Or, I suppose, we could debate which is the better movie. There must be someone who likes one or both of them, and they can’t all be Canadians.
Points in favor of SR:
It is a visually beautiful movie. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous.
Kal-El totally makes Newton, Maxwell, and Galileo his bitches, but lets Einstein keep his pants on.
Kevin Spacey is 10 pounds of crazy awesome in a 5 pound bag.
Parker Posey is hilarious and touching at the same time.
We actually see Supes answering somebody’s prayer. 'You know that shit happens all the time, but rarely is is actually shown.
Points against SR:
How’d Lois Lane get gets a job at the Daily Planet when she’s, like, 12?
Clark Kent is a stalking jackhole who doesn’t even apologize for making his mama cry.
Speaking of being a punk-ass bitch, dude could have at least TRIED to fight back when the mooks were pounding on him.
No Wonder Woman cameo. Why is such a thing needed, you ask? So Diana could smack him in the face and say, “You’re not that kid’s father, Clark. You’re his sperm donor. His father is the guy who actually, you know, changed his diapers and pays for his inhalers and rocks him to sleep when the monsters under the bed are scaring him. Suck it up.”
At no point in the movie does anyone punch Jimmy Olsen in the balls
Points for MoS:
Lois is portrayed by an actual grown-up woman who has to buy tampons and everything.
Faora is 50 pounds of badass in a 20 pound bag.
Both Eliot Stabler and Toby Ziegler get killed.
Deep in my heart I always knew Perry White was black.
Jimmy Olsen is in detention where he belongs.
Points against MoS:
1)Amy Adams spends the entire movie wearing pants.
2) Put on a tie, Clark, you’re a damn grown adult man.
3) Somehow I find it hard to believe folks are gonna be cheering for this guy whose first public act involes destroying half of New York City.
4) Oh, and Metropolis is New York City, damn it. Show the damn Statue of Liberty, or the Chrysler building.
5) No Bruce Wayne cameo. There was no reason not to show Batman showing up and trying to attack the Kryptonians in the Batwing and getting vaporized. Robin too. Batgirl’s too pretty to die, though. (Yvonne Craig, that is, not the teenage witch.)
Anyway, that’s just me. Thoughts?
Superman Returns deserves to be in the conversation for worst movie of all time.
It’s hard to think about how you could shit on the Superman franchise more badly on purpose than that movie did. Superman is a deadbeat dad in that movie. “Truth, Justice… and all that Stuff.”
Man of Steel was bad, but Superman Returns was one of the worst movies ever made.
At least Man of Steel had some really cool fight scenes. I don’t even consider SR to be particularly beautiful in terms of the cinematography. A lot of it seemed overdone and even masturbatory. I think I actually dozed off in the theater at one point, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
They both have a number of moments that are visually fantastic or otherwise interesting, and those are mixed with moments of strange plotting or inexplicable dialog. I liked them both because I was able to enjoy the former without being derailed by the latter, but I won’t argue with anyone who had the opposite reaction.
If nothing else, the Man of Steel trailers were great :).
Really Skald?!? You prefer Superman Returns to Man of Steel? Neither one is very good, but one is obviously an abomination while the other merely sucks like Ginger Lynn (I’m pretty old).
I liked Man of Steel and consider it the best of the Superman franchise, period, hands down. For two reasons: the fight scenes, which were awesome, and the fact that the movie felt more science fictional than the others did. The Kryptonians (even good ol’ Kal El) seemed more like superpowered aliens than mythic creatures. I recorded it to DVD so I can put it on in the background while I’m working. City Destruction Porn indeed!
Superman Returns was the movie my wife & I watched on our first date. It gets points for that. Also the airplane rescue is great.
Yeah, but I’ll still die first, if the Saskatchewanians have their way.
Kal IS a mythic creature. A science-fictiony Superman is a huge mistake, fit only for madmen and the … wait, whom am I prejudiced this week? Somebody check the log.
Damn you Skald! You’ve made me guffaw out loud in the office break room over a mention of Ginger Lynn sucking (which should not be a negative reference, that was an example of a highly accomplished performance, heck, worthy of Great Performances…).
Man of Steel was the Michael Bay Transformers of Superman movies, by which I mean an atrocity.
And I’m normally the type that when I call a movie a mindless big budget special effects action flick I want to see it multiple times.
Has Man of Steel killed anyone in real life?
Because people could literally die from having seen Man of Steel. During the tornado Pa Kent gets everyone out of their cars and tells them to hide under the overpass. That is dangerously bad advice. But then they are taking advice form a guy about to commit suicide by tornado. Once he got everyone safely to danger he waves off his son so he doesn’t rescue him. He doesn’t even make the slightest attempt to save himself either. He wants to die right in front of them. “Bye, I’m sick of y’all. I’m off to bang the Wicked Witch!”
I was actually thinking Kevin Costner was a great choice for the new Jonathan Kent, but instead of being full of home spun advice and good old American work ethic, he’d rather have busses full of dead children. This must be a Pa Kent that makes his money by turning a blind eye to Breaking Bad meth rv’s hiding on his farm.
And Martha is a coward. Is it worth your life to keep Clark’s space ship hidden? Well, if the aliens want it so bad they are on a murderous rampage you probably sold out your son and doomed the planet.
But I do love Amy Adams. How could I not? And let’s not overlook the romance between Lois and Clark. They first see each other while she’s bleeding to death in a tunnel. Talk about your cute meets! They next see each other in the grave yard. The least depressing place we see them together is a crater in a cornfield.
It’s a movie that hates itself. Every time there is an uplifting moment it slams itself down.
When I comes to Superman Returns I stayed away from spoilers but was aware it was getting plenty of hate. And after seeing it there were some things that rubbed me the wrong way. I really didn’t like for Lois. However, on the whole I felt it honored the franchise.
I dragged my brother into the cinema to watch Superman Returns and felt the need to apologize afterwards. That’s how bad it was. MoS was okay-ish, except for the ending.
Both betray the nature of the character. Superman Returns - which honored the classic Reeve movies very well - by playing the deadbeat dad angle and Man of Steel through the huge disregard for killing. Yes, killing Zod may have been justified but what about the enormous amount of dead in Metropolis.
I’ve advanced this theory before but it’s my belief that Superman is defined by the behavior pattern that the number of people he tries to save is everybody. He measures success by avoiding collateral damage. Having him allow that fight in a major population center is well outside of his character. It takes away from his mythic status. And that status is what defines him in the story. MoS took the Christ imagery - in spectacularly non-subtle ways - for the symbol but then disregarded it in practice.
And Brandon Routh absolutely nailed the performance. Nailed it.
Superman Returns is pretty bad; the deadbeat Superdad, the purpleish underpants, and the whole “sequel to Superman II but not the movies after” is a bit of a misstep. Brandon Routh was a decent actor-wise and was pretty good playing Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent but he wasn’t quite “Superman” to me. This may be due to Routh trying to evoke the same character that a young Intergalactic Gladiator-to-be fell in love with when he was in 2nd grade but not quite having the chops, direction, or pop culture cachet/nostalgia/sympathy to quite pull it off. Spacey was a good Luthor but they really didn’t make his plot very interesting, he wasn’t quite evil enough in one direction or goofy enough in the other and he wanted to make a Kryptonite island. Er…OK? Kate Bosworth was not a great Lois Lane. James Marsden plays another sympathetic good guy who gets his girl taken away (see also X-Men, Enchanted). I love Parker Posey and want to have her babies like I am some kind of weird mutant sea horse. Installing a big and expensive minigun on top of a building for a jewel heist is so over the top and pointless that it seems to only be there to remind everyone that Superman is invulnerable to gunfire, which everyone already knows. Super Peeping Tom was Super creepy but I did like the scene where Supes is floating above the planet soaking it all in before he flies down to be a hero.
Man of Steel is pretty bad. Snyder got the idea of Superman wrong – Superman isn’t a reluctant hero who shies from public. He is a colorful righter of wrongs who saves people and inspires others to be better. The only time I saw someone get a superhero characterization so wrong was when they put black armor on some dude, slapped a bat symbol on it, then chuckled at how he can now turn his neck. Superman’s farmer dad dying to save a farm dog is stupid but everything he did before that was stupid too. Too much Krypton aka planet Avatar in the beginning. General Zod’s motivations to reengineer Earth were kind of stupid when he obviously had other options. Destroying Smallville seemed pointless and unnecessarily tacked on. Drawing buildings falling down in CGI is too easy nowadays and so every f#cking blockbuster movie needs to evoke 9/11 because they can. Man of Steel was pretty joyless and dark for the sake of being dark. Henry Cavill was pretty good as Superman though and had a nice Super Bod. Amy Adams is a beautiful and talented gift from the gods and I would drink a pint glass of her sweat but I don’t think they got Lois Lane’s spunky and headstrong character quite right. Faora-Ul was pretty awesome and Michael Shannon’s Zod was pretty decent but the fact that they tried to keep themselves from getting full Superman powers was kind of stupid.
Superman Returns was not good, a bit of a misfire and they should not have hugged Superman and Superman II so tightly but I appreciate that Singer had a vision for what the movie should be about. Man of Steel is a no good awful very bad movie that proves only that Snyder is capable of making CGI stuff blow up and that he has very little skill in building interesting characters even though he has about 50 years of inspiration to lean on.
Superman Returns is better, but not by a very wide margin.
I actually enjoyed Superman Returns more than Man of Steel, but I didn’t love either one. The airplane rescue in SR was great, and I liked Brandon Routh (I grew up loving the Reeve movies). I liked Spacey’s Lex too. I didn’t really like Lois Lane, and the story was mostly recycled, and the Superman’s son storyline seemed pointless.
I don’t remember much about Man of Steel, except that Michael Shannon was good as Zod.
Superman Returns is by far the worst portrayal of Supes, ever. A deadbeat dad? A DEADBEAT DAD?! I walked out of that film feeling like someone had purposely punched me in the gut. I don’t remember much about Lois except she was her same old whiny self.
Man of Steel had as its biggest flaw that it was too long. I’ve said this before: We can stop covering Superman’s origin story. Everybody who is anybody knows about where he came from. And thinking as Jor-El’s wife, I had no idea why she didn’t punch him in the nose. Why didn’t you make an escape pod big enough for three, you dumbshit animal? Aaargh! But way too much time spent on the origin story, which was boring as all fuck.
And then, we get to what I thought was the excellent part of Man of Steel - a Superman that finally isn’t just a pretty American hero with no depth or personality whatsoever, that has a lot of angst. And a Lois who wasn’t annoying! My SO and I were cringing, waiting for the moment she’d be stupid/annoying/selfish/run into trouble. There was a little of the latter but I was really happy with the way they had modernized her. She doesn’t reveal his secret! She’s not the dumb stupid heroine of yesteryear, and if staying true to Supes’ origins means you have to keep that dumb girl, well then you lose an awful lot of credibility.
Pa Kent was indeed a dumbass, but again, we didn’t even need to see him. We could have cut straight to where he is already dead, and Supes is an adult.
And me, I was damn impressed by the killing of Zod. Damn impressed. That was a good bit of darkness in his soul, and I felt, very necessary.
Neither was a great movie. Superman Returns was so terrible though that I hated the entire Superman franchise for a while after it. Man of Steel’s biggest problems were it was in judicious need of a strong editor.
Superman Returns was a love letter to Superman The Movie and needed to be more its own thing. Man of Steel was callous in its disregard of collateral damage which is fine in some Superhero movies but is anathema to a Superman story. Not sure which is worse. Both are bad for different reasons.
