"Man of Steel" - Film Review

There’s a series of sequences in the last third of Man of Steel that all sort of blend together. They are a number of action sequences and after while they’re indistinguishable from one another. It’s as if the editor didn’t realize he had about at least thirty minutes of screen time that was absolutely unnecessary to telling the story. And in the middle of this constant, ceaseless action, you could be forgiven if you started to zone out here or there. You could probably fall asleep and wake up some time later and have missed rather little and still manage to follow the plot.

After a while this starts to become draining. This isn’t storytelling. This is CGI gone awry. This is someone yelling, “Hey! Isn’t this cool!”  

There are a lot of other things that take place in Man of Steel but that third act is so frustrating and poorly done that it becomes exemplary of the things that the film gets wrong.  

Man of Steel doesn’t really feel like it’s a Superman movie. There’s rather little that ties it to the comics or the older films. The infamous superhero outfit doesn’t get broken out until rather late in the film and Superman doesn’t work at the Daily Planet disguised as Clark Kent until there's five minutes left. 

The film keeps asking us to accept thing at face value simply because it’s asking it of us. Character’s motivations are rarely explained, and things just seem to happen for the sake of the plot. Take the film’s villain General Zod (Michael Shannon). He tries to destroy Earth to create a new Krypton. That’s his goal … but his reasoning is vague at best. We spend a fair amount of time with the character and yet it only becomes more convoluted as the story advances; the answer seems to be, “Because it must be done!” 

The film has a disjointed quality. It keeps jumping around its narrative but this detracts from its clarity and its pacing. After an unnecessarily lengthy opening sequence where we watch Superman’s father (Russell Crowe) send his son off to Earth and battle for excessive lengths, the film jumps ahead to when Clark is in his thirties, disillusioned and aimless. It’s never entirely explained how Clark got to this point. We get flashbacks to his childhood, but the film does more telling than showing here. We see Clark get bullied, but it’s never entirely clear why except for plot convenience. And the explanations by Clark’s adoptive father (Kevin Costner – in one of the more memorable parts of the film) always come off as didactic. 

The flashbacks are bad storytelling. It’s putting the cart before the horse, giving us questions than answering them after the fact (which wouldn’t be a problem except for these questions aren’t really a mystery so much as defining character traits of the protagonist). But since we don’t see Clark grow up in real time, the film treats his childhood as a less important part of the story despite the fact it holds the very answers to why we should be invested in his character. It doesn’t help that Clark in the present day (Henry Cavill) is a barely audible, gloomy and lurking figure. He’s more of a hovering presence than an actual person.

I said earlier that this film almost could act largely as a film that isn’t a Superman movie. In fact, it often comes off as a science fiction film done by someone who wasn’t aware that they were making a science fiction movie. An alien comes to Earth, befriends humans and defends them against other aliens. That’s science fiction (without the comic book origin story stuff happening elsewhere).  But instead of treating the film like sci-fi, the film treats the story like it’s an action movie. The action sequences feel like something out of a big action film. There’s a scope to it all, and there’s many, many explosions. But it also feels like a disaster movie. Countless people die and the destruction waged upon the planet is devastating. Superman weirdly enough seems to take little interest in how much destruction he and Zod wrack up in the course of their fighting. But the film has got none of the careful visual composition of the best science fiction or action movies. The special effects in these scenes are less about being part of the overall story but rather exist as attention grabbing sights. It keeps returning to these visuals but they’re not all that interesting to watch, especially since they’re so poorly edited (jumping around shakily a lot). And there’s simply not enough stakes behind what is taking place to care. We don’t know enough about either Superman or Zod’s motivations to be all that interested in what they’re doing or the property damage they’re accumulating.    

Director Zach Snyder is taking a cue from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (Nolan is a producer of Man of Steel). Nolan’s films brought a gritty, dark take to that franchise, and Snyder is clearly enamored by that approach. But Snyder fails to understand what made those films work. It’s like how so many television series copied the sex and violence of The Sopranos in the wake of its success but failed to understand that there was more to it than these elements. There was good, thoughtful storytelling there as well. Nolan’s films were more about using Batman as a lens for sorting through whatever philosophical and ideological questions were floating around his head. It gave the films a depth that went beyond the blockbuster bluster. Man of Steel is all the sheen and none of the luster of the Batman films.  

Weirdly enough the film I kept coming back to as I watched Man of Steel was 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Not because they have anything remotely in common and not because I wished I was watching it instead (though I did), but because 2001, besides being a great movie and sci-fi, is a film where it’s so easy to see Stanley Kubrick’s vision coming through every single scene, every single shot. You may not like it, you may find it weird or boring, but it’s shot by someone who knows exactly what they want to say and how to say it. Kubrick has such a command of visuals in 2001. Zach Snyder does not in Man of Steel.  

Snyder’s previous efforts show someone who’s more enamored with style than substance. Suckerpunch is a self-indulgent mess of someone letting their obsession with stylistic excess run amuck. 300 is so over-the-top that it almost transcends how dumb and loud it is. There are moments in Man of Steel that feel like someone who watched The Dark Knight or Tarantino movies or European arthouse (or all of those things) and failed to understand all the things that make those types of films work. There are all these little flourishes that seem so unnecessary and they become distracting. And this is made all the more problematic because the film is in a fight between its formalistic touches and the fact it’s a big action movie. It never really reconciles the two. When it does settle for one in its third act, it just becomes messier than ever (make of that what you will).  

By film’s end, we’ve been so heavily pummeled by confusing, repetitive and uninteresting action that it becomes mind-numbing. The film overstays its welcome, and then overstays it ten times over (It's an overlong slog at times). Man of Steel is not enough fun to make up for its poor storytelling and bad characterization.  

Grade: D+