Man of Tomorrow - Today

You will believe...

When Richard Donner made "Superman" in 1978, the tag-line was "You will believe a man can fly". Although Star Wars had only just come out, and Krypton could be pronounced as "CRIP-tun" by half your characters (instead of CRIP-taun) without a Reddit-y uproar, it was necessary to reassure the audience this was just a man, not an alien from another world. That world therefore had to be a pristine, crystalline, neon-lit, but ultimately sterile place backed up by the gravitas that Don Corleone brought to it.

Superman could be - had to be - the blue eyed, red-brief-on-the-outside wearing Nietzschean hero who (Fascist undertones notwithstanding) would be a bewildered Kansan in a big city that fights for 'truth, justice, and the American way'. The meanest villain imaginable for Superman in this Cold War era was nuclear weapons gone rogue, and no one took a super-hero seriously, so it was OK to reverse the Earth's spin and turn back time and for Lex Luthor to be a bumbling criminal genius with a real estate fetish...

Actually corniness was not something to be frowned at - it was a prerequisite! One of the iconic funny exchanges I remember from the movie is this mid-air snippet from when Superman saved Lois Lane as she fell out of a helicopter and off a building:

SUPERMAN: Don't worry miss, I've got you!
LOIS (hysterical): You've got me..? Who's got YOU?!

A trustworthy alien?

Fast forward 35 years and audiences no longer have trouble believing a man can fly! We've seen Neo go off and "do the Superman thing" in the Matrix movies. The Avengers have fought as a team to ward off an invasion of Earth. Alternate worlds have come alive, fully fleshed out, in their grime and bile as much as their radiance, in everything from Avatar to Game of Thrones. Zod can no longer be a promise made for a sequel in the era of instant gratification.

We leave rogue nukes for mortals like Jack Bauer to handle these days, and even cartoon fiction like 'Ben 10' is deadly serious about the origin tale, and has little tolerance for corniness. Comic books, and movies based on them, are acceptable and mainstream enough that critics spend time debating what the Joker (from The Dark Knight) represents in a post-9/11 era...

This is the perilous airstrip on which lands Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel". I thought it does the job of bringing Superman to the post-modern era well, while faltering just a little... I am not much of a star-giving reviewer, especially when the movie is about source material that I am so invested in - but if I had to, I'd give this a 3 out of 5. Let me explain why...

Everything beyond this point is likely to range from mildly to strongly spoiler-ish, depending on your thresholds. This goes double for those who have avoided all hype and trailers for this movie. So, if you are hyper-sensitive about being spoilt, stop and skip ahead to the end, where I write a Conclusion...

NO really, stop here.

You've been warned.

Text search for "The Conclusion" before ye go further...

What I Loved

The first hour of the movie had me absolutely gripped, as it peeled back the onion that was a fully-formed superbly designed Krypton heading toward total collapse. I'll admit I had never really thought of Superman as 'the Last Son of Krypton', in all my years of reading and viewing this universe across several interpretations. He was always just the invulnerable hero in red and blue. This movie brought home the fact of his being an alien with all attendant implications. The time spent on Krypton in this movie was well spent indeed.

I thought they got the exposition via timely flash-back device right. It belonged in the script, and gave us a good enough view Superman's early life in vignettes. Yes, they were edited together in a ham-fisted manner, but still (and more on that in the next section).

I loved that Superman's journey of discovery of his heritage wasn't a few random shots of him hitchhiking and disappearing down a cave for 10 years talking to papa-and-mama-ghost. I loved seeing Clark Kent go from shy child to angsty teenager to downright mean young man. I liked that he was Clark Kent first, who discovered his heritage as Kal-El next, and was only "Superman" at the very end. This is genuinely better than the somewhat simplistic portrayal in the old movies.

The juxtaposition worked - of Jonathan Kent as the humanist (and human) father who believed his son was destined to be... something... with Jor-El as the father whose only wish was for his son to break the cycle of determinism and become his own man. Of Zod as the eugenist man of violence, and Jor-El as the wise man that would rather his race died out than lost its hope and compassion. Of Krypton as the planet beyond redemption, and Earth, as the world still pregnant with hope.

The fan-boy in me was absolutely geeking out at the full realization of what Superman is capable of. Little things like the proper use of heat-vision, the punch - catch up - punch again aerial hammering, the very Matrix Revolutions-ish city-leveling fist-fights at the end, Superman carrying on a conversation through a one-way mirror - those were things us fans have been waiting to see done properly in live action for several decades now. No more 'non-canonical' powers like wiping memories and turning back time - Superman, of all heroes has ever been the one with his powers rooted in the physical.

The cast was exceptional - with the exception of Amy Adams, who is given too much to do plot-wise and not enough nuance to portray (more on this later).

I thought Henry Cavill, despite the missing curl of hair, pulled off what Brandon Routh struggled to do - he has filled out Christopher Reeve's mighty shoes. I bought into the fact that he was Superman. I even loved the end, and the 'resolution' of How to Deal with Mighty Zod and Superman's reaction to it. Pitch-freaking-perfect. Superman as a murder-haunted do-gooder will be a great thing to explore in the sequel(s).

But the contract said, I could say "Kneel before Zod!"

I liked Diane Lane as Aunt May... er, I mean, Ma Kent. I even liked the little bit Meloni got to do in his head to head "honorable death" thing with Faora. Russel Crowe and Michael Shannon owned their respective roles, and to be honest their powerfully depicted, almost Shakespearean rivalry made the events on Earth seem like a sideshow.

I have to say right up until the (forced by Indian cinema habit) intermission, I was convinced this was "Superman Begins" and Goyer and Snyder (and yes, the Nolans) had delivered another, er... marvel of a DC trilogy. I loved the several on-screen mentions of LexCorp, and that the scout ship and the "in Superman's body" codex leaves open the possibility for an expansion of the mythos.

Unfortunately, that's when I noticed Superman's cape had got caught in the jet-plane exhaust...

What I Hated...

The first sign that we were not in "Best movie of the Year" Kansas any more was was when with nary a "33 years later" caption, the screen cut from Kal-El's arrival on Earth to him all grown up and unrecognizable on board a ship answering a distress signal. It was jarring to me, because up until that point (the half-hour mark?) the action had been coherent and continuous. Just as I was done asking myself if maybe I had missed the titles to a temporal amnomaly, there was this pastiche of vignettes thrown up where I had to scramble to figure out what era each scene was from. No visual cues, no on-screen captions, no tones of sepia. Every damn era in HD and 3D. Fine, I'm all for near stream of conscious scripting, and exposition on the fly. I can forgive such transgression as sacrifice to the ADHD-bathed altar of post-modernism.

What I despise is when film-makers get cocky and rely on spectacle and visual splendor to gloss over script short-fall. I hate when they think a flying man and big 'sploding thingies mean they can lose all sense of time and space and take liberties with things like continuity. The Dark Knight Rises did that with the magical transportation of Bruce Wayne from Broke-Spine Prison to the streets of Gotham, and Man of Steel matched it with...

The Incredible Adventures of Lois Lane: Face, meet palm. So yeah, Lois Lane, intrepid reporter, can go from the Arctic to Metropolis, to Kansas, to a interrogation bunker thing vaguely near Vegas, to near-Earth-orbit, to Kansas again, to aboard a bomber that the US Military never would've let her board, to surviving another crash over Metropolis, to pin-pointing Zod and Kal-El's location  in Grand Central (while a whole city is going to hell) in time for a loving, reassuring post-climactic (no pun intended) hug. Hey script-writer, ever thought of letting the other thespians you'd got in the cast like the mostly wasted Laurence "Morpheus" Fishburne, Christopher "Stabler" Meloni, and Richard "Ziegler" Schiff do some of this stuff? Would've been more, y'know, sensible?

Sure, you can interrogate him! Not like we have any experts for that sorta thing...

What with the forced love angle as well, by the way? Superman and Lois Lane, especially given the complete lack of chemistry between the actors, really did not have to snog at the end there. I'll forgive you the tinkering with mythos and the loss of charm attendant to Lois knowing exactly who Clark Kent is - but try and be internally consistent will you? Couldn't you leave the loue for the sequel?

But enough about the bad editing and script (with no memorable dialogue that will stick with me a-la "Who's got you?"). To other failures...

Jonathan Kent Meets His End: No, sorry, no. I don't care if you are playing the Kal-El or Clark Kent angle, this character does not watch his father get taken by a tornado for sake of a secret identity. Especially when you make a joke of the secret identity anyway with everyone including Random General Dude Standing in for Obama knowing Superman grew up in Kansas. Not when Lois Lane knows, and every one else can figure it out in 10 minutes of research. (So, why did Zod go menace that tiny Kansan town again?).

The poignant thing about Pa Kent dying is that Superman, for all his powers, is helpless to do anything about it. He cannot restart a dying heart. That was the whole point! Killing him like a dog (for a dog) does not compute.

The Vanishing Secret Ingredient: Look I get it. If Nolan's Batman trilogy was, among other things, all about Bruce Wayne dealing with the mask of Batman and questioning which was his real self, this movie was about Kal-El learning to be Clark Kent, rather than Clark Kent becoming Superman.

My Fortress of Solitude flew away... and I wasn't even alone in it yet!

However, this movie loses the charm of how a pair of spectacles and a business suit is enough disguise (wink, wink) even for Lois Lane to not figure things out. There is no need in this new brave universe for Kent to be the bumbling fumbling idiot that does bad things to Perry White's blood pressure. That is not just dicking with mythos, that is losing so much possibility for dramatic tension and humor, it's sad. (And no, I am not a mythos Nazi, and didn't mind Jenny Olsen)

The Conclusion

I must admit I have not yet fully digested this movie - I am too much a Superman fan, and have been so for too long, for that.

There will be a second viewing for me, and yes, in a movie hall, not on DTH or DVD. I think they've built a strong foundation for any number of sequels, and this could well be the JLA universe building opportunity DC had been waiting for. I bought Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel. There are many beats this movie gets perfect - it even resolves many issues I had with the Donner films.

They better do something with a stronger script the next time though. I don't care if it's Brainiac next, or Doomsday; I hope not, because they need a more Earth-based sequel I think lest audiences OD on Krypton. Wherever this goes, I hope they write a better script than they did in this go around. There is real opportunity to flesh out the dynamic at the Daily Planet next time - that will be fun to see.

Ultimately, I think this is the contemporary Superman everyone had been waiting for - if not quite exactly what I was hoping for. It is a product of its time, just as Donner's Superman was a product of its own. This is what you get when there is a glut of super-heroes vying for the attention of ADHD diagnosed 12 year olds. This is what an 'immortal icon' needs to do to stay relevant in fast changing times. It is exciting, and it is a shame, all at once. While the movie screams out for slightly better scripting and execution, and suffers from criminal under-use of the ensemble, ultimately it is good enough to be the start of a new Superman saga.

Count me then, as a grudging fan of this Man of Tomorrow...