2014 Movie 2: Man of Steel

[talekyn]

Movie 2: MAN OF STEEL, directed by Zack Snyder, starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner.

The Premise (from IMDb, because it made me laugh):  A young itinerant worker is forced to confront his secret extrastellar origin when Earth is invaded by members of his own race.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Thoughts: I didn't love it, and I didn't hate it, and I didn't have the incredibly negative visceral reaction to the big final moment that so many people I know and respect had. As usual with reviews of movies that have been out quite a while, YES SPOILERS EVENTUALLY IN THIS REVIEW.

Positives:

• I wasn't sold until he shaved the beard off, but Henry Cavill really does look like Clark Kent, in and out of costume. I was even more sold in those rare moments when Clark actually smiles (the kitchen scene with his mother before Zod's ship is visible in the sky, etc).  I'm convinced that, with a less depressing script, Cavill really is the right actor for Clark at this point (as much as I had hoped our man Tom Welling would step into the movie shoes, which we all knew wasn't really to be).
• The first half-hour on Krypton. This could have been a movie unto itself: Crowe and Shannon play terrifically off of each other, Ayelet Zurer made a strong Lara, and how cool would it have been to see Brainiac stealing Kandor and Jor's brother Zor finding a way to save Argo City? They're bound to bring Supergirl into the movie mythos eventually (based on the casting rumors for the next movie, they're introducing EVERYONE IN THE DCU in one movie...) I felt like this is the closest, in film or television, that we're going to get to "my" Krypton, the one of the 60s-70s comics rather than the soul-less ice-world of the Reeves movies and the Byrne comics relaunch. I'd have watched a full two hours of KRYPTON if the script was strong enough.
• The interspersing of the flashbacks with the current action. It wasn't always perfectly paced or timed, but I think the days of having your main character only show up halfway through the movie are gone. We needed to see Cavill right away after the Krypton sequence, not spend another forty-five minutes with Costner, Lane, Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry (Dylan is a friend of a friend, and I thought he did a great job as teen Clark in the bus rescue and resulting scenes, but I think those scenes worked far better intercut with the main narrative than they would have worked if they'd run the story chronologically).
• Amy Adams. Okay, I admit it, I've developed a bit of a gay man woman-crush on her. But that's beside the point. I liked that we got a strong-willed but not oblivious Lois Lane right out of the gate. Yes, Pulitzer Winner, yaddayaddayadda, but this is a Lois who is not afraid to both tell Perry White what she thinks and to listen to him when she knows he's right; a Lois who chases the story but also recognizes the toll it will take once her "alien benefactor" has a human life to be exposed; a Lois who is not afraid to ride into a battle well beyond her ability to survive, not because she's story-crazy but because it's the right thing to do.
• Michael Shannon. Michael Shannon. Michael Shannon. Best Zod since Terence Stamp, and possibly better.

Negatives:

• The Disaster Porn. Like so many others, I'm tired of huge city-scapes being torn to pieces with no indication that actual people are dying and being injured.  Smallville is devastated by the Kryptonian's attack and the military's response, and other than the scene in the IHOP (mandated because we've seen Pete Ross and thus he HAS to have an "in peril" moment (despite the complete absence of an adult Lana Lang)) we see almost no town citizens being endangered.  Likewise the Destruction of Metropolis, in which we see almost no human toll except for the small focus on Perry, Steve Lombard and Jenni (Olsen?). When cranes were tearing apart buildings in Spiderman 3, we saw people other than Gwen Stacy in danger ... likewise in the Batman movies, and the X-movies, and The Avengers. Man of Steel gives us huge vistas of falling skyscrapers ... and even if you buy the argument that Superman is too preoccupied with the Kryptonians to notice the havoc he's wreaking, the director and the camera should not be so preoccupied.  I'll come back to that lack of human toll in a moment, but first...
• How the hell big IS Metropolis? Zod's ship starts destroying the city from the center out. We see countless buildings fall, cars crushed by invisible waves of energy ... and yet after a half hour of destruction, there are still endless streets of incredibly tall skyscrapers with working electricity and un-evacuated tenants for Superman and Zod to crash through. Again, "disaster porn."
• The fight scene special effects in the second half of the movie. The one-on-one fights between Superman and Faora and Superman and Zod were so uneven it made me laugh; it felt like no effort was made to match the "actors on soundstage" close-ups with the wider "CGI versions throw each other through walls" shots. It's not that the CGI is bad .... it's that it doesn't mesh, and the change from real to CGI and back kept throwing me out of the action.

And last but not least, that controversial ending, where Superman snaps Zod's neck. I may be in the minority among my friends with this verdict but: I thought it served the story, made sense narratively and contextually, and could not have been handled any other way. The Phantom portal has closed, there is no way to imprison Zod (Kryptonite not being a thing yet), and Zod has proven he will not stop until he's dead or every human is.  Now, if Clark had snapped Zod's neck and then run to Lois for a make-out session, I'd be declaring a different verdict. But Clark tries his hardest not to do it, is pushed to it anyway, and the heart-rending wail Henry Cavill gives out as he falls to his knees sold the moment for me: this is a Clark who has been pushed to a decision he didn't want to make, and thus a Clark who I believe will never kill again.  I'm okay with it as a character-point (and people who say "But Superman Never Kills," I hear you ... but that ship sailed a long time ago, back in 1985 when John Byrne had Superman kill the alternate-dimension Kryptonians via Kryptonite poisoning. We need to get over it.).  What I wasn't okay with it was the ham-handed "family in the line of Zod's heat vision," when we'd seen pretty much NO human toll to the battle up to that point. That part could have been handled differently ... or left as-is had we seen any other human deaths in the preceding hour of battle.

I'm sure there's a lot more I could say, but this review is way over-long as it is.