by OL » Mon Apr 07, 2014 1:10 pm
Man of Steel.
I really wanted to like this one.
Spoilers abound:
Okay, first the good: I like Henry Cavill as Superman. Easily the best live-action Supes we've had, mainly due to the fact that he actually looks just right. And Kevin Costner was surprisingly good as Pa Kent. He gets a pretty bum rap as a bad actor so much of the time, but he's really good in this case. The dialogue isn't all that great, but he manages to say it in a way that really, really works. Russel Crowe, as well, managed to play Jor-El in a way that didn't keep knocking me in the face with the fact that it was Russel Crowe on screen. He pulls it off, and I was surprised that I actually liked him in it (I'm not generally the biggest Russel Crowe fan in the world). And in a few cases the action is really cool, such as when Superman and Zod are knocking each other around in the sky, sending each other flying for a mile with each hit. Every now and then the action would hit a moment where it just felt right, like this is how Superman action ought to be done. I can appreciate that kind of thing.
But I think the bad outweighed the good. First off, the script has absolutely no personality to it. The biggest complaint most people seem to have about Superman is that he's too much of a boyscout with little to no personality (a standpoint I disagree with wholeheartedly, having read the best of his comic stories and whatnot). This movie doesn't help things at all; they play him completely in the way most people wrongly perceive the character to be. He's boring. The movie takes that cliched misconception and runs with it for the entire goddamn movie. The most personality he shows is at the very end of the movie, when he smashes the surveillance drone and says "I know you're trying to find out where I hang my cape; it's not gonna happen." But that's at the absolute tail end of the movie, five minutes before the credits; they couldn't have made him more interesting for the rest of the two hours and twenty minutes he was around? It's just maddening that Marvel does such a brilliant job with making their characters really pop in the personality department, but for some reason filmmakers can't manage to do it with DC characters. Why is it that Superman seems so boring here, but Captain America (another character with a previously misconceived "boring" personality) seems so fucking great in his movies?
The dialogue, in most cases, is also pretty bad. Having Lois Lane start a sentence with "Okay, if we're done comparing dicks..." is just plain wrong. That's not the kind of dialogue you put into a movie like this. It doesn't jibe with the rest of the movie, it doesn't fit with Lois's character otherwise, and it's just plain crass for a movie based on an 80-year-old superhero property. Not to mention that Amy Adams just sounds completely unnatural saying it. I thought she was a bad casting choice to begin with, and it turned out I was right. She's completely not the Lois Lane type. Why do filmmakers have such a hard time casting the role of Lois? They never seem to get it right.
Funny thing is, I think Diane Lane is pretty good as Ma Kent, barring the fact that she's way too hot for the role (they give her gray hair and fake liver spots to try to make her look old, but she still looks too good). But if this were just a few years ago, I think she would have made an amazing Lois Lane. She would have been perfect. Just the right blend of personality and hotness. None of this "girl next door" bullshit; I've always thought Lois Lane ought to be a good mix of glamorous and sassy, and Diane Lane would have been just right for that. Nevermind the fact that they have the same last name.
But yeah, back to the bad shit: I also hate that filmmakers can't just forget about Zod. I've always thought that one of the most important aspects of Superman's personality is the fact that he is the last survivor of his planet. He might be surrounded by people, the world might love him for all that he does, but he's ultimately alone in the universe because he's the only one of his kind. But y'know, fuck all that. Apparently it's more important that we have characters that can take a punch from him, so yay! More Kryptonians!
And that's not even mentioning the silly detail that Jor-El implanted the genetic code of Krypton's entire society in Superman's cells. Yeah, okay, you beat Zod and sent everyone else back to the Phantom Zone; you've still got the capability to bring your entire home planet back to life if you want to. That kind of kicks the "alone in the universe" concept in the nuts.
I also thought the whole style of the Kryptonian technology just felt a little too out-there, and Krypton itself seemed a little silly, what with winged dinosaur creatures flying around and shit. Just a preference thing, but I didn't like it.
One of the biggest problems, though, was the size of the action in the movie. It's all just too big. An alien invasion, giant tentacled terraforming machines, an entire goddamn city gets decimated to the point of looking post-apocalyptic... they just tried to hit too many big things on the first outing. They may as well have brought Darkseid in to it.
This, I believe, is why they're trying so hard to introduce a whole team of superheroes in the next movie; they're trying desperately to one-up the action, but it's hard to do so when you already made everything so fucking colossal the first time around. Having knocked over so many buildings, I don't honestly know how they're going to manage making anything seem bigger with the next one. They should have limited themselves with this first one; make the invaders only a small handful of Kryptonians (Zod, the girl, the big tall guy, and maybe one or two others, rather than a freaking army) and only knock down one building, just as a shock and awe kind of thing. As it is, they just kind of exploded themselves into a corner, and now they don't know how to make the next movie seem even crazier.
But anyway, more than anything else, I just don't like the shaky-cam "realistic" take on Superman. It seems so unnecessary. For a movie with so much aerial photography and giant alien invasion action scenes, that kind of "ground level" style of filming just ends up negating itself.
There are a ton of other little gripes I could mention as well, but I'll leave it at that. I didn't think the Superman/Batman movie sounded all that bad before, even when everyone was complaining that they're trying to stuff too many characters in it all at the same time; I thought it could work if done right. But if they're making it in this style, with this same team of filmmakers (Zack Snyder, David Goyer, Chris Nolan)?
It ain't gonna work. Apparently none of them know how to make just a good, fun, personality-fueled, superhero popcorn flick. And if you're making a "team" movie, like the next one is supposed to be, that's what you really need.
So yeah, having seen Man of Steel now, I get the skepticism and I don't honestly have much hope for the next movie.
OL has received 2 thanks from: Henry Spencer, Kenny