Amy Adams and Henry Cavill (Warner Bros./Clay Enos)
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a frustrating, bloated movie that isn’t entirely successful. But it’s still the best blockbuster I’ve seen this year. It’s an origin story, its long Krypton-set prologue part of a feature-length prologue for what, if the movie has legs, will be a lucrative venture for post-Dark Knight Warner Bros.
In major and unsatisfying ways, it departs from the Superman saga of hope and wonder that generations of fans have grown up with. But it also resonates in a crucial way with the origins of Superman as a story of immigration and of fatherhood.
Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were born of Jewish immigrants, and their families’ histories were as epic any comic book story. The lives of the pioneering comic book artists even inspired great fiction, Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Legend has it that Superman’s creative parent was inspired by tragedy: Siegel’s father ran a Cleveland haberdashery and died during a robbery attempt when Siegel was a boy. What son would not give anything to protect his father from such harm? The father-son relationship resonates deeply in Man of Steel, which arrives just in time for Father’s Day.
Look at the set up: an orphan boy from a distant land is sent to America in the hope that he will have opportunities his parents didn’t have. Adding to the usual adolescent anxieties of a changing body is the young immigrant’s feeling that he doesn’t belong. But a strong adoptive father guides the young man in the right direction. It’s a classic American story, and Man of Steel is at its best when it places young Kal-El (Henry Cavill) in rural America where his hirsute brawn lands him small jobs that test a man’s mettle but don’t quite lead him to the greater calling that is his destiny.
The movie begins, as the Superman story should, with Krypton in crisis, and efficiently introduces the movie’s good and evil. The good Jor-El (Russell Crowe) readies his infant son to escape the twin perils of a doomed planet and the evil intentions of General Zod (Michael Shannon). Shannon is a commanding actor, an everyman with a touch of menace that made him perfect for the revelatory off-Broadway production of Our Town in which he played the stage manager. He’s easily typecast as a villain or a nutcase. (Revolutionary Road, Boardwalk Empire, the University of Maryland sorority letter, et al.) Shannon has a physical presence that Terence Stamp did not have when he played Zod in Superman II. But Stamp has the superior instrument. Shannon’s David Letterman-meets-Richard Kiel looks are spot on for a sinister military man, but his Kentucky timbre has a little too much aw-shucks to deliver the extraterrestrial menace required when he promises to rebuild Krypton ATOP YOUR BONES.
This tragedy in space finally ends at sea—Earth’s sea. In scenes reminiscent of the excellent documentary Leviathan, the world is all out of kilter, which would explain all that shaky camera work if it didn’t remain shaky on solid ground. We first meet the adult, shirtless Kal-El desperately trying to save workers trapped on an oil rig fire at sea, and when he plunges into the ocean, humbled and vulnerable, we’re treated to flashbacks of his difficult childhood as an alien boy who doesn’t yet know how to harness his powers.
I’m a sucker for the coming-of-age element in these early scenes. I really wish his father were not played by Kevin Costner, but the dynamic with his Earth parents (his mother is played by Diane Lane), all iconic farmscapes shot in dreamy handheld, comes off like Terrence Malick without the twirling.
Michael Shannon (Warner Bros.)With producer and co-writer Christopher Nolan on board, this is a Very Serious Superhero indeed. The shaky camera work has some calling this Terrence Malick’s Superman, but if the impressionistic look of rural America has become Malick’s signature cliché, the Superman saga was ripped from that American myth long before Malick tapped it for his stories of outlaws in an unheroic land.
But like Malick at his worst, Man of Steel gets too big for his Lycra britches, and the superhero becomes an all too obvious Christ figure. It’s not a bad message for kids attracted to the simple conflict between good and evil, but its heavenly pretenses get pretty heavy handed.
Worse than its pretensions are its flat out moronic details. The awful handheld camerawork contributes to both. In a shot where Lois Lane (Amy Adams) runs out of the Daily Planet office, the unstable camera pans up quickly to an exit sign before she opens the door to escape. Do audiences really need that much spelled out for them? Sadly, such amateurishly helpful camera shots are outnumbered by their opposite in sequence after sequence of poorly set up action sequences, haphazardly edited.
The movie’s climactic scenes recall at times Tianamen Square and 9/11, dark milestones in a volatile world longing for a hero and a leader to trust and believe in. But the level of casual destruction that surrounds the final battle seems far more than a just Superman would allow. Who cleans up after this stuff? I can’t tell you what the filmmakers did to his relationship with Lois Lane, but it throws out one of the great tensions in their storied romance.
I had major and minor issues with everything from Man of Steel’s camerawork to its casting. Cavill himself is a flawed superhero. He looks the part, but he has no charisma, and at times he recalls a young John Travolta so violently that I had horrible flashbacks of his misguided teaming with Lily Tomlin, Moment to Moment. For all that, I almost liked Man of Steel. A two-hour version might have been the one Hollywood blockbuster this year that I liked. But it beats its bulletproof chest too mightily and too long.
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Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan
With Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane, Russell Crowe
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, planetary annihilation, and some language
Running time 143 minutes
Opens today at all the multiplexes everywhere.
