Man of Steel (2013) Review

★★

 

By: Kameron McBride

I want to start out by saying that Superman is a very difficult hero to put a good reboot together of by virtue of the fact that there aren't all that many great Superman stories. There just aren't a ton of directions to go when trying to put a new twist on the character. With that said, lets take a look at Zach Snyder's latest adaptation, Man of Steel.

The story starts in the planet Krypton, which sort of looks like Naboo from The Phantom Menace, where lead scientist Jor–El (Russel Crowe) is trying to convince a high council that the planet is about to die and that they need to take steps to prevent the death of their race. However, Krypton's military leader General Zod (Michael Shannon) attempts a coup of the planet and begins taking it by force. Jor–El escapes, goes home and manages to send his son—the first natural birth in a century on Krypton—to Earth in order to escape destruction. Zod is captured by the Krypton police and sent to the Phantom Zone in permanent isolation. Soon after, Krypton crumbles and falls apart, with Jor–El's son being the only survivor.

These Krypton scenes are pretty interesting but they don't really give us a good indication of what Krypton was like. We don't get a good feel of what the customs of Krypton are like, Zod keeps talking about the importance of bloodlines but we have no idea what he is talking about. If we were going to spend time in Krypton I wouldn't have minded a little more exposition.

My main problem with Man of Steel is the writing. How the story progresses and the character arc of Superman himself just makes little sense to me. How the story is edited just makes no sense to me. We jump back and forward in time so often that no scenes have a chance of actually having an impact. Instead, every "revealing" scene about Clark just kind of fizzles out. This movie is two and a half hours and yet doesn't actually fill out that long run time. 

Anyways, we find that the shuttle carrying the baby crashed into Kansas. Then suddenly we find a fully grown Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) working on a fishing boat. What follows is sort of a montage where we see a grown Clark set against him growing up in Kansas with his father Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and his mother Martha (Diane Lane). We see Clark is struggling to cope witht he world around him, he doesn't appear to connect with any other humans and is constantly moving when he fears his powers may be exposed.

This all changes when Clark stumbles upon a spaceship from his home planet where he finds information about his past. Also stumbling on the ship is spunky reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams). However, just as Clark feels he may understand his past General Zod shows up and offers Earth an ultimatum: surrender Clark Kent or suffer the destruction of Earth.

I think this film is trying to work as a character study of Superman and, more specifically, study the dualing influence of his two father figures: Jor–El (Russel Crowe) and Jonathon Kent (Kevin Costner). The problem is that the motivations of these two father figures are either totally bizarre or undefined. Crowe's Jor–El I thought was just confusing, especially his motivations for sending his son to Earth, but I really didn't understand a lot of the choices made with the Jonathan Kent character.

 I'm not the foremost expert on Superman lore but I always thought that his Earth parents helped form Clark Kent's moral center and gave him a reason to be so attached to mankind. However, in Man of Steel Martha Kent is barely in the film and Jonathan seems to have one message for his son: one day you will essentially be the most important person in the world so, for now just avoid exposing yourself at all costs. Seriously, he chides Clark at one point for exposing his strength by saving a schoolbus full of his classmates. A tearful Clark responds by asking "what should I have done? Let them drown?" to which Jonathan responds by saying "Maybe." I just don't buy this as a character choice, shouldn't Jonathan be trying to nudge Clark to help people but without lording over them? If Martha and Jonathan should be helping form Clark's moral center, shouldn't they actually teach him morals instead of teaching him that he is so special that he should let others die rather than out himself?

Furthermore, shouldn't we see a lot more of Clark interacting with humans? Honestly, most of his interaction with human beings involves him restaining himself, which I think works really well as long as we see him also find reason to hope for humanity.

I also don't really understand how the cast can be forgettable in this film.  I thought the cast was initially very strong. Everyone fits their part very well but nearly every character is just so bland and totally meaningless. Laurence Fishborne is a very good choice for Perry White, and yet he has virtually no impact on the movie. Ditto for Amy Adams, both her and Fishborne are very good actors and yet they aren't given enough room to breathe and actually produce interesting characters.

I think all of these problems revolve around one aspect: General Zod doesn't work well as a first movie villain. I'm not saying Michael Shannon does a poor job with the character, he may actually be the best part of the movie, but Zod just doesn't really work well within an origin story. The conflict Zod presents is that he is the only link Superman has to his Kryptonion roots, but in order for this conflict to exist Superman needs ties to Earth. In Man of Steel Superman has no real tie to Earth, other than his parents, and thus isn't going to have as big of struggle. Additionally, the citizens of Earth probably aren't going to have a hard time giving up Superman when they barely knew he existed.

My frustration with this movie stems from the fact that I really liked the direction it was trying to go in. The idea of doing a slower character study of Superman is a good idea and trying to examine the influences acting on him is even better. And finally I think forcing Superman into a decision between whether or not to trust humanity or rejoin his own people is a great piece of tension. However, in order for these things to be effective, we need more time with Clark Kent. We need to make these issues matter so much that it is a tough choice. As an audience, we barely know Clark and are being asked to take a stand on whether he should save Earth or not. It's a great dilemma, just not set up well. 

This film needed just a little more care and focus, somebody to actually plot out how the events of the plot set off each other. Instead, this just feels like a giant mess with a few bright spots.