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Well I finally got to see Man of Steel yesterday and I have to say that I'm somewhat perplexed by the movie. Going into it I knew that a lot of critics were rather mediocre to negative in their reviews, but I was going to see this anyway so I told myself to ignore what they say and make up my own damned mind on it. So, does it live up to the hype that it's gotten in the last month? No, that would have been next to impossible considering the final marketing push. But so then, is it a good movie? Well...not particularly, and this will require an explanation of a few things as to why I think Man of Steel ultimately felt somewhat vapid and confusing.
I'm not going to go into the fine details of everything because I won't remember them all, and also this would become rather tedious and long were I to do so. I'll just leave those areas and say that there are a number of smaller ideas or points that made my head go cockeyed from time to time (gravity well and indestructibility as one small example).
First let's look at the run time. Man of Steel is 143 minutes long, just shy of 2.5hrs. For movies this is generally a longer movie to be had, but certainly not the longest (Seven Samurai, Ben Hur, extended LotR as examples) and this is the primary reason why I felt this movie faltered. It was too short. If I'm going to be perfectly honest here Man of Steel needed I would guess close to 45 minutes more of screen time to flesh out a lot of things, because this is the #1 problem throughout the movie. It's too fast. It's packed too tightly with so much information, plotlines, characters, and ideas that I never once felt that the movie had A. a strong rhythm to the narrative, and
B. SPACE. No, not outer space, but breathing space. This is something that in today's connected and increasingly complex world is easy to forget, but art needs to breathe. Actors need time to develop connections and make plausible relationships (and set pieces and plotlines need this just as much), and I never felt that there was enough time given to allowing these notions to breathe properly. Even in the very opening, we get all the information we need, but the information feels abstracted from the actual plot, almost like saying, this is what you need to know to understand our plot, got it? Kal's birth is just one example of "wait...this is special because Kryptonians don't do natural birth usually?" Shouldn't you have told me that before this scene so I had some context as to why? And this is a continued thing where throughout the movie I felt like I was being told or shown what was happening, but that there was this esoteric, invisible barrier that prevented me from feeling a part of the world, or the experience. It was like analyzing a possible outcome on a subject from a controlled environment.
Anyway I just felt that this movie didn't breathe the way it needed to. It had to be all the time high energy, which unfortunately undermines a lot of the intrapersonal relationships throughout the movie, especially the burgeoning love between Lois and Kal, which was.. well, rushed. I mean, I can understand savior worship and the possible connective strings that places on people, but from Clarks perspective I was left wondering why would he care about her? What from his past makes him want to feel loved and connected to the world that he opens to her willingly? And the odd thing is that there are a few things that 'should' do this, but I don't think they were handled in a way where that desire was seeded into our minds, so here I am left outside the cool kids circle once again trying to understand it, rather than understanding it experientially.
Speaking of Lois, I liked seeing Lois as an actual reporter, but I felt for the plot that after all that investigative journalism (which again, very truncated) Clark actually revealing himself to her rather than Lois finding him on her own, does much to undermine her "Pulitzer Prize winning" status. Is he really that aware of everything and everyone? Perhaps this is just a difference of perspectives in his characterization, but I don't know if I liked what it did, at least for me, to Lois as a character.
In getting back to the issue of time, I'd like to just note the number of threads in the plot that needed counting, just to illustrate why the screenplay is just too tightly packed.- Krypton, what it is as an ecosystem and world
- The sociopolitical workings of Krypton, which kind of leads to
- Jor and Zod's relationship, which eventually becomes Kal and Zods relationship
- Technology and terraforming principles (why is it so easy to understand by Dr. Hamilton later? this was lazy as shit "oh so you know how alien civilizations make worlds habitable do you? you're a smart man." derp.).
- The characterization of Kal/Clark, from child to adult
- his relationship to terrans, especially in feelings of acceptance, love, and morality
- his relationship to krypton and its people
- The Kent family, how they interact as a unit
- Smallville and its inhabitants, important for young clark
- Lois, Perry and the Daily Planet
- Lois characterization
- Lois and Clarks relationship
- military or governmental involvement
- how the human race reacts to such a thing as aliens
That's a lot of things that you have to cover in such a short period of time, especially when trying to set up social dynamics between everyone and Clark. Speaking of Clark...
And before I go into this I should just say that aside from some stupid dialogue choices placed intermittently, or personal choices, I have to give props to the actors. This was a very strong cast and I felt with what was given, that they did a very good job with humanizing and opening up the plot.
Anyway, Clark. The single biggest problem with how Clark is characterized can be seen once he's taken in to custody by Zod and they have this hallucinogenic conversation which I'm not sure I quite understand still (its purpose, and how). But when Clark sinks into the skulls professing his indignation towards Zods cruelty I couldn't help but think...why would you care? Haven't you been seriously mistreated in the past and wouldn't that not engender a level of love or paternal-like protection on your part? But here he is becoming the protector of earth that he's supposed to become as is oft professed, but I can't understand why he'd want to (or am having a hard time believing it). What in his life creates such a strong connection, is it the love from his adoptive parents? Is that enough to translate to the entire world? Part of what made this so unequivocally convincing in the past with elements from other movies is that he developed close and meaningful relationships with specific people as an adult, past his life with his parents (Lois and the Daily Planet for instance), or one thing that Superman Returns did that I liked was explaining to Lois that people cry out to be saved, as if to remind us that the world is full of shit and he feels on an instinctual level to need to help lift them up and lead as a shining example. Here, I didn't quite get that undertone to the relationship between Clark and Earth, and what created an odd feeling when he donned this mantle of burdens as I kept asking "why?"
I just wanted to touch on one last thing in the movie. The ubermensch kills, and I didn't have a problem with it, except for the fact that Zod could have easily just looked slightly to the right and done the deed with no fuss if I'm remembering that right. It was a ploy to tug at our hearts, and it only half worked.
So what then, are my thoughts on this movie? Is it good? Did I hate it? On both counts, sorta? It has many good elements (action sequences, certain cinematography, visual stylization, general plot devices, good actors), but it trips up on itself from time to time, and overall felt somewhat cold, or perhaps standoff-ish in that It wouldn't allow me in to the narrative. I am fairly convinced however that many iniquities that I felt on characterization or the like could have been solved if they only took more time to develop their ideas. In the end, Man of Steel is Beautiful, rushed, and emotionally removed at times.
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I'm not too well versed in superheros and superman, do you know how an entire advanced species can die off from only their home planet imploding? In the movie they said that they inhabited other planets and such, so why would they die when Krypton gets destroyed?
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tbh, no idea as I am not as familiar with the entire 'canon'. I would have assumed that they all died from various circumstances that had little or nothing to do with Krypton as a planet. Maybe Darkseid or another entity like Braniac enters the mix and its not obviated yet, but I'd be guessing here. It's not really explained how the colonialism of Kryponian civilization correlates with the death of krypton and all other kryptonians. That was another small "huh?" moment for me that I wish was explained better.
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Well they cut off ties to their colonies and maybe without resupplies they eventually died off
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On June 17 2013 04:43 KOFgokuon wrote:
Well they cut off ties to their colonies and maybe without resupplies they eventually died off
I'm not completely well versed in it all, but from what the movie said, this is exactly what happened. Apparently Krypton is like Brave New World with its birth system and also that it is run by a totally utilitarian gerontocracy; this pairing apparently sentenced all of those colonies to death by lack of supplies.
OT: I agree with everything said in this, especially the breathing room. A lot of the time I just felt like this should have been a 3 hour movie because literally everything felt rushed. I never had any time to care about the husband-wife relationship. I never got the feel that rebelious teen Clark gave a shit about his adopted dad. I never understood the relationships Clark made along the way, or how he got along without any kind of identification, I never understood who Zod or his lackeys really were, one of which never even speaks. In general shit made no sense when it came to relationships. If they had fleshed them out, maybe I could forgive the awful scripting.
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If superman was the first to be born of natural conception, then obviously Krypton colonies ain't gonna last without a breeding ground of some sort. I also agree. They could totally had split the movie into two or even three parts to give us a more detail growth of the character. I feel it was way too rushed. And the fight with Faora or whatever her name is was so much better than the one with Zod...sad.
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I don't understand how a culture can allow itself to have a superhero movie be the event of the year that everyone must talk about.
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I was already confused when I got to your opening paragraph, because I have heard a ton of good things about the Superman movie and virtually nothing bad about it... It's got decent ratings on all video sites I generally check which are rated by many users and critics...
From what I understand from this review is that the movie moves along too fast for you to analyze every element in it so that you can fully understand it... Myself, I didn't find any element of the movie particularly hard to understand. I mean, this review basically sums up what I heard about many other works which seemed rather simple to understand for me such as Game Of Thrones and The Dark Knight... I have no idea how or why because all 3 (that including The Man Of Steel) were extremely straight forward and easy to understand... At least that was my observation.
To everyone who is looking at the destruction of Krypton and asking how that causes the death of such an advanced race, they are attempting to draw a parallel with Earth in this scene.
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It seems like not that many people liked it, but there are certainly a lot of blogs being written about it :o
Nice review, thanks!
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On June 19 2013 00:40 Eywa- wrote:+ Show Spoiler +
I was already confused when I got to your opening paragraph, because I have heard a ton of good things about the Superman movie and virtually nothing bad about it... It's got decent ratings on all video sites I generally check which are rated by many users and critics...
From what I understand from this review is that the movie moves along too fast for you to analyze every element in it so that you can fully understand it... Myself, I didn't find any element of the movie particularly hard to understand. I mean, this review basically sums up what I heard about many other works which seemed rather simple to understand for me such as Game Of Thrones and The Dark Knight... I have no idea how or why because all 3 (that including The Man Of Steel) were extremely straight forward and easy to understand... At least that was my observation.
To everyone who is looking at the destruction of Krypton and asking how that causes the death of such an advanced race, they are attempting to draw a parallel with Earth in this scene.
It's not a matter of understanding or needing to parse out everything. I got pretty much everything they were doing; that in it of itself isn't terribly difficult (though there are some deeper elements that do require more thought to understanding why their done), but, what I had a problem with is more a matter of allowing everything room develop properly (depends on the intent of the writer/direction team and narrative). This is where this movie fails badly from my perspective. This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens. It's easy to parse out, but jarring as hell to the overall flow because there wasn't enough time given to develop their ideas in an organic way and so many of these vignettes were cut short of what they were asking. Now is that an intentional choice? It could be as you can play with the expectations of your audience in certain ways, but I think it was pretty clear that they weren't making these choices for deliberately narrative reasons, but for overall timing purposes. Can't have a 3 hr movie, what a bore fest that would be.
As an example, I don't mind the 'flashback' approach they took on paper, but to be perfectly honest the way they handled the first 3-4 of them was jarring and poorly transitioned into. This is more apparent later when the later flashbacks feel far more at home and well placed in the overall flow of things. They made sense, whereas the former felt out of place.
On June 19 2013 01:48 Aerisky wrote:+ Show Spoiler +
It seems like not that many people liked it, but there are certainly a lot of blogs being written about it :o
Nice review, thanks!
haha, true. There have been quite a few lately, and interestingly enough there's been a bit of difference of opinions as well on them.
Edit: I should mention that this was from a single viewing. I may go back and watch it in imax to see if my opinion changes, or if I simply missed things from before.
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Honestly, I think that all the bad reviews for this movie are just about people not really understanding what to expect from Superman... Now that I look around more, there are a lot of negative reviews, but lots of quite simply bad reviews.
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EPT
