I’m with you, and I generally like Superhero movies. But there has been so many in the last few years that even the better ones are getting repetitive. I kinda wish hollywood would find a new trend for its big blockbusters.
Not so much for me, but we’re getting there. Huge effects movies in general are getting too easy to make, I think, and filmmakers are leaning on the CGI way too much and drifting too far away from the story making. Maybe this is the Michael Bay-ification of Hollywood, but I find it a disturbing trend. On top of that, everything seems to harken back to September 11 too easily and everything has to be an allegory for it and for post 9/11 America, the government’s response, or the war on terror. Look at all the damage on New York in the Avengers or in the fighting here in The Man of Steel (Disclaimer: I have not seen it yet, but I’ve read several reviews and many have made note of it), buildings are destroyed but nobody mentions all the people who died.
Compare that to Superman II. The fight scene between Superman and Zod’s crew is arguably the cheesiest, worst superhero fight put to film: Zod gets thrown into a Coca Cola sign, super breath makes everyone blow backwards, most notably the guy on skates, and the whole fight seems underwhelming and not to scale of what 4 super powered Kryptonians can do, but at least you get the feeling that Superman cares for the humans and wants to protect them.
So I would like to see comic movies, I liked Iron Man III enough and I’m looking forward to Captain America 2 and the other Marvel movies. I would just like to see the writers, directors, and producers to get away from the wangsty, ultra drama, heavy handedness, and all that other stuff and just make a movie.
The superhero fight in Superman II was awesome! I saw it when I was ten.
Not me, I’ve been waiting for 'em my whole life (and I’m nearly 60). This is the answer to a Silver AGe boy’s dream.
I enjoyed the 3D. It was great at conveying the speed and power of the superfights.
You definitely get a sense of why Lex Luthor might feel he is absolutely justified in wanting this alien gone in the sequel after Metropolis is absolutely ravaged (possibly worse than NYC in The Avengers).
I went ahead and saw it this morning. I thought it was really good! I’ve never seen a film at less than 60% on RT that I thought was worth watching, but this one was. The critics have failed me in aggregate!
Like many, I was taken aback by the scale of destruction in the action scenes toward the end, and would have expected a bigger deal to be made out of that.
I’ve just come back from seeing it at the local cinema. 2D. Started writing this ten minutes after sitting down; finished forty minutes later. The film was better than I expected from the trailer. The trawler thing - that wasn’t an important part of the plot at all. I was half-expecting the film to about Clark Kent working as a fisherman, with Kevin Costner using fishing as a metaphor for the human struggle, but he doesn’t catch a single fish throughout the entire film, even though he has ample opportunity to do so. In fact the trailers suggested that the film was a schizophrenic mess, but it’s not like that.
It’s interesting to compare it with Superman Returns, which is the only other Supes film I’ve seen at the cinema. They both belong to the modern era of CGI effects, they both have tiny little observations about the impact of the internet on modern journalism, they occasionally look the same, but they’re very different films. Returns suffered from a poorly-served main character, a laughable villain, and general lacklustre air.
It felt as if the writers were very young, competent, unimaginative, inexperienced. And, looking them up on the IMDB they are roughly the same age as me and haven’t written anything of note before and since. They seem to have been hired on the strength of their work on X2. I know my own strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and the screenplay for Returns felt like the screenplay I would have written if the producers had given me five million dollars and six months to do it. It would have been competent, but unimaginative and derivative and ultimately lifeless. Throughout that film I had a sense that I could do… just as well, if our places had been swapped, but not better. And that was painful, because a man never wants to see his limitations.
In contrast Man of Steel is… actually, it’s hard to say how it’s different from Superman Returns. It’s the better film by a country mile, but it has similar problems. The main character has more to say and do, but he felt overtly jovial at times, and I can’t convince myself that he was any better than Brandon Routh’s stab at the role. Routh was never given enough to work with and he didn’t have a chance to prove himself. Henry Cavill isn’t given much more but he feels slightly more authentic, slightly less like a male model. Nonetheless I never really felt I had a handle on the Superman character. I’ve always thought there would be a Doctor Who quality to him - distant, aware of the passing of time and of the people he cannot save - but he remains a blank slate.
The treatment of Lois Lane, on the other hand, was infinitely, undeniably, inconceivably better. In Returns she’s a lightweight feather, whereas in this film she’s still a bit limp but came across as fundamentally more competent and just generally more charismatic. She still exists to be saved, mind you, and in that respect Returns was a bit shrewder (the human characters do a lot to save the day in both films, but in Man of Steel they basically pull the solution out of thin air, whereas in Returns Lane’s boyfriend had to risk his life despite being marked for death by dint of being Superman’s love rival).
Russell Crowe was a bit stiff in a role that required somebody a bit older, with more gravitas. For some reason the producers chose to put Laurence Fishburne in a fat suit, which was an unfortunate decision. It doesn’t flatter him during the running-away-from-rubble sequences. Kevin Costner is low-key, Diane Lane has aged extremely well.
Where it worked, what saved it, was that it had a genuinely threatening bunch of villains and a proper action movie plot. It still relied too much on the unsatisfying device of having Superman being bashed and broken and then just clenching his jaw and bursting out of a pile of rubble to smite the baddies one more time. And as always with superhero films the fighting seems arbitrary - they punch, and kick, and we know that neither combatant will do any real damage until the plot demands it. But General Zod was nasty with a tiny sympathetic air and he looked genuinely upset at times. The action was a bit rougher and less “safe” than other Superman films; we see people being most definitely killed, and there is a lot of mayhem.
Towards the end it turns into Independence Day, and is another one of those films where the main characters stand around being soppy even though thousands, possibly even millions of people have died. Conversely it has a much larger scope than other Superman films, it has an air of a grand sci-fi adventure, which bodes well for the future. Superman is too big for earthly villains, he needs something really tough to punch.
And yet I enjoyed it. I won’t buy it on blu-ray and I’ll probably never watch it again. But I don’t feel I wasted £9.90 + the 50p booking fee and the £4.80 for medium salty popcorn. Trailers: Despicable Me II (looks dull), Wolverine (looks dull), Alan Partridge: Alpha Pappa (this is doing to be awful), and World War Z, which looks expensive and monotonous. Also, I hate the world and kittens in particular.
Howard Hawks once said that the key to making a film was that it should have three good scenes, no bad scenes. Man of Steel has a couple of duff moments, but they pass; it has two good scenes and two genuinely witty moments, but there’s nothing great about it. When Richard Donner was making Superman: The Movie, all those years ago, he aspired to greatness, and the film has a couple of moments that almost made it a great film, rather than a decent special effects movie. Rather undermined by the Lex Luthor section in the last third. In contrast Man of Steel is a competent superhero action movie. You won’t feel ripped-off. You might however leave the cinema wondering whether it was a rejected script for a Thor movie, or a Hulk movie, or an Iron Man movie - Iron Man vs the Space Warriors - or any superhero with enough strength to smash through a building without dying.
So, marks out of ten, it’s competent. Competent out of ten.
There now follow some observations that I could have folded into the body of the text - but didn’t:
My real first thought was that the main characters seemed to have had nose jobs, and that Henry Cavill’s neck was wider than his head. My second thought was that Joaquin Phoenix looked strangely unlike himself as General Zod, which I now learn is because he wasn’t Joaquin Phoenix at all. Did I mention that Diane Lane has aged very well? Her nosejob is the most tasteful of the lot.
No offence to Sarah Douglas, but this version of Ursa - she isn’t called Ursa, but she’s basically the same character - filled out a metal suit of armour much more (pause) much more. And that pleases me hurhurhur. Reminded me of Mimi Rogers in Lost in Space, which also pleases me. Hurhhur.
Hans Zimmer’s score is effective but relatively low-key. Unfortunately it sounded like out-takes from The Dark Knight. Whether he was rushed for time, or whether he has a limited range, or the director told him to write like that, I don’t know. I’m not going to ask him. His answer would probably be “I’m Hans Zimmer and I will walk around naked if I want” (drops towel) (naked).
The heck are you talking about? Are you saying you took a few seconds from a trailer and took it to be representative of the entire film? Why that few seconds of that trailer, and not some other few seconds from some other trailer for the film?
I might go see Man of Steel, but it’s not one of my must sees. I must say Amy Adams as Lois Lane does seem like perfect casting.
Yeah, when I heard it would be another origin story, I was a little disappointed. It seems like there are too many origin story movies. And Superman is the one comic book character with an origin that pretty much everyone already knows.
It’s funny, because people seem to look back at Superman Returns and discuss it like it was terrible and a flop, but Superman Returns had a better Metacritic score (72 to 55) and a better Rotten Tomatoes rating (75 to 57) than Man of Steel currently does. Maybe in 2006 people were so excited about the first Superman movie in so many years that they gave it high ratings, but now look back at it harshly.
Check out these critical comments by Mark Waid who wrote the comic book series Superman: Birthright upon which Man of Steel is based. He isn’t very happy.
And that review told me much more than anyone in this thread has. That should have been the lead off. I was already upset that they were going grittier with Superman, but when Smallville is able to be more optimistic, your film has problems.
Well, they are using a binary system of Good/Bad. Hence the disparity with F&F6. On Metacritic, the spread is just 55 to 61 between those two films, putting them on a slightly more even playing field (and offering a better frame-of-reference of what to expect, I think).
But you liked it and that’s what matters. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually…
I’m sorry, BigT, that I hadn’t read that particular review and understood that it was the perfect thing for you to read today when I posted the OP. I will try to do better next time.
Can’t remember who it was, but someone was tossed into the side of a Lexcorp tanker truck. (The IMDB message boards also mentioned a satellite labeled Wayne Industries, but I didn’t catch that.) So clearly they’re trying to set things up for a later film, or preferably a franchise.
Personally, I thought it was OK, but not great. One thing that was slightly weird was the way the story jumped back and forth between adult Superman/Clark Kent and schoolboy Clark Kent. And I laughed openly when the holographic Jor-El said that he uploaded himself into Zod’s ship’s mainframe. And it was also ridiculous seeing Russell Crowe stand there and direct Amy Adams around the ship.
BTW, I never read the comic books so the 1978 Superman movie really defines the character for me, and I always liked that movie a lot. (And Christopher Reeve embodied the character much better than anyone else.)
And I think Warner Bros has been trying to reboot Superman for a decade. I think it must annoy them that they haven’t had Marvel’s success with superhero franchises.
If you want to read reviews, there are multiple websites where you can do that. This is a message board – different function altogether. Bitching that others are not providing you with the reading material you are looking for is pretty well missing the point of our community her.
Superheroe movies are the Reality Shows of the 00’s, the family half hour comedies of the 90’s and the hour long PI shows of the 80’s.
In other word, overdone.
Edit: Oops, meant to respond to the fact that I’m sick of Superheroe movies.
It was okay. Well acted, predictable story. Jittery camera, even during dialogue scenes. I hate jittery camera at all times. I can make movies with a jittery camera at home. I would think that a paid cinematographer would cringe when jittery camera is demanded by the director.
They destroyed New York/Metropolis yet again, and nobody seems sufficiently moved. Millions dead and its time for celebration?
I liked the more fleshed out Kryptonian world and characters. Desite past movies or comics, I’ve always felt Superman is at its heart about an alien adopted by humanity, come what may.
That which comes is from an alien civilization, and the resultant epic, sci-if feel it gives gave this film a lot in the way of meat on Superman’s bones, as far as mythology and tone. Which, IMHO, is what Zack is best at. It’s his best since 300, whatever that’s good for.
Ultimately, the movies was good. Not great. Not one of those you really walk away from satisfied or can’t stop talking about. Half the movie was your basic origin story, the other half was defeating the threat-at-hand, which we all know Supes will vanquish. So, that always leaves you a bit thirsty for more substance. The effects and action rival some of the best out there right now, but as stated, without the feeling that something/someone you’re actually made to care for is in real jeopardy, it’s only skin deep.
Like most first movies in a franchise, it feels like a set up to a sequel — one where you hope for more pathos and strong dilemmas that truly move you — but knowing how rare that is you’re not holding your breath.
And yes, I’ve been sick of the glut of comic film blockbusters since the mid-2000s.
I wrote more in the “Seen it” thread (maybe these threads should be merged?) but I really enjoyed it. Superman is not an easy character to make a movie about and they did a good job.