The DC Movie Universe. Hoo boy, this is a bloody minefield.
I haven’t seen this much wasted potential in a blockbuster movie franchise…ever
actually. I’m struggling to think of another franchise with so much talent at
their disposal go only 1/3 in not catastrophically shitting themselves. I’m
going to do all 3 of the DC movies in short order, and today we get started
with Man of Steel, the movie no one thought would actually end up being a
franchise leader.
Before we get started I want you all to take a moment to
think about this question: Out of Man of Steel, Batman Vs Superman and Suicide
Squad, which one do you think (based on previous rants, or, if you know me,
actually knowing me) was my favourite one so far?
Let’s give you a bit more space here.
Oh look a cloud.
Wonder how many of you said Man of Steel? Cause everyone who
did is right.
I actually quite like this film, despite its obvious flaws.
Still think this is the best live action Superman to date. It’s certainly the
only one I rewatch in its entirety – these days I’ll only bother watching Zod
clips from Superman 2 and not a lot else. So, let’s get into it then.
The first act of the movie is largely split between Clark
having flashbacks to various points of his life, and an opening sequence
dedicated to the final days of Krypton .We’ll start with Krypton as it
basically sums up Zack Snyder in a nutshell – looks amazing, sets up the plot well,
is still riddled with stilted cliches. It’s the routine we know well by now –
Krypton is dying (in this case, they mined their planet so hard the core is
about to implode – well done chaps), and they’re all fucked. Jor-El (played by
Russell Crowe) has just had a son – naturally born, which is a huge deal on
this Krypton – and wants to send him and the Codex away so that something of
Krypton may survive. What is the Codex you ask? It’s a genetic database that
Krypton uses to create new Kryptonians. This means that not only is little
Kal-El rather unique, he’s kind of unapproved. Zod goes as far to call his
birth a heresy, which hints at an interesting form of eugenics/population
control being practiced on Krypton.
Speaking of Zod, his response to the planet being about to
die is to launch a coup and kill Kryptons ruling council. Not really sure what
his followup was going to be but I’m sure it made sense to him. He asks Jor-El
to join him for old times’ sake, and Jor-El says he’ll honour the man Zod was,
not the monster he’s become. If you’re confused, it’s because this is the first
time we’ve seen the characters on screen and we never get any context, ever for
their history together. So lines like this look even more painfully clichéd than
normal. Anyway, Jor-El bails, steals the Codex, imprints it into Kal-El’s body,
and then sends him to Earth before Zod kills him. Zod also tries to shoot down
Kal’s capsule, but the Kryptonian military have their act together by this
stage and have put down Zod’s rebellion. As punishment, Zod and his crew get to
live while the rest of Krypton dies in fire.
Ok, I wrote that sort of wrong. Zod’s mob get exiled to the
Phantom Zone while the rest of Krypton accepts their fate and dies stoically.
Not sure why the Kryptonians didn’t leave Zod and Krypton and flee into the
phantom Zone, since it’s a realm they can clearly travel to and from but hey.
Then again, a species that knows about its power boost under a yellow sun that
doesn’t exploit this deserves everything it gets. I’m being kind of snarky, but
the stuff about genetic engineering, and Zod’s “kill first, questions never”
approach to problem solving is actually pretty important for later on. Plus, it
looks amazing. Seriously, Krypton looks like a dying but vibrant world full of
alien life and structures. I’ll rip into Snyder for a lot (mostly in the next
review), but the man is damned good at crafting the visual part of a scene.
On to Earth, and young Clark’s life wasn’t easy in this
timeline. He had to put some effort into controlling his powers and especially
his senses – we learn early on that if he doesn’t focus, he basically hears
everything, sees through everything, and probably smells everything as well.
Total sensory overload is hard on anyone, let alone an 8 yr old. These scenes
also show us the Kents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) as decent people who are
just worried about their son. I think this early stuff is pretty decent as well
– they’re great parents, and they also admit that they don’t have all the
answers. Some of you might remember the early trailers where Jonathan responded
to Clark asking if he should have just let his classmates die by just saying “maybe”?
Sloppy marketing. That scene as a whole is pretty good, and Jonathan’s full
response is basically showing that as much as he is proud of Clark for saving
people, he’s terrified of what might happen if word got out about Clark being
alien. In this day and age, I feel that his fear of people basically
vivisecting his teenage son is probably not far-fetched really.
We get a few more scenes of adult Clark (now played by Henry
Cavill) wandering the world, doing good deeds in some places, wrecking the hell
out of peoples stuff in others (he wraps a drunken rednecks truck round a light
pole at one point). It’s kind of interesting, but kind of worrying at the same
time – he comes across as searching for his way, true, but at the same time,
his considered response to a problem is overwhelming violence. That redneck
basically attacked Clark in a bar, but his snap response was to swallow his
pride and walk away. It was several hours later that Clark destroyed the semi,
which is concerning. It also never gets referenced again, so it just feels
jarringly out of place – like Snyder had gone 20 minutes without destruction
and couldn’t help himself.
Anyway, we’re out of the first act now and we’re only just
getting onto the actual plot. Enter Lois Lane (Amy Adams). She’s at a dig site
in Canada with the US Military (jeez, the Canadians are pretty compliant in
this universe) where they’ve found something odd under the ice. Clark is there
as well under a false name, and he bails at night, only to be followed by Lois.
They both enter what turns out to be a long crashed Kryptonian scout ship.
Clark uses a crystal Jonathan found on his pod to summon Jor-El’s data ghost
and get an info dump on who he is and a recap of Kryptons final days. Lois gets
alien robot claw to the gut. Pretty sure she would have loved the data dump
really. Clark cauterizes her wound, dumps her on the ice and takes off with the
ship, leaving Lois with a lot of questions and a cover-up. Once safely away,
Clark gets a bit more of an info dump, his suit (no underpants on the outside,
fucking finally) and starts to harness his powers. Cool stuff.
Her response is actually some solid investigative journalism
by montage which is nice to see. She basically backtracks Clark through all the
rumours that have sprung up on his journey about this strange man who just didn’t
seem to fit in, who kept seemingly helping in times of trouble and vanishing.
Good stuff. It leads her to Clark, and to the single dumbest scene in this
movie. Clark explains that he doesn’t want to reveal who he is because he and
his family are uncertain how that will turn out (good) and how his father died
(terrible). How terrible? Jonathan died in an easily escapable situation,
saving a dog instead of a person, and with possibly the most over the top
attempt at a moronically stoic death I have seen in ages. It’s not MARTHA! levels
of bad (because very little is) but it’s pushing that kind of dumb.
Anyhoo, having had a bit of meandering scene setting, the
plot accelerates at breakneck pace from here. Lois tells Perry White (Morpheus)
that she’s dropping her story on the superhuman. In a good little moment, Perry
thanks her for it – he doesn’t believe her at all when she says she didn’t find
anything, but is worried about public reaction to someone like Clark existing.
This is all rendered moot when Zod shows up in a fancy spaceship and tells the
world that he’s here looking for one of his own.
Things basically spiral into chaos from here until the end
of the movie. Lois gets taken by the Pentagon because they want to know what
the hell Zod was talking about. Clark offers to be handed over to Zod so that
Lois can go free. They both go to Zod, who reveals that he’s after the codex.
And also that he killed Jor-El, is not proud of it, but would do it again if he
had to and intends to rebuild Krypton on Earth. This part basically fleshes out
the last bit of Zod, and ties in neatly to the earlier Krypton stuff. Why doesn’t
Zod think about co-existing with humans? Well, he’s a genetically engineered
soldier programmed to protect Krypton (I guess he interpreted his coup as being
in Kryptons best interests. Slight loophole) at all costs. He can’t conceive of
another solution because despite being a living being, he basically has as much
autonomy as a gun. Neat contrast to Clark, who can choose his own destiny.
While all this is going on Lois sneakily uploads the Jor-El
crystal (slipped to her by Clark) into Zod’s ship, which allows Jor-El to cause
all sorts of trouble and free the pair of them. In the meantime, the
Kryptonians spot Clarks ship at the family farm and go looking, leading to a
spectacular (and stupid) throwdown. Spectacular because this and the final
fight have some of the best Superman-level combat ever committed to film.
Stupid because Superman actually takes Zod from a farm in the middle of
nowhere, flies him across miles of open terrain, and then throws him into a
town to fight him.
One of the major criticisms hurled at this Superman was that
he seems indifferent to human life. Broadly, I think that’s an unfair criticism
– sure the Metropolis fight would have had horrific casualties, but Zod
committed his forces there and did most of the damage with the World Engine.
Clark was just trying to put Zod down and having problems with an almost
equally-powered, better trained soldier. Generally I'd say it's Snyder and his writers who have an indifference to human life - the scale of destruction in Metropolis before Supes ever gets there is crazy. This town fight though? Clark went out
of his way to take Zod from an uninhabited area to a town. Stupid, stupid,
stupid.
Anyway, the fights look cool at least. The Kryptonians
retreat here so they can trigger the World Engine to begin terraforming Earth.
Clark goes to stop one in the Indian Ocean, while the military tries to turn
Clark’s baby pod into a black hole bomb (somewhere Godzilla just sneezed and
knows exactly why) to throw at the one in Metropolis. This isn’t actually as
dumb as it sounds – Clark’s pod wouldn’t fit in anything less than a C-130
transport craft, and those things aren’t quick. Clark was around the world and
back again in roughly the time it took to get the C-130 to Metropolis in the
first place, so good call. Plus, movie black holes are those self-consuming
ones that stay just long enough to be dramatic, so all good there I guess. This basically serves to clear the Kryptonians and a few other minor characters out of the way as the transport crashes into the World Engine, destroying both.
While this is going on Zod finds Clark’s ship, purges Jor-El
and gains control of the genesis chamber on board. Now if he can just kill
Clark, he’ll have what he needs to rebuild Krypton…no wait, World Engines are
down. Also, Clark kinda torches Zod’s new ship and trashes it. I’ve heard a lot
of people say that Clark killing Zod was the saddest scene in the movie. And
sure, it’s got the soft music, the manly screams and the forced sense of
tragedy to it. Personally, I think Clark hesitating as Zod tells him that
destroying this ship would destroy Krypton, only to fire up the laser eyes and
proclaim “Krypton had its chance!” is that moment. It’s the moment Clark
chooses his adoptive home over his actual home, and because Zod is an
engineered psycho he has to destroy any chance of there actually being a chance
to rebuild.
Cue one more major fight in which Zod pulls a fairly extreme
version of Suicide by Cop (I guess it’s hard to do it traditionally if bullets
bounce off you) and we’re done. Mostly. Two more scenes show Superman agreeing
to help out around the world so long as the military stops chasing him, and
then joining the Daily Planet as a reporter.
And we’re done. Overall I quite like it, despite some
glaring problems in plot and dialogue. The secondary characters I didn’t cover
in detail actually do help flesh out the world a bit or do a bit of scene
stealing – Faora (Zod’s 2nd in command) and Col Hardy in particular
deserve some credit here. Mostly for being badarse in their own way and
eye-fucking each other harder than I’ve ever seen minor characters eye-fuck
each other before. Seriously, any other movie and those two would be at it like
rabbits. Faora’s demolition job on the soldiers in Smallville was really good –
she basically rag-dolled a bunch of otherwise competent looking soldiers to
show off how powerful Kryptonians are to us humans. Actually, the military come
off as mostly ok in this – they’re not clownishly stupid or anything, they’re
just way out of their depth (Suicide Squad will show just how far…). Lois gets
some good journalist work, Perry seems like a solid boss, the Kents were aweome…overall
pretty good job from the actors.
Overall my biggest criticism would be about the focus of the
plot more than anything else – having Superman put on the tights and
immediately have to fight Zod is a pretty grim start to his career. Grim is a theme
we’ll be seeing a lot in my next review – it’s like Snyder took all the
criticism about his Superman being too grim (deserved or not depending on what
scene we’re talking about) and thought people wanted more of it. Henry Cavill
proved to be a decent Superman, but I feel he needed more time to be Superman –
to be saving people and actually getting to feel good about something – before a
throwdown with a genocidal maniac. OTOH, a lack of pointful action scenes was
one of the damning criticisms of Superman Returns, so I can see why they did it
here. Still, chunks of it (especially the Smallville fight) seem like Snyder
wanted incredibly destructive scenes (Metropolis alone may as well have been
hit by a tactical nuke by the time Zod was done with it), and wasn’t fussed
about he got there, even if his characters had to do stupid things to make it
happen.
What happens in Batman vs Superman though…well, that’s my
next rant. Here’s a preview – all of the little faults and Snyderisms present
here basically come roaring into prominence and I stop being generous.
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