Man
of Steel shoots
off an entire movie’s worth of special effects in its first fifteen minutes.
Right away this starts us worrying. Whatever the advisability of yet another
movie about the origins of DC Comics’ Superman, belaboring the caped crusader’s
beginnings on the doomed planet Krypton can only detract from the main event.
Better to summarize Krypton’s predicament in one or two quick scenes and get on
with the superlative infant’s adventures in Smallville, Kansas.
But director Zack Snyder and his
screenwriters, David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan — adapting Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster’s characters created for the original comics — seem determined to
prove something. Soon after little Kal-El, aka Superman, is born amid a
formation of flying tadpoles, his father and mother, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and
Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer), run afoul of the evil General Zod (Michael
Shannon), a megalomaniac bent on combating “degenerative principles.” Uh-oh,
that’s fascist talk. Everything on Krypton is facing destruction, including the
underwater baby pods and tiger-faced giant winged insects, so just before he
dies Jor-El packs baby Kal-El into an automatic-pilot rocket ship pointed at
Earth. We think we’ve seen the last of Jor-El, but no, he reappears as a sort
of hologram. Several times. No one from Krypton ever really dies, they keep
coming back as reruns — that’s the beauty of it.
Ma and Pa Kent (Diane Lane and Kevin
Costner) are slow to tumble to the kid’s potential, but when they finally do,
Ma turns out to be the ideal adoptive parent, while Pa counsels young Clark
Kent (English actor Henry Cavill) to keep his identity secret. Clark agrees,
reluctantly. He’d rather fight offshore oil rig fires, visit his Fortress of
Snozzle-tude deep in a glacier, rescue an intrepid newspaper reporter named
Lois Lane (Amy Adams), and shoot the breeze with his deceased birth dad — dig
that spooky metallic frieze diorama that explains Kal/Clark’s background.
The
mind begins to wander. A question arises: Why doesn’t Superman ever do anything
about global warming? What’s he good for, anyway? With his toned-down costume
on (the “S” doesn’t even stand for Superman, we’re told), he looks like a
corporate lawyer at a costume party. But no time for that. Soon Zod and his
crew come looking for Kal-El and the battle royale begins. Zod wants to take
over Earth, cornfields and all. Everything else gets put on hold except for the
Magic Kotex, or Cordex, or whatever it is. Cue mega CGI, in shades of gray.
There’s nothing very astonishing
about any of this, despite layers upon layers of effects. The prematurely gray
color scheme may indeed indicate the inner anxiety of this unusually dour superhero,
but somehow we expect a titanic struggle for the existence of our planet to be,
I don’t know, more vivid. No individual set piece stands out, with the possible
exception of the tornado scene or maybe the ruination of Smallville. Exploding
planets in space mean nothing, but when Superman and Zod crash through a Kansas
grain elevator or an IHOP, that’s scary because it hits closer to home.
Eventually the demolition road show visits the city formerly called Metropolis —
because no plan of destruction can
truly be considered world-class unless it involves messing up New York City.
Metal shavings everywhere. The effects were undoubtedly costly but they look
cheap.
The acting is generally perfunctory, with Cavill’s Kal the epitome of perfunctory-ness. Shannon, as usual, is the
most fascinating actor onscreen. There are times when director Snyder (300, Watchmen),
a veteran herder of robotic heroes, counters the terrific noise of Superman and
Zod’s slugfest with one or two eerily quiet moments where they just stare at
each other while muttering insults. At times like this it makes perfect sense
to imagine the same two players as, say, Jesus Christ and Satan in a biblical
spectacle. We’re already halfway there, with Shannon as a suitably wicked
devil, tempting our guy in the desert. Superman’s scene getting advice from a
priest and his “surrender to mankind” just reinforce the imagery.
But Man of Steel is mostly about big booms and fireballs. It’s poor
mythology that runs too long — 143 of this summer’s most tedious minutes — and
proves nothing other than the fact that the US military is just as obnoxious as
General “Release the World Engine!” Zod, and that Superman is a lonely
immigrant. Tell us something we didn’t know.
