by Jarrod Jones. This is RETROGRADING, where a good death is its own reward.
THE FILM: Man of Steel
THE YEAR: 2013, one year after Christopher Nolan changed the superhero landscape, for better or worse, with his Dark Knight trilogy, and the year a certain review site came into being.
THE SPECS: Directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David S. Goyer; starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, and Russell Crowe. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Rated PG-13.
THE MAKE: In 2011, Christopher Nolan was the king of comic book movies, and Superman was trapped in movie limbo. Nolan’s Batman Begins was released in 2005 and became a hit a full year before Bryan Singer’s more tepidly received Superman Returns in 2006, and his 2008 follow-up, The Dark Knight, was a staggering financial and critical success. Nolan was being referred to as “something of a god” for Warner Bros. over at Deadline, and his sophisticated brand of Bat-mania had all but eclipsed Singer’s Superman revamp. Returns went to home video, and then it went away.
While The Dark Knight Rises marked the end of Nolan’s time with Batman, Warners wasn’t ready to end their relationship so soon. Before Rises had completed its scripting phase, WB tapped Nolan to serve as “godfather” to a potential Superman reboot following Returns’ unexceptional box office (Singer’s film ultimately made $391 million worldwide on a reported $270 million budget). With Singer and his star, Brandon Routh, in the rearview and Nolan happy with the new story he hammered out with Dark Knight collaborator David S. Goyer, it was time to make a new Superman movie. All the studio needed was a new director.
Initial reports had names like Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), Tony Scott (Top Gun), and Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, and, later, The Batman) in the mix. As fate would have it, Warners already had a director on their bench who knew his way around comic book movies: Zack Snyder, the helmer of Watchmen and 300, who was wrapping post-production on his gnarly, anime-infused fantasy picture Sucker Punch when he got their call. With Goyer & Nolan’s story locked in and Snyder on board, casting began in 2010, with British actor Henry Cavill (Immortals) landing the Superman/Clark Kent role in January 2011. Principal photography started in August of that year.
Snyder’s film, titled Man of Steel, was released in July 2013. It took a decidedly more macho approach than Returns, with Cavill’s Superman locked in mortal combat against Michael Shannon’s General Zod. Its overall tone, unquestionably darker than any prior live-action iteration of the character, ultimately became a huge sticking point with certain audiences; this writer eventually took his angst about Snyder’s film to the internet with a review that soon after became the launching point for a minor outlet called DoomRocket.
THE REVIEW: I loudly and frequently rejected Man of Steel upon release. (Unfortunately, the original DoomRocket review has been lost to the servers of time.) My issues echoed critics who felt it was too grim, its themes too unfocused, and how it signaled an end to the smiling, genial onscreen Superman, now a relic in this post-Dark Knight dichotomy. 10 years on, Man of Steel is still all of those things, though Snyder’s Superman movie is due some level of reappraisal in the context of recent cape movie fare. (I mean, talk about grim.)
Any honest assessment of Man of Steel should begin with its visuals. Snyder’s grounded faux-documentary approach conveys a tangible sense of melancholy that speaks to the bygone sense of Americana that Superman has long represented. America has changed — politically and spiritually — since the high-flying days of Christopher Reeve, and Snyder is only too eager to show us how the country’s most iconic superhero has changed with it.
The vision of America in Man of Steel is cynical. Its military (represented by Harry Lennix’s wary general character and Christopher Meloni’s adversarial Col. Hardy) is cagey around Superman. To hammer the point, they’re depicted firing on a civilian population when provoked by an intergalactic threat, as they do during an action sequence set in Superman’s hometown of Smallville. Snyder frames this as a chaotic, destructive choice, but the machismo behind it suggests valor. When they finally meet their would-be savior, they put him in chains.
Superman is just as cagey. The film hops around time during its distracted first hour, going from the destruction of Krypton (a grungy Giger-infused world that also homages the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs) to Superman’s childhood with his adopted parents, The Kents (Costner and Lane). More time is spent during Clark’s continent-trotting journey of self-discovery before the film’s Zod-focused threat takes shape, and it’s in these early scenes — some of the better, if more thematically hinky stuff in the movie — that Snyder’s appraisal of Superman comes across.
From an early age, Clark’s Earth dad has beaten into his head that the planet isn’t prepared to accept someone like him, a sentiment later echoed by Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White (Fishburne). When he uses his powers, it compromises his anonymity, but more than that, it threatens an existential confrontation with his adopted planet. Jon’s wary philosophy is best articulated in an exchange that raises thorny implications about this modern Superman, though Man of Steel comes up short in its exploration of them: Young Clark, following a school bus rescue, asks, “What was I supposed to do? Just let them die?” Jon, ashamed to meet his son’s gaze, mutters: “Maybe.”
Later, the film engages with this reticent aspect of Clark’s character more explicitly: Zod demands Earth deliver Kal-El, who he considers a Kryptonian refugee, to his custody, and Clark, in another moment of doubt, ducks into a Smallville church. It’s there, framed against a stained glass of Jesus praying to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane (before he’s to be crucified, you see), Clark ponders his impending sacrifice. “Zod can’t be trusted,” he tells his priest. “But I’m not sure the people of Earth can be, either.” The priest replies, “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith first. The trust part comes later.”
By the time Clark establishes a tenuous working relationship with the American military, what passes for “trust” in this film, Man of Steel has indulged its Nolan-molded prerogative to cloud the brimming optimism of Superman with moral murk. Its infamously brutal ending, where Superman and Zod have all but decimated Metropolis with their brawny, overlong battle royale, creates a death toll that the film has no time to account for. Man of Steel is a frustrating story experience, impeccably cast, told with a vision and musculature that doesn’t seem to exist in the modern superhero movie. While its choices are uncomfortable, some even wrong-headed, there is at least some thematic meat to gnaw on while the action figures go boom. Problem is, the bone’s picked clean long before the credits drop.
NOSTALGIA-FEST OR REPRESSED NIGHTMARE? Its points are blunt, its politics are cagey, and its bombastic action sequences are a little too committed to realism, but Man of Steel is at least half a great superhero movie — and, yes, that greatness comes from Zack Snyder. (Though its rockin’ Hans Zimmer score certainly helps.)
RETROGRADE: B
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