Movie Review: Man of Steel

If you read this blog, it is no secret that Super-man is my favorite D/C comics character,  so the anticipation and the expectations are raised pretty high, though after the Rotten Tomatoes reviews started coming in and the social media reaction was not negative but just not knowing how to take the film, I tried to lessen my expectations. Now after seeing it myself I can understand the odd reactions as it was not what people expected and I am still a little unsure how I feel about it.

It was entertaining and did not suck. Part of this was due to the fact it was incredibly well made. Some of the mega-galatic qualities made elements of the Avengers look like cheap video game cgi.  So from a production and cinematic level it was a better movie than Avengers as it had more of a Ridley Scott feel than the more comic like elements Snyder normally employs.

From the get go liberties began to be taken with the mythos. Krypton resembled something that was a cross between "City of Lost Children" and "Dune". Truth be told I am so tired of this origin story being told I guess the visual element was needed to keep from losing me. The last adventures of Jor-el, while fun to watch could have been trimmed to have put more screen time with Clark in the suit before he turned him self over to the military. Zod shows up and outs Clark via a broadcast threat, so the fact the military decided to just take Zod's word or everything seemed a little off to me.

The Fortress of Solitude being a space ship instead of an ice castle , made sense i selling it with as much realism they attempted with this and I think overall the film succeeded in what it intended to do in making Super-man more feasible to modern audiences when he was so grounded in World War 2 values. The Smallville elements were handled better than previous films , I feel even more than the Donner films. Reeves had more charisma on screen and made you feel like Super-man was your friend, this movie he was much more clearly alien and there was an sense of isolation and being on the outside looking in that almost took from the Bill Bixby Hulk television show.

As with Smallville or any of the movies there is this sense of joy that wells up inside of me when ever I see him first appear in the suit. Its such an iconic image that somehow manages to almost hold more weight for me than when I see Banner transform on screen. I think this is because the Hulk is more about release where Super-man is the actualization of our higher selves. It was in these moments the movie excelled, but when it threw a lot of hard sci-fi at you in the big battle scene in the movies second half that it lost something for me.

After Clark saves Lois when she is crashing to Earth and becomes embroiled in stopping all these various terra forming plots and devices Zod has set in place it gets scattered and then turns into a disaster film combined with the third  Matrix film. Snyder dialed back his trademark slow-mo fight scenes but went just as over  the top but in a much more Micheal Bay manner and lost me because then I couldn't see the character. The character came back in the final fight scene with Zod. I find it hard to believe Super-man would have allowed for that much destruction of Metropolis to take place, but this is a different Super-man who will kill, when he has to.

Overall I will have to see the middle section again to make a final judgement, it quality film making but feels weird seeing this as the portrayal of his world be it on Earth or on Krypton, it was gritty and often serious , though I don't think that was necessarily problematic, it was an intangible element in the tone, but maybe I just need to see it again to get use to the stylistic difference. It was one of the more well made Super-hero films to date and raises the bar on Marvel when they think about the quality in which they wish to bring the cosmic elements to life.