Because MAN OF STEEL is kind of shitty.
I am going to do something different this time and talk about things I liked as well as the perpetual shit parade that pranced throughout my viewing of this movie.
I was okay with Superman killing Zod. I was okay with the destruction of Metropolis. At that point in the film Zod was–while wanting to pummel Kal-El into oblivion–still more interested in the annihilation of humanity. Had they pulled a SUPERMAN II move I am confident that this Zod would have simply erased Metropolis from the face of the planet, rather than flying after Superman to some remote location.
THINGS I LIKED:
- Faora. She will be mine. Oh yes, she will be mine. I was also a big fan of how she fights. What, you thought I was just thinking with my penis here? Using super speed to traverse the extremely short distances between her and her enemies was fun to watch and a good use of her new-found powers.
- Kevin Costner. He probably had the best performance out of anyone in the film.
- Costume and set design, especially on Krypton. I even warmed up to Superman’s new suit.
- When Thick Morpheus grabbed his compadres during the destruction of Metropolis and, instead of continuing to run along the path of a falling skyscraper a la PROMETHEUS, he ducked down the nearest side street.
- Superman finding his inner …Superman and, despite the fifty-five billion tons of Kryptonian gravity bearing down on him, finds his can of spinach and manages to fly up and curb stomp the world machine.
- Lois Lane making fun of Superman and informing him that it is, in fact, an S on his chest.
THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:
- You’re going to change the world x65. I didn’t actually count to see how many times Clark was told that he would change the world, but basing it on how annoyed I became with the line I am estimating it being uttered no less than sixty-five times.
- Shaky cam. I hate American film makers with such unbridled fury that my rage could burn up the sun and blacken our solar system permanently. For once I would like to watch a new triple A movie that wasn’t filmed with a fucking GoPro or Handycam. I would also like to see a movie that doesn’t have scene cuts every four to six seconds, especially during climactic fight sequences. Anyone watch BULLET TO THE HEAD? I recommend students of film seeing it at least once so they can log it away as how fight scenes should never be done.
- Lens flares. I know everyone in Hollywood seems to be infatuated with burning the collective retina of their audience with shiny bullshit. It ruins immersion. I’m supposed to BE THERE, right? Especially with all that camera being three inches from the faces of the actors, held by a man with late-stage Parkinson’s disease crap. I thought the point of shaky cam and “Is that a hair coming out of his nose?” cinematography was to help the audience feel immersed in the flick, then they go and ruin it by adding lens flare effects. If I were actually there, on Krypton, I WOULDN’T SEE LENS FLARES, JACKASSES! Jor-El doesn’t see lens flares, why should I be subjected to their headache inducing effects? You have multi-million dollar equipment and tens of thousands of dollars worth of education, some of which to teach you how to avoid real lens flares and other camera anomalies, and then you ask the guys in the visual effects department to add a metric ton of them back in? Fuck you.
- Zod. I was in no way, shape or form, ever intimidated by this man. In fact, it seemed to me that he was doing far less acting and far more reading all of his lines from a cue card, and reading them poorly. I’m not saying we needed a different actor–although that may have helped–I’m just saying that maybe once or twice during production Zack Snyder could have taken him aside and, you know, politely asked him to do his job. The Zod from Superman II was way more scary than this guy, and he was practically a string bean!
- Krypton’s “atmosphere” rendering Superman helpless. I almost wanted this to make sense, but then I realized that Zod and his henchmen were capable of super strength while still breathing in Krypton’s atmosphere by way of their respirators. Why are they still super strong but it strips Kal-El of his powers? I attempted to argue with myself that they’re so used to Krypton’s gravity that they merely appear to be super strong while on Earth. But that’s crap, because if their ship really simulated Krypton’s gravity how come Lois Lane’s frail, human body wasn’t instantaneously crushed when she boarded? You know, like how all the cars and buildings were reduced to two dimensions during the brief terraforming of the planet to mimic Kryptonian conditions. Woops?
- Along the same lines, I wasn’t really cool with how it took Clark Kent 33 years to acquire, hone, and control his powers but it required Zod and his goons roughly forty-five seconds to do the same. Especially when the movie attempts to explain that over the course of those 33 years Superman has absorbed so much of the sun’s radiation that it has made him immensely strong. But somehow Zod’s cells can replicate that process in just a handful of minutes. Wut?
- Finally… Flying in the infinite vaccuum of space where there exists no air or atmosphere: NO PROBLEM! Breathing “Kryptonian atmosphere” for fifteen seconds: OMG, WHERE ALL MY POWERS GO? Anyone else facepalming out there?
So really, to sum everything up, the entire problem with MAN OF STEEL wasn’t that Zack Snyder reinvented the character, loosely based on the previous seventy-five years of canon. The problem is that he wanted to turn Superman into a science fiction movie but neither he nor his writers were intelligent enough to make it happen. Which is, honestly, a major failing of just about all science fiction movies. So thank you, Mr. Snyder, for shitting all over nearly a century of canon in favor of creating something that managed to make even less sense than a man who uses a pair of eyeglasses as the primary element to his alter ego disguise.