 75% of Jor-El’s presence in the movie. And is there enough editing magic to make Jonathan Kent less of a douchebag?
@145/Austin: I’m fine with Jor-El’s presence. He’s the actual hero of the film, the main protagonist who gets stuff done. There’d be practically no story without him. This isn’t a good Superman movie, but it is a pretty good movie about Jor-El, Lois Lane, and General Swanwick saving the world with some help from Jor-El’s strong but indecisive son, until it gets sidetracked in the last act with endless disaster porn.
@137. vinsentient: ” I can’t stand most of Geoff Johns’ output… I’m hoping Bendis will be a good influence.”
That’s a common view on Johns among some fans. Personally, I think it’s overstated. Just adding more Lantern Corps to the mythos alone secures his legacy. There’s also his revamp of Aquaman as a badass, without which the Aquaman film would either have been very different or not existed at all. And if you haven’t seen any of the DC streaming shows he’s involved with, like Doom Patrol, they’re actually worth a look.
So far Bendis hasn’t impressed me. His first new Superman villain was a Terrax retread. I don’t think he’s as inspired by DC properties as much as Marvel ones. My guess is that he was drawn by the free hand he’s been given with the original books and characters he’s launching. Do the superhero stuff to be able to do the other stuff.
@144. spoonfan: that would be Age of Ultron…
Long story short, my opinion on first viewing was, “an excellent science fiction/alien invasion movie. Too bad it’s such a shitty Superman film.” Said opinion stands.
@148 My bad. I stopped checking the thread after the GOTG thread showed u
Quoth Sunspear: “There’s also [Geoff Johns’s] revamp of Aquaman as a badass, without which the Aquaman film would either have been very different or not existed at all.”
Um, no, that revamp happened in 1993 with Peter David’s Aquaman: Time and Tide miniseries and the monthly series he wrote that debuted in 1994. Jason Momoa’s Aquaman is pretty much exactly the Aquaman that David wrote in the mid-1990s.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Take this with a grain of salt, but this article compares the destruction in MoS with 9/11:
damage estimate
It also suggests a change to Superman’s motto to “Truth, Justice, and the Americans who got in the way.”
@krad: I’ll give you the long hair and shirtless look (and I usually like David’s work), but personality-wise that version is a long way from Momoa’s gypsy-stoner fun-loving character. He was sometimes angry and mopey. And don’t forget the missing hand replaced with a harpoon.
I’m thinking of Johns relaunched New 52 version who wielded a quindent, was bulletproof and still had to fight off jokes about talking to fish. Although that one’s since been supplanted by the Rebirth version.
And then there’s the DC Animated Universe Aquaman, who was pretty much just Namor. Although he did get the hook hand eventually.
@137 – vinsentient: The random cuts to the Russian family in JL were distracting. It did not work at all, quite the opposite. Can’t agree about Geoff Johns, though.
@154: One of my favorite JLU episodes is the one where they essentially do a reverse “Squadron Supreme” on the Defenders with:
Solomon Grundy = Hulk
Dr. Fate = Dr. Strange
Hawkgirl = Nighthawk
Aquaman = Namor
I forget if there were any other analogues, but I burst out laughing the first time Grundy called Hawkgirl “Bird Nose.”
One of the things The writers of MOS really should’ve looked at was the success of the DC Animated Universe in terms of storytelling. I’d say that “The Batman/Superman Movie” is about a thousand times more potent as a story – even as a stand-alone – than the next film we will be talking about. Also, the opening episodes of the Superman animated series are probably the best non-comics telling of Superman’s origin. They put this movie to shame.
A large percentage of things that DC has done in both animation and in live action is better in animation. (An obvious exception being a solo Wonder Woman movie, of course…..)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It’s been said already, but this movie is the reason I gave up on the entire DC movie universe. The death, destruction, and the romantic kiss surrounded by crushed and dying people just snapped some DC loving neurons right out of me like Zod’s neck. I still haven’t seen Wonder Woman, Affleck Batman, Justice League, etc. No desire to at all.
I have decided to watch Aquaman if I ever see it on Netflix etc.. but right now it’s Marvel all the way for me.
@158/Mike: Wonder Woman is fantastic, a very different entity from the Snyder-directed films. As for Justice League, it’s inconsistent, but I find it entertaining in its character work. And it sounds like the newer films from Aquaman onward have shaken off the approach that did so much damage to the first few movies and are focusing on being fun standalone films (although I haven’t managed to see Aquaman yet).
Mike: DO NOT DENY YOURSELF WONDER WOMAN. TRUST ME.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
In addition to what the others said (yes Wonder Woman!)…Affleck Batman is hardly the worst thing about BvS. I actually found that, in a movie I otherwise didn’t particularly care for, I enjoyed that aspect of it more than I thought I would.
Wonder Woman is good for the DCCU movies, but it is at best an okay movie in its own right. Mainly because it is two shorter movies back-to-back. It is a lower middle-third, upper lower-third MCU level movie. It did not completely suck, which is a solid win for DC though.
@127/random22, @130/krad: I was being sarcastic.
The biggest sin MOS makes is failing to own up to it’s story.
If your story is about the real world consequences of superbeings living amongst regular people then don’t sweep all of that under the rug at the end. Slapping a happy ending – welcome to the planet (Groan) – to a movie that has just shown a devastation event that is many times greater than 911 is not only disingenuous, it’s insulting.
@164/OldDarth: And I still say that if you want to make a movie where the consequence of aliens among us is massive death and devastation, then don’t make it a movie about Superman. Especially don’t make it the first movie about your version of Superman. Failing to prevent the destruction of most of a city is a very inauspicious, ineffectual debut for Superman. If your intent is to do a whole series about him, then start off by giving him a big win.
Cannot producers give the public something new for a change?
Superman might have been brilliant half a century ago but since Akira the game has changed.
And family matters are soap. Science Fiction is also ‘scientia’ about this Superman is woefully inadequate
@166/Lutz Barz: “Superman might have been brilliant half a century ago but since Akira the game has changed.”
Akira came out over 30 years ago — more than a generation, and thus more than enough time for the game to change again. It’s hardly “something new.” If anything, each generation tends to react against the tastes and excesses of the previous one, so I’d say we’re about ripe for the anti-Akira, for something pushing back against its pessimism with more optimism. And we’ve seen that with the lukewarm audience reaction to Snyder’s cynical, dark DC films (steeped in the deconstructions of 1980s comics that were contemporary with Akira) and the positive reaction to more optimistic, fun films like Wonder Woman and Aquaman.
Agreed but Akira still rocks, I gotta get my hands on the manga
Getting back to mschiffe‘s comment in #55 about whether Shazam/Captain Marvel is the same person as Billy or not, CBR has just posted an article clarifying that the change from “Captain Marvel is an adult who trades places with Billy” to “Captain Marvel/Shazam is Billy in an adult body” was made in 1986, when Roy Thomas reinvented the character as part of the main DC Universe (rather than a separate reality based on the old Fawcett comics):
https://www.cbr.com/shazam-billy-batson-same-person-debut/
So Billy and CM were different people for the first 47 years of the character’s intermittent publication history, and the same person for the past 33 years of near-continuous publication. So I’d say it’s pretty inaccurate to accuse the movie of getting it “wrong” by using the version that’s been standard for the entire modern age of comics, the same length of time as “Clark is the real identity and Superman the facade,” Lex Luthor being a businessman, Batman being a grim loner who was raised by Alfred, Wonder Woman’s home being named Themyscira instead of Paradise Island, and plenty of other things we now take for granted.
So I’m incredibly late to the party here, but if anyone’s still around I was wondering if they noticed the same flaw about Clark and Lane’s relationship.
Now, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the movie, but it was so weird how Lane’s connection to Clark/Superman went from investigating, to all of a sudden transforming into a full blown intense relationship that included a heart to heart with Clark’s mother.
If there was no background from the comics that the audience was cognizant of, no one would have have bought/understood their relationship.
I may be misremembering, but I don’t think so
@169/anomanderrake: That’s my problem with a lot of Man of Steel — it just tosses in stuff because it’s expected as part of the Superman narrative, but doesn’t make any attempt to justify it within the story. Like making Metropolis the final battleground when Clark has never even been to Metropolis before and there’s no reason for Zod to pick it as a landing site.
MOS was a let down, plain and simple. The writers and director did not understand Superman’s essence: he is a god raised by mortals and has a down-to-earth, Midwestern, farmer ethos.
I disagree with just about everything you say.
To call this a character assassination is nonsense. To call John Kent paranoid or an idiot is a failure to understand his position or his fears. He is neither paranoid nor an idiot. If anything, you are not paranoid enough if you think it’s okay to let your son put himself in danger whenever wherever.
For you to call this an embarrassing Superman movie is to suggest that Superman can only be written in a certain way. You insist on all of these rules, insist that he cannot be allowed to fail. You insist that there can be no amount of uncertainty in Clark’s father in regards to his destiny. You insist that he must say the right thing. Always. Did it never occur to you that him saying “Maybe” was not actually a response to his question but an unfinished thought?
“Maybe… there’s more at stake than our lives…”
And if you’re still going to pout “Nonononono” like a spoiled fan, than maybe you should stop reviewing Superman movies altogether. Insisting that Superman must be written as an idealist, and that he always does the right thing? Bull. He’s failed before. He’s made the wrong choice before. And if he never makes mistakes he never learns from them.
You don’t seem to want a hero. You want a god. You want Jesus in a red cap and blue tights. You want Christopher Reeve flashing a smile as he reverses time to save his lover.
I cannot abide with this review. It’s all wrong.
@174/X:
Your other arguments are valid, but why the mudslinging? I happen to disagree with krad’s review too, but then what’s the point of people writing reviews and people reading them and commenting on them if we’re all just going to agree? Krad didn’t like the movie and he’s perfectly within his rights to write that he didn’t like it.
X: Just a few points:
1. Yes, Superman is the ideal hero. Yes, he sometimes makes mistakes, but all we get in this movie are the mistakes. And then, to make matters worse, every subsequent movie in this sequence acts as if he is the ideal hero, yet we never actually see that.
2. There’s nothing in the text of the movie to indicate that “Maybe” is the beginning of an unfinished thought. All we get is Kevin Costner saying “Maybe” in response to whether or not Clark should have let a bus full of children die. Also, your hypothetical finishing of the thought isn’t any better. It’s not “our” lives that Clark was talking about, it was a bus full of innocent children. And I’m curious, what’s more important than that?
3. I really really really don’t want Jesus in a red cape and blue tights. If you’ve read the other Superman reviews in this series (I covered all Christopher Reeve films early on, and Superman Returns prior to this and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League after this), you’d know that.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@174/X: Please take a minute to acquaint yourself with our moderation policy: you’re welcome to disagree with an opinion or review, but the tone of your comments must be civil and constructive. This is a discussion, not an invitation to attack people you disagree with, so please keep things polite if you want to take part.