- Superman: All right, who stole my underpants? Anyone seen a pair of red underpants? Anyone?
(In the film section this week, you can find my review of Man of Steel, which I had to shear down to 300 words to fit the constraints of print. But since the internet doesn’t have a word count, I thought I’d share my full Man of Steel review here. This review, as in the one in the film section, is spoiler-free. I really want to talk about spoilers, but I’ll save that for a clearly marked post early next week.)
Even though he’s the original superhero—let’s for a moment pretend Doc Savage doesn’t exist, for simplicity’s sake—Superman might be the single hardest superhero to get right. We’ve heard all the complaints a million times before: He’s too powerful. He’s too pure. He’s too earnest. He belongs to an America that doesn’t exist anymore. First, the complainers probably haven’t read Grant Morrison’s excellent 2005-2008 comic series All-Star Superman, which gave us a positively positive, folksy-but-godlike Kansas farmboy who could create whole universes and fend off intergalactic threats without breaking a sweat and still managed to tell a terrific story. Second, let it be said that Henry Cavill, in The Man of Steel, proves those doubters wrong by giving great Superman: He grins a lot, flashing a great big wide welcoming smile that would leave Batman rolling his eyes. And he moves like he’s indestructible. This is a man who doesn’t fear stubbing a toe or, say, getting hit by a mack truck, but he is always slightly worried about accidentally crushing these delicate fleshy humans all around him.
And as you probably already suspected, Amy Adams is a wonderful Lois Lane, a gutsy, smart reporter guided by a strong sense of justice. And Michael Shannon, who is the closest thing to a Christopher Walken our generation is going to get, is a great, creepy General Zod, the nightmare side of the Superman coin: Godlike power honed with military discipline and a pragmatic worldview that puts Kryptonian lives above all else. (And since the score is such a vital part of this film, let’s take a second to mention here with the major players that Man of Steel‘s score, by Hans Zimmer, is absolutely incredible. Superman’s main theme is rousing and catchy and completely original. Most modern film composers could learn a lot by locking themselves in a room with Zimmer’s work for a month or two.)
The goal with the film is obviously to pull a Batman Begins for DC Comics’ most recognizable intellectual property. They’ve even got most of the Begins team together behind the scenes: David S. Goyer wrote the script, and Christopher Nolan produces. But while Begins delivered a few surprises and felt like a layered reimagining of the Batman story, Man of Steel glosses over the same story beats we all know by heart.
We open on Krypton, which seems to be intentionally the opposite of the cinematic Krypton we’ve already seen: While Marlon Brando’s Jor-El walked around a pristine crystal palace, Russell Crowe’s Jor-El frets over a dusty, brown-and-grey desert land, replete with dinosaur-like creatures and incredibly phallic machinery. (Some of the Kryptonian design feels like floor-model H.R. Giger leavings.) We get to see some of Kal-El’s childhood in Kansas and his God-bless-America upbringing by the Kents (a could-be-better Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). We very briefly meet Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) and the rest of the Daily Planet masthead before Zod is introduced into the plot and the movie becomes a straight-on conflict. There’s none of the nimble self-awareness or ingenious reinvention of Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie, only good-guy-versus-bad-guy schematics that play out just about the way you figure they will.
Credit where it’s due, though: Zack Snyder’s direction is beautiful. The decision to go handheld with almost every shot should have been maddening, but it only serves to make the special effects look more realistic: the camera sometimes scrambles to keep up with Superman’s super-speed, and the flight scenes give off an air of respectful awe. (I saw a non-3D press preview of Man of Steel, but I’m guessing that the 3D version isn’t worth it, since handheld 3D rarely, if ever, succeeds. Skip the 3D if you can.) Perhaps most impressive of all, with Nolan’s help, Snyder seems to have finally beaten his addiction to slow-motion shots. But the last forty-five minutes of the film are basically one long fist-fight. While the super-powered antics are impressive at first, and a few clever visual easter eggs are thrown in for the observant, there are about twenty 9/11s thrown into the climax of this movie and it gets to be quite numbing. The effects become more and more abstract, until a bunch of gray pixels smash into a bunch of orange pixels for what feels like a solid half hour.
So why isn’t Man of Steel a better Superman movie? Don’t get me wrong: It’s way better than 2006’s awful Superman Returns. I wouldn’t even mind seeing a sequel with this same cast and crew. But it ultimately just can’t get the character right. I’m not quibbling over some minor changes from the Superman canon but instead talking about a larger philosophical problem that the movie skates over. (In fact, most of the updates Man of Steel undertakes are fine or at least not terrible: certain fates of certain background characters have been changed, and mostly for the better; Superman’s red underpants have disappeared, leaving the Man of Steel with a prominent crotch-bulge; a few motivations have been adjusted.) To put it simply, and to delicately step around spoilers, this isn’t a Superman movie I’d be comfortable bringing a child to. Speaking as someone who learned how to read on Superman comics, that’s a huge bummer.