Man of Steel starts out promisingly
enough. It opens on Krypton as Lara Lor-Van is giving birth to a child we know
will become Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman, and a group of dissidents led by
Michael Shannon’s General Zod stages a military coup when the planet’s current
leadership refuses to help save their civilization from annihilation brought on
by their excessive consumption of natural resources. Though this sequence feels
rather derivative thanks to its striking similarities to the prologue for J.J.
Abrams’s Star Trek, right down to the
heavy use of lens flares, it nonetheless effectively establishes an emotional
base that would ideally anchor the rest of the film. Ayelet Zurer as Lara and
Russell Crowe, who plays her husband and Superman’s biological father, Jor-El,
are convincing even while delivering some grandiose dialogue (indeed, they’re
pretty much the only actors in the movie who are able to make the dialogue
sound natural), and as Lara watches the spaceship carrying her just-born son
disappear into the sky while the world around her literally goes up in flames,
you get a real idea of how she and Jor-El have tied up all their hopes and
dreams in his survival, of the weight of the burden placed on the shoulders of
this child who has only just entered the world. There’s genuine gravity to the
situation, but the movie that follows fails to maintain this level of urgency,
instead descending into cheap action scenes and Roland Emmerich-level
destruction porn.
One of the difficulties of
adapting Superman for the screen has always been in generating meaningful
internal – or even external – conflict for a character that is not only
essentially invincible, but also sports squeaky-clean morals. As someone who’s completely
ignorant about anything comic-book-related, I can’t say whether this lack of
complexity has always been part of the character or the result of general pop
culture and Hollywood oversimplifying him, but the fact remains that, in a
modern age where people are drawn to the troubled darkness of Batman and flawed
egotism of Iron Man, Superman, with his boy scout, do-gooder attitude and
unabashed optimism, feels out-of-place and un-relatable. Zack Snyder and co.
attempt to fix this problem by giving the hero a moody background full of
bullying and I-never-asked-for-this angst. After seeing numerous flashbacks of
Clark’s childhood, like an episode where he rescue his classmates, including a
kid who’d been teasing him, after their school bus careens off the road and
into a river, we learn that he’s always been driven by the innate need to help
people and that he feels a great sense of alienation, but that’s about it. We
never get more than the most basic glimpse of his inner psyche, and even this
is largely discarded by the time the movie’s central plot kicks into gear.
Basically, General Zod and his
crew, who were banished from Krypton shortly before the planet’s demise, have
survived and now want to restore their society by moving what remains of its
populace to Earth; of course, in order to do this, they apparently have to wipe
out humanity for vague reasons that seemed to relate to a supremacist view of
evolution. With such a cartoonish, generic antagonist to bounce off of, perhaps
it’s no surprise that Superman never grows beyond a two-dimensional shadow of a
character. Not helping matters is Henry Cavill, the largely unknown British
actor chosen to take on the cape previously worn by George Reeves, Christopher
Reeve and, most recently, Brandon Routh. With a shock of dark hair, his angular
chin and insanely well-sculpted body, he certainly looks the part, but that’s
the thing: he doesn’t do much else besides stand around and look heroic. He’s
unable to breathe any new life or nuance into the role.
The rest of the cast doesn’t
fare that much better. Unable to overcome the underdeveloped material, Amy
Adams turns in a rare lackluster performance as Lois Lane, though she does get
one of the film’s more rousing moments when she escapes Zod’s ship with the aid
of a computerized hologram of Jor-El. Despite the presence of some big names,
including Laurence Fishburne as Lois’s boss Perry White and Kevin Costner and
Diane Lane as Clark’s adoptive parents, the only person who makes a memorable
impression is Antje Traue, the East Germany-born actress who portrays Zod’s
right-hand woman Faora-Ul. Rocking a punk-chic black haircut and a sweet suit
of armor, she oozes cold-hearted swagger while gazing at the world around her
with an expression of bored condescension, as if to let her opponents know
exactly how little they matter to her right before she kills them. She steals
the movie without ever seeming to try and brings a roguish wink of fun to an
otherwise self-serious affair.
As disappointing and forgettable
as the ensemble cast is, what keeps Man
of Steel frustratingly grounded is that, for a major blockbuster about a
character meant to embody hope and nobility, the whole thing is awfully
joyless. Because the characters are never fleshed out in any meaningful way and
David S. Goyer’s script fails to demonstrate how they have been affected by the
story’s events, it’s difficult to get fully invested in anything happening
onscreen after those initial fifteen minutes. Not even a characteristically epic
score from Hans Zimmer that’s reminiscent of his previous work alongside
producer Christopher Nolan can get the pulse racing or make the interminable
action set pieces feel like anything more than a whole lot of CGI flashes and
punching. While he stops short of indulging in the ridiculously over-the-top
stylizations that characterized 300
and Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder shows
that he still hasn’t learned how to make an action scene exciting, or at least
not headache-inducing. He aims to do for Superman what Nolan did for Batman but
doesn’t seem to realize that Nolan wasn’t successful simply because he went
dark, but rather because he went dark with
a purpose. The Dark Knight trilogy
explored timely themes and questions in ways that superhero movies had never
done before without abandoning the spirit of its source material or the genre.
Photo Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment