Zack Snyder’s last film was Sucker Punch, the most misguided attempt at making a film about female empowerment ever and the worst film I have ever seen. I have seen pornography with greater artistic merits. He has now made a Superman movie that dare not breath the name Superman.
This is what is wrong with Man of Steel:
It is way too long; the scenes on Krypton are tedious and overly CGIed; everything is incredibly earnest, as though this movie were as important as Citizen Kane; the scenes at the Kent family farm look like a student’s attempt at a Terrence Malick movie; the script is full of people saying things that are very obvious, there is never a subtext; there is, essentially, only one character who is not a cardboard cut out, and that’s being generous; it’s yet another movie where buildings get pounded and explode constantly for 45 minutes with seemingly no concern for the people who must clearly be dying inside, or indeed any concern for the notion of telling a story or doing anything remotely related to character; there’s plenty of crass usage of 9/11-style imagery, with planes (and people) crashing into buildings, buildings collapsing in city streets as people run away from big clouds of dust, people being trapped in wreckage etc; there’s a lot of product placement, but only for IHOP (International House of Pancakes, I believe); there are A LOT of shots of people standing in the street staring up at the sky and marveling while everything around them is being destroyed; Superman’s costume is presented to him by the “ghost” of his father with no explanation as to why he would wear it and it not looking like anything that anyone wore on Krypton; Kal-El can’t breath the Kryptonian atmosphere but can breath in space; at no point is there any real dilemna faced by anyone, the decisions are always easily made; Jonathan Kent dies aged 46 but is played by Kevin Costner looking more than his 58 years, even when he should be in his 30s; the famous “S” symbol no longer stands for Superman… I could probably go on.
Henry Cavill sporting his perma-furrow
Despite all of this, I kind of enjoyed it.
B
Length – 2hrs 28mins – feels 2hrs 10mins
