Whenever a character as iconic as Superman is revisited, the creative visions behind it rarely see past the conservative knee-jerk reaction to regurgitate the hero’s origin story. Which means each “new” take treads familiar narrative ground. Like the latest cover version of a populist classic, we know the melody and lyrics, but we still want to know what the new artist brings to it.
Bryan Singer attempted something totally different with his revisionist Superman reboot in 2008, but it turned out so disastrously that with Zach Snyder’s new Man of Steel, we’re back to square one, more or less seeing the 13-page Action Comics No. 1 play out for 143 minutes.
The actors are different but the song remains the same: Man of Steel opens with a baby of steel, born on Krypton to a forbidden conception as the planet crumbles toward its apocalypse thanks to a successful coup from General Zod (Michael Shannon). After dodging Armageddon on the back of a raptor, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) dispatches his newborn Kal-El, along with the entire genetic code for future Kryptonians, to the lowly planet Earth just in time in to meet his own demise. General Zod and his minions are condemned to “eternal living death” in the Phantom Zone, while Kal-El grows up as the adopted Clark Kent on a farm in Smallville, Kan., where he gradually discovers his supernatural abilities.
Man of Steel isn’t a total origin re-hash. Instead of writing stories for the Daily Planet, Clark/Superman (Henry Cavill) becomes the story, after being discovered, along with a Kryptonian craft, on an assignment in the Arctic wilderness by intrepid war correspondent Lois Lane (an engagingly spunky Amy Adams). Much is made of this strange humanoid alien. Lois’ editor (Laurence Fishburne) doesn’t buy her story, but by the time Zod, in his resurgent quest to kill Superman, hijacks the public airwaves and shuts down our electrical grid, the U.S. government is forced to take notice, thus filtering the Superman mythos through a prism of ufology and alien-invasion panic that suggests the sci-fi classics of the ’50s.
Flashbacks to Clark’s past show him bullied by older children, and even as a thirtysomething, the Man of Steel is harassed by federal agents who wouldn’t know a Kal-El from a Zod. Christopher Nolan, who co-produced the film and helped conceive the story, brings the cynicism of his Batman trilogy to the movie’s perception of the superhero as persecuted, misunderstood Other.
Indeed, for a while, Man of Steel’s amiable origin story manages to successfully convey the agonizing duality of the hero’s coexistence as human and alien. It discovers his emotional core, finding various kernels of truth in a popcorn-movie formula.
But eventually, all character development takes a permanent backseat to mindless spectacle.
Man of Steel is one of those superhero epics in which nothing less than the entire world is at stake, and we’re lathered with constant dialogue reminders of the gravity of the situation. There’s no time here for provincial, onomatopoeic attacks on purse-snatchers or romantic night flights with Lois; Snyder would rather catapult his story from one bombastic, eardrum-bustingly-loud set-piece to another. Earth – and space too – becomes a giant playground for interstellar warfare, its streets, buildings and military transport manipulated like so much Silly Putty.
For Snyder, more is more is more – the word “excessive” doesn’t do justice to the film’s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink methodology. The first half-hour is breathlessly relentless in its bludgeoning action, and so is the final hour, to the extent that the film barrels along well after three sufficiently blockbuster climaxes. The director actually leaves us wanting less, and it’s difficult not to become desensitized to the showers of CGI shrpanel.
Screenwriter David S. Goyer’s characters regularly say things that no one outside of a movie set has uttered in human history — “the instrument of our damnation became our salvation,” Zod explains to Superman — and every line Kevin Costner speaks, as Clark’s adopted dad, sounds like a trailer pull-quote or Hallmark card. But these complaints are far less abrasive than the film’s descent into indistinguishable violence.
While lacking both radicalism in its story and restraint in its direction, this reboot just left me craving the next reboot.
MAN OF STEEL. Director: Zach Snyder; Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Christopher Meloni, Richard Schiff, Laurence Fishburne, Antje Traue; Rating: PG-13; Distributor: Warner Brothers; Opens: Friday