Philadelphia (1993)

4/4 stars

About fifteen years ago I had a conversation with a woman who told me she couldn’t understand why I supported gay rights if I was not gay myself. Her ignorance was profoundly telling. About seventy or so Alabaman whites marched at Selma in 1965. Had she been there at the time I knew now where she would have been. She’d have stayed at home. For far too many justice for others is not their problem.

In Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, attorney Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) is faced with a similar dilemma. After agreeing to take Andrew Beckett’s (Tom Hanks) case against AIDS discrimination he is propositioned by a homosexual in a drugstore. To this guy it seemed that only another homosexual would take any interest defending a gay man’s rights. But, Miller, an unapologetic homophobe, vehemently and violently denies the assumption. For him the issue is a matter of justice and the law, not social acceptance of the LGBTQ community. Like Oskar Schindler, Miller’s reasons for protecting the disenfranchised are not the same as the disenfranchised’s for seeking his help. When Miller comes around it is not a dramatic scene of recognition of his errors, but a slow process of developing compassion. As their relationship grows Beckett becomes more than just a client. He becomes a fellow human being.

Andrew Beckett is a lawyer working for a prominent law firm who gets fired after receiving an AIDS diagnosis. To him his termination is a cut and dry case of discrimination. But his boss Charles Wheeler (Jason Robards) and his team of lawyers have orchestrated things so that things are not so simple. They sabotage one of his cases by hiding a much needed file so they can accuse him of incompetence. And it is this argument of incompetence they bring to the courtroom, leaving him to have to prove that his homosexuality and illness were the real reasons.
Miller is reluctant, at first, to take Beckett’s case. The fact that he was Beckett’s tenth choice to represent him doesn’t help either. Miller doesn’t think he has a case and he rejects him initially.
The moment of change comes months later when Miller is at the library. As he quietly pores over a stack of books a complete stranger passes him by and stares him down with an angry unprovoked glare. As a 39 year old black man in 1993, Miller remembers a time when racism was legal and institutionalized and the cause of the stranger’s unspoken hostility is obvious. When the moment passes he sees Beckett, his physical deterioration now clearly visible, looking over some law books at another table. The library’s curator and other visitors are uncomfortable with his presence and drop hints that they want him to go study out of sight. The ignorant prejudice that makes them think AIDS is communicable by proximity is fully on display. The scene makes minimal use of dialogue, letting visual language and editing do the talking.

Philadelphia is a film that lets the camera subtly speak for the characters. Emotion is conveyed most strongly in the movie’s shots. Values and thoughts flash by unspoken through glances, gestures, and body language. The film often speaks volumes in scenes where not a word is spoken.

In the court room the defendants exert all their efforts into damaging Beckett’s credibility. They push forward a narrative that Beckett was a mediocre lawyer and the situation with the missing file was the last straw. Their arguments and the facts they present are erudite and convincing enough to leave things seemingly stacked against him. His own defense relies more on circumstantial evidence and it is a very subtle point about his former bosses’ behavior that gives him any chance for success.
Beckett when he is on the stand makes a profound statement about justice. He claims that his favorite part of being a lawyer were those rare moments when he felt he played some role in seeing justice done for other people. It’s a turning point in the proceedings where the looks of shame on the defendants’ faces and the judge’s observation of them silently clarifies everything. They were not the good guys in this story and they knew it.
Being the good guy may seem naive to some, especially to lawyers, but the simple morality of Sesame Street values is where the buck stops at the end of the day. And that is a truth that stands whether we grown-up civilized people want to admit it or not.

Philadelphia is not so much a film about acceptance of the LGBTQ community – despite the subject matter – but rather the universality of human rights and the justice that all people deserve as human beings. What the film states is that we shouldn’t have to approve of someone’s life style and personal identity to afford them rights and give them justice. The fact remains that a man was wrongfully terminated and the act was against the law. A homophobic lawyer’s opinion of his client’s sexuality is irrelevant and Miller understood this when he took Beckett’s case. He finds himself having to remind a journalist in one scene that the Declaration of Independence said that all men are created equal, not all straight men are created equal.

Justice and rights are, as a principle, universal and when we only give them to some we ultimately give them to none. Tides can turn in how the social zeitgeist views certain groups and our salvation and progress lie in the precedent we set today. If we don’t stand up and defend outcasts who are socially safe to discriminate against, who will, when the tides turn again, stand up and defend us?

Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Ron Nyswaner
Producers: Jonathan Demme, Edward Saxon, Ron Bozman, Gary Goetzman, Kenneth Utt, Kristi Zea
Cast: Tom Hanks (Andrew Beckett), Denzel Washington (Joe Miller), Joanne Woodward (Sarah Beckett), Jason Robards (Charles Wheeler), Antonio Banderas (Miguel Alvarez), Mary Steenburgen (Belinda Conine), Charles Napier (Judge Garnett)
Composer: Howard Shore
Cinematographer: Tak Fujimoto
Editor: Craig McKay

Doom (2005)

1/4 stars

Doom is a movie that pleases neither fans of the game or fans of action movies in general. Being both I can say this with some authority. ID Software’s 1993 Doom is often heralded as one of the greatest video games ever made and with good reason. It fathered the popularity of the first person shooter genre, was satisfying and cathartic to play, and graphically set the stage for the PC becoming the superior platform for gaming. Alongside BioShock, Donkey Kong Country, and Final Fantasy VI it is one of my favorite video games of all time. It’s simple on story (forgivable in a video game), but it plays like a game of chess. More than just “guns blazing” action it is a game of resource management and split-second decisions on choice of weapon and the player’s movements.

But enough about the video game. I am here to review the movie.

The movie adaptation is a chaotic mess of noise and bad lighting that does no justice to video games or to science fiction movies. Instead of the satanic, heavy-metal inspired inferno of Gothic imagery that made the game so memorable – and so controversial – we get instead a close quarters action thriller that tries to imitate Aliens, but in the end barely reaches the quality of Jason X. At least that movie, awful as it was, had some personality to it. This film has none.
The characters are not characters at all. They exist only because somebody has to shoot the guns, wear the costumes, and get eviscerated every once and awhile. Being written the way they are, the casting can only be an expensive waste of time. Rosamund Pike, The Rock, Karl Urban, and the talented and too often underrated Richard Brake should have fired their agents after starring in this non-spectacle. There is no chemistry to any of their performances. They grunt, scream, and utter some false-ringing phrases of machismo. What the writers don’t seem to understand is that without character investment and plot development, action scenes are going to be boring.
Even had the visuals not been drab and unappealing, the persistent action sequences lack interest. Everything is dimly lit to disguise the paltry special effects budget; the sequences mostly shot in close-up of grimacing faces of space marines space marining their way through dark hallways, strobe lights, and a lot of muzzle flashes and shattering glass.
There is one mildly impressive scene where Karl Urban’s “character” goes into first-person mode (like in the video game) as he fires through a gauntlet of monsters and demons. But the sequence is out of place and pointless. The rest of the film is not shot this way and it doesn’t serve the plot at all. Although admittedly I thought the hell knight wielding a chainsaw was kinda nifty.

My use of the word demon might be a bit premature. In the games they were demons because they were accidentally summoned from Hell by experimental portal tech. But, here they are said to be ancient natives of Mars’s moons that were dug up by an archaeological team. They are explicitly claimed to have one extra chromosome compared to humans and this apparently gives them super-strength and high intelligence. They were products of an ancient eugenic program that turned them into murderous monsters. I won’t comment on the feasibility of all that because I am not a geneticist, but I suspect the science behind this lore is fairly dubious at best.
At any rate the monsters can barely be seen throughout most of the movie. I would expect theater goers expecting some sort of spectacle in 2005 felt ripped off. None of these people spending their cash on a Doom movie were asking for badly lit shadows scurrying past the camera from a distance. But that is what they got, and when we finally get any decent look at the monsters in the film’s last 30 minutes it is too little too late.

This movie really has nothing to do with Hell or even monsters. It doesn’t even have much to do with space marines. There would have to be more genuine camaraderie for that. It doesn’t even have a story worthy of attention. The plot never thickens, it merely simmers. It sticks on one point and doesn’t develop. The space marines go to mars, growl, shoot at things. and die on senseless repeat until the movie is over. Doom was a cheap and tawdry experience to sit through.
If you really want to watch a good adaptation of a video game go watch the Fallout TV series on Amazon. But this movie can stay in Hell where it belongs. It’s the same Circle where they keep the Uwe Boll films.

Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Writers: Dave Callaham, Wesley Strick
Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, John Wells, John D. Schofield, Laura Holstein, David Minkowski, Henning Molfenter, Thierry Potok, Jeremy Steckler, Matthew Stillman
Cast: The Rock (Sarge), Karl Urban (John Grimm), Rosamund Pike (Samantha Grimm), Deobia Oparei (Destroyer), Ben Daniels (Goat), Razaaq Adoti (Duke), Richard Brake (Portman), Al Weaver (The Kid), Dexter Fletcher (Pinky), Brian Steele (Hell Knight), Yao Chin (Mac), Robert Russell (Dr. Carmack), Daniel York (Lt. Hunegs), Ian Hughes (Sanford Crosby)
Composer: Clint Mansell
Cinematographer: Tony Pierce-Roberts
Editor: Derek Brechin

Fantastic Planet (1973)

4/4 stars

Fantastic Planet is a beautiful and visually arresting piece of counter-culture art. Roland Topor’s animation is like the illustrations of a storybook. Not a single shot is wasted and every frame is a work of beauty on its own. The images have a grim Dr. Seussian quality and are illustrated like a darker version of the works of Maurice Sendak.

The film presents a challenge to our notions of nature and humanity’s relationship with it. The natives of the planet Ygram are gigantic blue-skinned beings called Draags. Theirs is a sophisticated, proud culture where knowledge is highly sought after and meditation is a regular ritual in every household. Humans are also present, but they are the size of insects in comparison and are viewed as little more than dumb animals to the Draags. The humans are called Oms (evidently derived from “homme” the French word for Man), and when they are not being kept as pets they are treated as vermin.
The movie opens with an Om mother carrying an infant in her arms. When she runs into a large blue hand, it’s finger flicks her around like one would an annoying bug. The casual cruelty brings about her death, but a young Draag child finds the Om baby and adopts it as a pet. Their relationship is a playful one, but I would not call it loving. The young Om is prodded and teased like he’s a toy and when the Draag grows into adolescence she becomes bored with him and neglects him. The Om (whose name is Terr) runs away and finds more of his kind in the wilds. These Oms are considered pests by the Draags and are routinely exterminated in a process called de-Ominization.
The Draag attitude toward Oms is not entirely hostile, but it is highly patronizing. Oms make decent pets they claim, but they breed too rapidly in the wild. As sub-Draag animals in their eyes, the Oms have no rights and kindness is afforded them only when it is convenient. In our own culture dogs and cats are loved and treated with familial affection, but little thought is given to killing them should they bite another human being or if they contract a disease. We distinguish them from humans where individual rights come into play. The Draag opinion of Oms is not dissimilar. What is most alarming about the Draag’s ideas about Oms is how sensible they are from their point of view. Why shouldn’t they flick an annoying Om away like a bug if a bug is all they are? Why shouldn’t their nests be subject to extermination if animals is all they are? As long as the Oms are equated with animals the Draags’ behavior toward them is justified. It’s as justified as how we treat animals on our own planet. No crime is committed when we squash a bug. Even when we take satisfaction and enjoyment from the experience. Think on the last time you squashed an annoying beetle. Did it make a popping crunch when it died? Have you ever sucked terrified pests with a vacuum and watched them go? Was it oddly fun and satisfying? In its own way The Fantastic Planet asks these questions. And it adds one more. Could there be something wrong with being so casual about it, let alone enjoying it? The reason we reject these questions is because we accept that they are sub-human species and the act of killing them and even enjoying it doesn’t carry the same moral weight as doing the same to another human being. As long as the Draag maintain this same view of the Oms they are cushioned against any guilt from causing them harm. When we are convinced of our definitions there is moral justification in committing these acts without moral censure. Roland Topor, who also co-wrote the film, knows this better than most. His father was a Polish-Jew who had been one of a small group of survivors of a Nazi death camp. And like the Draags, the Nazis freed themselves of guilt by their definitions. Jews were not human beings to them. Ergo their brutal treatment was justified. Evil doesn’t cackle and twirl its mustache like in cartoons. It moralizes and debates with cold reason.

Fantastic Planet is the sort of film that is only one of a handful of films that comes along in my lifetime. They are the films that challenge me by asking questions that are uncomfortable and difficult to answer. Like most of my species, I was raised to find the question of animal rights laughable at best. Fantastic Planet asks the question and it is not funny at all. It forces the viewer to face the issue even if the answer is not clear. I appreciate art that challenges. I personally think we need more of it. Even were we to fall back onto the opinions we held before, it is no bad thing to reevaluate them once in awhile.

Director: Rene Laloux
Writers: Roland Topor, Rene Laloux
Producers: Anatole Dauman, Simon Damiani, Andre Valio-Cavaglione
Cast: Jennifer Drake (Tiwa), Eric Baugin (Young Terr), Jean Topart (Master Sinh), Jean Valmont (Adult Terr)
Composer: Alain Goraguer
Cinematographers: Boris Baromykin, Lubomir Rejthar
Editors: Helene Arnal, Marta Latalova

The Plague Dogs (1982)

3.5/4 stars

Hope is a powerful thing. It can push a man (or a dog) to achieve more than he otherwise could without it. But hope doesn’t ensure victory and The Plague Dogs is tragically aware of this. By the close of the first act it is clear that nothing that happens in the movie is going to end well.

The film (by the creators of Watership Down and based on a novel by the same author) opens with a dog being cruelly drowned by lab scientists. They retrieve and resuscitate him; and it is explained that they have been doing this routinely. What is involved is an endurance test in which the scientists time how long the poor dog can be kept underwater before being saved. It’s stated that psychology is a factor. The dog, named Rowf (Christopher Benjamin), begins to anticipate the rescues which gives him the endurance to survive the longer and longer periods of simulated drowning. Simpler put, hope is trained into him as a Pavlovian response.
Rowf doesn’t understand why this is being done to him and wonders aloud if he has been a bad dog somehow. His friend, Snitter (John Hurt), has more reason to think so. Unlike Rowf, Snitter was not raised in captivity and once had a kind, loving master. But his old owner was killed by an oncoming truck after he had tried to coax Snitter off the road. Snitter still suffers from bad dreams over the incident and he views the lab and the harsh world they escape into as a sort of purgatory to atone for his past sins. Snitter is not being drowned routinely like Rowf is, but the scientists conducted an experimental brain surgery on him that causes him difficulty in distinguishing reality from his imagination. This causes him to relive his past traumas vividly and he sometimes dives into his own memories of happier days because he thinks he is physically safer there.

Their escape from the lab presents them with freedom, but not much happiness. The English countryside they wander in is to them a stark wild place. The painted backgrounds present wide open fields and stony ground in late Autumn. It’s a cold unfriendly place that requires cold and unfriendly acts to survive. They begin slaughtering sheep for food which gets a lot of angry attention from local herders. It’s not long before the two escaped dogs are on the news and the lab scientists are working hard to find the dogs and kill them. Turns out there is more to the dogs’ escape than killing sheep and inconveniencing farmers. The dogs are revealed to be carriers of the bubonic plague and the scientists have an invested interest in seeing them neutralized.

Rowf and Snitter don’t understand any of this, of course, and they press on trying to find a safe place away from the harsh environment. At first, Snitter holds out in the hopes of finding new masters to care for them, but the harsh reception from the locals dashes these dreams. In the end their only goal is safety. What they find in the end is a world that has rejected them and won’t allow them peace or security.

The driving force throughout the events of The Plague Dogs is hope. But the situation Snitter and Rowf are in is a hopeless one. The film delves into the psychology of hope honestly. Hope does not always bring about victory, but it can lengthen the duration of survival and add endurance. The dogs’ ignorance and their hope gets them as far as it does. But the film’s final note is one of uncertainty and nothing works out for them as they had wished.

The fact that The Plague Dogs is a cartoon can be misleading to the unwary. The painted backdrops give still life realism to the Fall-to-Winter world they dwell in, and the animated cells are not gaudy and colorful like in a Disney picture. The animals and people are drawn with the same realism in mind and they are photographed as if they were live action and not cute cartoon characters. This is also a very violent film that gives tangible reality to the messiness of death. The Plague Dogs, like Watership Down which preceded it, is not a movie for young children. If anything, this film is more traumatizing and dark than Watership Down ever was. That film was about the harshness and sacrificial requirements needed to achieve victory. The Plague Dogs is not about victory at all. Rather, it is about hope in the midst of hopelessness. Their hope carries them far, but never far enough; and there is a stark sort of truth to how this movie handles hope and its value. Most movies cop out with promises of salvation and victory, even if bittersweet and costly. The Plague Dogs is a movie that has the guts to tell us that sometimes things just don’t work out. That is not to say that hope is a dangerous lie. The film doesn’t indict hope at all. But it does say something about being prepared for failure. It’s a rough truth, but a valuable one.

Director: Martin Rosen
Writer: Martin Rosen
Producers: Martin Rosen, Jake Eberts
Cast: John Hurt (Snitter), Christopher Benjamin (Rowf), James Bolam (The Tod), Nigel Hawthorne (Dr. Boycott), Warren Mitchell (Tyson/Wag), Bernard Hepton (Stephen Powell), Penelope Lee (Lynn Driver)
Composer: Patrick Gleeson
Editor: Richard Harkness

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

3.5/4 stars

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a movie that defies analysis. As a teenage male power fantasy it lacks serious commentary on power fantasies and, indeed, gives them full expression as something real and legitimate. The world Scott Pilgrim inhabits doesn’t separate adolescent wish fulfillment from reality. Instead, for two hours we are treated to the notion that they are reality. Like True Romance (an admittedly more subtle film) Scott Pilgrim is a boy’s daydream.

When we first meet Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) he is an unemployed 22 year old guitar player who announces to his bandmates that he has a new girlfriend. Her name is Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) and she is a 17 year old high schooler who worships the ground he walks on. His friends make a bit of a fuss over the age gap, suggesting there is something immature in his choices. This is certainly true enough, but more than being immature the relationship touches on a number of ethical grey areas that apparently in 2010 were less scandalous than they are now. Moving on from that, the girl is supportive and enthusiastic for Scott’s musical career. She treats him with complete deference, despite his unobtrusive personality and shy geekiness.
Scott lives in an old bunker-turned-apartment and shares his bed with his gay roommate, Wallace (Kieran Culkin) who disapproves of the relationship. Neither does Scott’s sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick) who pops in and out of the film to give him grief over his life choices. To Scott’s chagrin Wallace always tells her everything about his activities, letting her know as soon as he does. In one surreal and very funny scene Wallace manages somehow to give her the latest dirt even though he is fast asleep at the time. Moments like this are common throughout the movie. It reminds me a bit of a Family Guy episode where the surreal moments pass by with no comment or lasting consequences.

Scott later meets an older girl named Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an offbeat, pink-haired alt girl whom he swears he saw in a dream before. He becomes infatuated with her and pesters her to go out with him, even though he is already in a relationship with Knives. Scott has all the cowardly insecurities of a teenager with low self-esteem and the self-destructive behaviors to match. Like a lot of young men in his predicament Ramona’s complicated sexual history intimidates him. He feels uncertain that he can measure up to her previous partners, all of them jerks of course, while he lives out the common incel myth of being a “nice guy.”
Ramona’s exes have formed a League of Evil Exes whom, according to Ramona, Scott needs to fight if he wants to date her. They are seven in total, all larger than life and highly ridiculous. They range from a boorish action movie star (Chris Evans) to a vegan with super powers (Brandon Routh). The fights are fanciful, super-heroical epic battles heavily annotated with CGI, arcade score counters, and video game prompts a la Mortal Kombat. At first, one could be forgiven for assuming these fights are all in Scott’s head. His scrawny frame implausibly comes out on top every time while his defeated foes disintegrate into coin tokens. And let’s not forget to mention the mass amount of property damage incurred by people being thrown through brick walls and ceilings being ripped off with super strength. But, the results appear to last and his onlooking friends accept the events as if they are really happening.
The “final boss” of the whole affair, Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), who bears a striking resemblance to Marge’s ex-boyfriend from The Simpsons, manages to steal Ramona away from him. This final fight brings Scott face to face with the facts of his infidelity, but not the harsh realities or consequences of it.

The entire film dwells squarely within the realm of teenage male fantasy. Never does Scott Pilgrim find himself forced to wake from it or deal with how life truly is. There are only a few things that clue us in that there is a harsh reality beneath the surface glitter at all. For one, Scott never succeeds in having sex with Ramona and there’s an arm’s length’s distance between the two of them at all times that the fact that they are dating desperately tries to deny. If there is anything to be picked out of the film thematically it is the psychological inner workings of a young virgin male trying to cope with his girlfriend’s sexual experience. What Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is, is a cinematic recreation of what such a young man imagines he wants. It’s juvenile romantic fantasy on full unadulterated display. It never breaks from character by pulling back the curtain and exposing Scott’s insecurities and incel-like mentality. That is the real Scott behind the fantasy. But we are not shown what is behind the fantasy. We are just shown the fantasy itself.

In the end, how Scott Pilgrim is analysed as a character depends upon the maturity of the viewer. The vision of his daydreams are artfully created by cinematography built upon the backs of video games, arcade machines, and comic books. These things are what are at the forefront of his childish mind. What we get out of the mix is a clever, self-aware comedy that is visually appealing and entertaining. The lack of consequences for Scott’s bad behavior may grate against some viewers, and I can understand perfectly if they should feel that way. But, for myself, the movie is not a condoning of his behavior. What Scott Pilgrim vs. the World aims to do is give his fantasies a breath of fresh air. If the exposure is distasteful, perhaps that is what the film is supposed to convey. The movie is ridiculous and unglued from reality. And maybe that is how these sorts of fantasies are supposed to look.

Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Producers: Eric Gitter, Nira Park, Marc Platt, Edgar Wright, J. Miles Dale, Jared LeBoff, Adam Siegel, Ronaldo Vasconcellos, Lisa Gitter, Joe Nozemack, Steven V. Scavelli
Cast: Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim), Kieran Culkin (Wallace Wells), Anna Kendrick (Stacey Pilgrim), Alison Pill (Kim Pine), Aubrey Plaza (Julie Powers), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona Flowers), Jason Schwartzman (Gideon Graves), Johnny Simmons (Young Neil), Mark Webber (Stephen Stills), Ellen Wong (Knives Chau), Satya Bhabha (Matthew Patel), Keita Saito (Kyle Katayanagi), Kjartan Hewitt (Jimmy), Nelson Franklin (Comeau), Kristina Pesic (Sandra), Ingrid Haas (Monique), Chris Evans (Lucas Lee), Chantelle Chung (Tamara Chen), Brie Larson (Envy Larson), Mae Whitman (Roxy Richter), Brandon Routh (Todd Ingram), Shota Saito (Ken Katayanagi), Bill Hader (The Voice)
Composer: Nigel Godrich
Cinematographer: Bill Pope
Editors: Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

2/4

The Zack Snyder cut of Justice League – something the fans clamored for after the original’s lukewarm reception – is overpadded and badly paced. Nearly two and a half hours go by before the story emerges from its first act and when it finally does it turns into a meandering exercise in repetition. The final climactic battle between the heroes and Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) doesn’t feel like a climax at all as it is barely distinguishable between any of the other fights in the movie. They fight him again and again and again and then the film just kinda stops suddenly. While I didn’t particularly like the original theatrical version when I saw it in theaters I like it better than this one. The original’s final act was poorly written and made too many awkward unfunny attempts at humor, but what it had going for it was a real sense of being climactic. Pacing is more important than length in any movie, and at 4 hours and 3 minutes Zack Snyder’s Justice League is just plain boring.
An issue I had was its use of intertitles that divide the film in a series of parts. It comes across as pretentious and the fades to black to show us these only drag the movie’s pacing even more. I was taken out of the movie each time they appeared and they seemed to serve only as a reminder that the movie was still going.

The plot revolves around a new villain named Steppenwolf – an armored CGI giant straight out of Diablo – who has fallen out of favor with his nephew, Darkseid, and now wants to redeem himself. Steppenwolf is seeking three macguffins called Mother Boxes with which Darkseid wants to gain ultimate control of all life in the universe or something. I mean, look, macguffins and villain plots are not that important in most superhero movies because the resolution is always the same. The heroes win some, lose some, and then ultimately win some again and then the movie is over. We know who the bad guy is and we know who the good guys are and we want to see them fight each other. It’s like PPV wrestling or a video game without interactivity or an ability to skip the cutscenes. The Roger Moore Bond era had the same problem. No one cares what the bad guy is doing, just grab a pair of skis and stop him like always.

One of the Mother Boxes is in the possession of new JLA member, Cyborg (Ray Fisher), who was created with it after suffering injuries from a car accident. This same Mother Box is used to revive Superman (Henry Cavill) who now dons a black suit with a silver S.
Superman’s revival makes for the best and most interesting part of the movie. He awakens with no memories of who he is at first and starts attacking the Justice League before being snapped out of it by Lois Lane (Amy Adams). My favorite shot during the attack is when the Flash (Ezra Miller) tries to get around Superman at high speeds. Whenever he does this he disappears and the rest of the world goes into slo-mo similar to what happens to Quicksilver in the X-Men movies. As he passes, Superman’s eye slowly shifts in his direction revealing that he is able to keep up with the Flash at all times.

The majority of the movie’s first few hours is Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) meeting with the future Justice League members and trying to recruit them. He meets with Aquaman (Jason Momoa) in Iceland who makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with whatever Batman and co. are planning. Obviously he comes around later.
The writing and casting of Aquaman in the DCEU is a conscious effort to distance the character from the memes and jokes that have been made at his expense on the internet. Shows like Big Bang Theory and Family Guy are largely to blame. There is now a consensus among non-comic readers that a man from Atlantis with a three-pronged spear, who can control the power of the seas, and talk to sharks is somehow lame. Here, Aquaman is a rough brawler who drinks heavily and tries to intimidate everyone with his surliness and physique. Momoa’s performance is good enough, but this choice is definitely an odd one.
Batman’s first success is with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) who is first introduced in the film stopping terrorists from blowing up a building full of schoolchildren. It’s the usual plot armor gimmick with a bomb with a timer that goes down at a varying rate. If you actually try to count the remaining seconds you realize everyone should have been blown up a minute ago.
Gadot’s Wonder Woman is not strong on personality. She gives dull pep talks and plays at being serious. She is not convincing as a character and her action scenes continue to suffer from special effects tricks that don’t look real.
Cyborg is more reluctant to join than perhaps even Aquaman. He doesn’t relish being in the suit he is in and his prolonged isolation from society has left him bitter and angry. What makes him more interesting than the other characters is that his origin story is ripe for a villain. The circumstances of his condition and his anger says a lot about free will when he ultimately joins the good guys anyway. He has the ability to tap into any network, computer, and camera feed making him an asset that rivals the resources of the Batcave. Before joining JLA he tries to find purpose in life helping poverty-stricken single mothers by hacking their bank accounts and making them millionaires overnight. Even when he is being bad he does it kindly and with pure motivations. Bruce Wayne tells Flash in the movie that his superpower is being rich. But all we have seen him do with that is pay for Clark Kent’s funeral. What does he have to say for himself?
Lastly is the Flash played by Ezra Miller. In the established lore he is prone to causing crisis events, coming in and out of reality, and being an overall nuisance to the space-time continuum. But enough about Ezra Miller.
The Flash character in Justice League is written as comic relief. He is eager for friends and to be liked, but is socially awkward and tends to say the wrong thing or too much at the wrong time. Occasionally he can be funny, but often his bits don’t land and his utterances make me wince. The funniest moment is when he tries to say goodbye to a Russian family, but says Dostoevsky instead of do svidanya. Sadly that moment was cut in this version. Miller puts in the best performance of any of the other actors in Justice League, but he could have been given better lines.

As far as the action set pieces, special effects, and cinematography go, the film has the same problems I had with Batman v Superman. They’re dimly shot, over-reliant on cartoonish CGI, and use so much fast-cuts and quick editing that I doubt even Flash could understand what he was seeing without pausing it off and on again. With the far superior Wonder Woman (2017) released between this movie and BvS it is clear that this is just Zack Snyder’s style. I’m not a fan. His films tend to look drab and ugly and they’re soullessly written.

This movie certainly didn’t anger me the way Suicide Squad did. But it is not exciting like Wonder Woman or as interesting as Batman v Superman. The theatrical version is slightly less good than Man of Steel (another film I disliked), but the Snyder Cut fatigued me. What made movies like Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind justify their run-times was that there are no wasted shots and the writing is engaging throughout. With Justice League the reincorporated footage and added pickup shots are just mere padding. Stuffing everything back into a movie for a vanity project doesn’t make it good. It just makes it long.

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, Zack Snyder, Will Beall
Producers: Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Ben Affleck, Wesley Coller, Curt Kanemoto, Benjamin Melniker, Christopher Nolan, Jim Rowe, Chris Terrio, Emma Thomas, Michael E. Uslan, Madison Ainley, Marianne Jenkins, Tamara Watts Kent, Madison Weireter, Andrea Wertheim, Gregor Wilson
Cast: Ben Afflect (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Henry Cavill (Superman/Clark Kent), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince/Wonder Woman), Ray Fisher (Cyborg/Victor Stone), Jason Momoa (Aquaman/Arthur Curry), Ezra Miller (The Flash/Barry Allen), Willem Dafoe (Vulko), Jesse Eisenberg (Lex Luthor), Jeremy Irons (Alfred), Diane Lane (Martha Kent), Connie Nielsen (Hippolyta), J. K. Simmons (Commissioner Gordon), Ciaran Hinds (Steppenwolf)
Composer: Tom Holkenborg
Cinematographer: Fabian Wagner
Editors: David Brenner, Carlos M. Castillon, Dody Dorn)

Wonder Woman (2017)

3/4 stars

Wonder Woman is where the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) finally gets it right. Upon its release it was the best of the series and the best looking. Man of Steel was a turgid misfire and Suicide Squad was an execrable display of incompetence. Batman v Superman had many great qualities, but had flaws that alienated its audience. With Wonder Woman next on the slate, director Patty Jenkins approached the material by making what the audiences had wanted all along: a superhero movie. Instead of following the subversive pattern set by Zack Snyder she tears a page from Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s playbook and makes a superhero origin movie that follows the writing philosophy of the first Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger.

These types of movies are what they are. They aren’t movies in the usual sense. They are not made to stand on their own, but designed to revolve around a larger cycle of other movies. Modern superhero films are part of an expensive serial that releases two to three 2-hour episodes a year. Even origin stories like this one serve only to introduce its character. What they don’t do is give the characters a solid resolution. Story is an afterthought, the writing being pooled into setting up the ensemble event to come later. A lot of auteurs in the industry resent them for reasons I do not necessarily disagree with, but accepting them as something different I can review them for what they are and not for something they aren’t intended to be. I happen to enjoy serials, after all.

Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) starts out as a young woman who is trained and honed for combat on an island inhabited by Amazons. Diana – the future Wonder Woman – was made of clay and brought to life by the god Zeus. She is raised by the Amazonian queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) who delays her combat training because she wants to keep her sheltered. But, Hippolyta’s sister, Antiope (Bonnie Wright) trains her in secret. Diana is told that the god of war, Ares, had slain all the other gods except for Zeus who had banished him to who knows where. The Amazons were created to protect the race of humans against Ares who wants to exterminate them and they fear his eventual return. I don’t rightly recall reading this in Bulfinch and Hamilton, but comic book gods are a different ilk from their classical sources and merely share their names. I’ve had similar thoughts about Rick Riordan.
When American fighter pilot, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crashes his plane nearby while being pursued by Germans they learn from him that outside of their cozy island the world is currently being embroiled in WWI. When Diana first meets him she asks him if he is a man. She had never seen one before and they are seemingly scarce on the island. This begs a lot of questions since the movie explains – too thoroughly, I thought, for a family movie – that only Diana was made of clay and the others were sexually reproduced. There are so many things I want to ask. Where are the men? Do they keep them sequestered out back? Are they only kept for breeding? Is there a way to sign up for the job? And so on.

Diana believes that the war Steve is describing could only be the work of Ares and she negotiates a deal with him to return him home as long as he takes her with him so she can find and kill Ares. Steven thinks she is being naive, but agrees. The eventual reveal of Ares later on is a serious weak spot in the movie since it undermines a more poignant theme that had been running in the film up to that point. Trevor understands that true evil is not found in a single external force and he tries to tell her this several times. The fact is, wars like WWI are not waged by gods and monsters. They are brutally executed on the battlefield, but they are conducted by bureaucrats and men in suits with trimmed nails. They murder men, women, and children by edict and paperwork, call it a day, and then take their families out for ice cream. Evil is not men twirling their mustaches and cackling. Evil looks scarcely different than you or I. So when after so much is made of her being naive on the nature of human wickedness, the sudden reveal of Ares as an instigator behind the war didn’t sit well with me.

The strongest moments in Wonder Woman are when Diana is slowly adjusting to modern culture and when she is fighting Germans on the front. The action scenes are much better than what the DCEU had done so far. In the earlier films the fights are shot dimly and rely on quick editing to give the viewer a lot of visual noise, but nothing that can be clearly made out. This time, the camera never loses focus on Wonder Woman even when the fighting speeds up and intensifies. Like in the classic Superman movies with Christopher Reeve she charges heroically into action in closeups. We never lose a clear view of Wonder Woman and the side characters which was sadly lacking in the Snyder pictures. Where the action scenes fail is an overuse of slow-mo. Slow-motion photography tends to telegraph events and it steals away their surprise and oomph. When an arrow starts moving in slow-mo around the same moment a character slowly dives into frame you know they are about to get shot. It’s a waste of dramatic tension.

Wonder Woman’s cinematography is otherwise flawless. As I said above it is so far the best looking of the DCEU films up to this point. It drops the drab colors of the previous flicks replacing it with beautiful shots that, for once, contain color and detail. Throughout the late 2000s and most of the 2010s movies started sucking color out of their movies in favor of dim lenses that make everything appear in shades of grey-blue. For reference, see what happened to the Harry Potter movies’ cinematography as the series went on. But around 2016-2017 we started seeing more natural color and lighting in movies again and the trend has mostly stuck around for now. The best shots are when Diana and Trevor are in London. There is a gorgeous attention to detail in the set design and palette. The scenes when Diana is trying on modern clothes in a shop, while deliberately silly, look fantastic.

The music in Wonder Woman, like in Man of Steel and BvS, is largely composed of incidental pieces with nothing in particular that stands out, save for Wonder Woman’s main theme. It was first heard in BvS and it’s a real banger. I’d accept it as the definitive Wonder Woman theme along with John Williams’ Superman and Danny Elfman’s Batman scores. It’s that good, even if they really don’t make great music that much in movies anymore.

I enjoyed Wonder Woman a lot. It showed that the DCEU series was capable of reproducing the sort of content that made the Marvel movies so popular. The mismanagement that caused the series’ demise later was preventable had they made more movies in the same vein as this one.
When Trevor mentions that saving the day would involve finding the man who can, Diana quips back, “I am the man who can.” Looking at the DCEU’s fallen house of cards compared with the success that was this movie, I think she was on to something. Women, especially Wonder Women, often are.

Director: Patty Jenkins
Writers: Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs
Producers: Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, Richard Suckle, Jon Berg, Wesley Coller, Geoff Johns, Stephen Jones, Steven Mnuchin, Rebecca Steel Roven, John Bernard, Tommy Gormley, Curt Kanemoto, Enzo Sisti
Cast: Gal Gadot (Diana Prince/Wonder Woman), Chris Pine (Steve Trevor), Connie Nielsen (Hippolyta), Robin Wright (Antiope), Danny Huston (Ludendorff), David Thewlis (Sir Patrick), Said Taghmaoui (Sameer), Ewen Bremner (Charlie), Eugene Brave Rock (The Chief), Lucy Davis (Etta), Elena Anaya (Dr. Maru)
Composer: Rupert Gregson-Williams
Cinematographer: Matthew Jensen
Editor: Martin Walsh

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

3/4 stars

note: This is a review of the Ultimate Edition, an expanded edition of the film not initially shown in theaters

When I first saw Batman v Superman ten years ago I hated it. A lot of people did. Many still do. But, having seen it for a second time a decade later I find myself in the awkward position of being one of its defenders. Bear in mind, the Ultimate Edition is the only cut of the film I have seen, so I can honestly inform the reader that the extra thirty minutes are not what made the difference to me.
No, what I think happened this second time around was a mixture of acceptance and comprehension of what the filmmakers were trying to do. Being dark is not necessarily an issue for me. What made Man of Steel a bad movie was that its darkness extended to its main character as well as the plot. Putting Superman in a dark story is fine. Wholesome, good people live in a dark world and how they adapt to it and learn to live in it is ripe for good storytelling. But, in Man of Steel Superman comes right off the bat as someone angsty and angry which suited him not a bit. The kinder more winsome Superman of old would have made that film more palatable since light versus dark is what he is all about.

Superman (Henry Cavill) is not much better in this movie either, but, perhaps I have got used to him. He is not as unsure of himself as he was in Man of Steel for one thing. And, also, Batman v Superman is not all about him. It’s not really about Batman (Ben Affleck) that much either. The angsty Superman is here to stay and the movie accepts this and moves on without dwelling on his character as much.
For me, BvS’s saving grace is that the dark tone is not just a gimmick like it was in Man of Steel. This movie has something to say for once. What made many people angry, I suspect, is that they purchased their tickets and expected to see a superhero movie. Can’t really blame them there. But, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – an admittedly awful title – is not a superhero movie. It’s an epic social thriller that takes the subject of Superheroes (or meta-humans as the film calls them) seriously. It’s a commentary on what the ramifications of beings like this would have in a world that is post-9/11. In many ways I view the movie as a companion piece to Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.
Much of the film’s scenes are set in newsrooms, congressional hearings, and foreign lands falling apart under unstable regimes. The frequent cameos of real life figures like Charlie Rose, Nancy Grace, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson commenting on the existence of superheroes is just another way the film tries to posit how a world inhabited by meta-humans would react to them.

The film is set two years after General Zod wrecked devastation on Metropolis and now the world is questioning whether it needs another all-powerful Kryptonian living amongst them. Superman is a good man who is on the side of humanity, but that fact is not unquestionable to the many people who were maimed and lost their loved ones in the fallout. It was Snyder’s conscious decision to spend more time on this subject than on the pure unadulterated superhero flare we have come to expect in these sort of movies. Just before I rewatched it I read this comment from director Zack Snyder that he made about the movie in 2023: “I think that probably is what caused the movie to be so polarizing. I think … a lot of people went into the movies for going like, “Oh, it’s the superhero romp, right? Let’s have fun with it.” And we gave them this sort of hardcore deconstructivist, heavily layered, experiential modern mythological superhero movie that … you really need to pay attention to. That was not cool. That’s not something anyone wanted to do.”
At first when I read that comment I got annoyed. I thought it patronizing and a failure to take ownership of the issues that people actually had with the movie. Watching it again, though, I hearken back to that comment and understand somewhat of what he was trying to say. I believe he was mostly right, but a few people did have other reasons for not liking it. The characterizations of Superman, Batman, and Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) are hardly traditional. The film still languishes under its fast-edited action sequences and unconvincing special effects. And a lot of people bristled at the reason for Batman sparing Superman’s life being that their mothers’ names were both Martha. The latter issue was meme’d and mocked to death back in 2016 and a lot of people still complain about it today. I am not as angry about it as they are. The scene intended to give Batman an understanding of Superman’s humanity that he had not seen before. He had a mother. The scene only failed because of a lack of subtlety and Batman’s animosity died down too quickly to be believable. I thought Batman’s issues with Superman were not wholly addressed here. Having a mom named Martha should not have been enough to convince him that Superman was not a threat and the movie should have resolved this concern a bit more. I also believe the addition of visual flashbacks to Bruce Wayne’s parents being shot was too on the nose and the scene would have been better received without them. But, the fact that Supes also had a mom named Martha being a turning point in Batman’s relationship with Superman didn’t bother me. It’s not as stupid as people say it is. It just needed some adjustments to its execution. But, people like their bandwagons, you know.

Batman is a big point of contention, and I do understand why. He is a bit hard to swallow. He is much more brutal and violent than any previous incarnation of the character we had seen on screen before. He also shows a shocking indifference to human life. Much of his actions are reckless and indirectly cause the deaths of the men he is fighting. The reason I still am able to accept him, however, is that the reinterpretation of the character is not so jarring as it is with Superman. Clark Kent and his alter ego don’t align at all with what he is supposed to represent, whereas Batman has always been a more edgy character. Making Batman this grim was the only logical thing the filmmakers could do if he is to contrast with Superman as he is presented here. It helps that he is not the movie’s main character. Batman serves the majority of the plot as an antagonist who has become misguided by suspicion and paranoia. The movie focuses most on the loneliness and the near sociopathy of the character which, let’s face it, has been with Batman since the beginning. Batman has always been the sort of guy whose trauma and internal rage at injustice had driven him to becoming a violent vigilante who beats the wicked and corrupt to a bloody pulp. Must I also point out that he dresses up in a vampiric bat costume and has the power of fear and the cover of darkness as his primary weapons? I can forgive the movie for knowing what everyone else knows that such a man in real life would likely be mentally ill.

The actual fight between the two is instigated by Lex Luthor. Instead of the usual self-congratulating Bond villain played by Hackman and Spacey, Jesse Eisenberg plays him…well…as Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg is not a bad actor, but he is a one-trick pony. He only plays one guy in all of his films and that is Jesse Eisenberg. His Luthor is neurotic, talks fast, and eats up attention like a child eats up sugar. He clearly loves the sound of his own voice and becomes grandiose and prone to demagoguery. He thinks of Superman as a sort of god in the classical sense and wants him dead on that basis alone. Instead of cutting his teeth on Sesame Street and Dr. Seuss like most normal people, he lives by cherrypicking the philosophies of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. I’ve known people like this and they aren’t much fun at parties.
By staging a number of terroristic plots that are deliberately centered around Superman’s presence he turns him into a controversial figure. A vocal minority of the citizenry are now leery of Superman and Batman is convinced that the world will not be safe and secure until he is dead.

Another newcomer to the franchise is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) who spends most of the movie in disguise as Diana Prince. Her purpose in the film is limited and she is there by and large as a justification for the “Dawn of Justice” part of the movie’s title. She is meant to foreshadow the eventual rise of the Justice League. The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman also make very brief appearances, but they don’t inundate the movie with too many characters as a lot of superhero movies do with their villains. Secret archived footage is shown of them on computer screens to give us our first look at them before they make it to the main event.
Gadot’s performance is a bit bland, but she is not given a whole lot to do in her defense. As Wonder Woman she doesn’t spring into action until the final climactic battle and when she does she contributes little. Action movie directors must find writing for women hard or something, because I complain about this often.

The final battle is where the movie tends to fall apart. It’s a CGI-laden mess. The three heroes get tossed about frequently, transitioning from CGI models to actors when they land. CGI is supposed to be like a magic trick and when done poorly the trick is revealed to the audience and takes them out of the illusion. Doomsday, a monster made of kryptonite designed by Luthor, looks like a cartoon. It stomps about, roaring its head off and fighting the heroes in front of bluescreen that is so obvious it’s more like watching a video game.
The modern filmmakers have seemed to forget that fight scenes need personality as well as action. There is a lot of emotion involved when fighting someone. There needs to be a personal connection that has to be shown during the fight and not just in the moments leading up to it. This is done through simple emoting, facial expressions, and signs of physical exhaustion as the conflict becomes prolonged. What this movie fails to do is show us any of that. It’s all fast blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kinetics, explosions, loud noises, and whole shots where not a single thing on screen is real. All of which is dimly lit for reasons I suspect have to do with disguising the fakeness of the special effects. It’s more exhausting than entertaining.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is at its strongest when it is not trying to fulfill its obligations as a superhero movie. The social commentary is brilliant and the pacing of its first act is near perfect. It suffers during its action scenes, but provides a much more profound experience when it is being serious. It’s not perfect, but I rather liked it.

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer
Producers: Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Wesley Coller, David S. Goyer, Geoff Johns, Benjamin Melniker, Steven Mnuchin, Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas, Michael E. Uslan, Trevor Christie, Curt Kanemoto, Bruce Moriarty, Jim Rowe, Andrea Wertheim, Gregor Wilson
Cast: Ben Affleck (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Henry Cavill (Clark Kent/Superman), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Jesse Eisenberg (Lex Luthor), Diane Lane (Martha Kent), Laurence Fishburne (Perry White), Jeremy Irons (Alfred), Holly Hunter (Senator Finch), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince/Wonder Woman), Scoot McNairy (Wallace Keefe), Callan Mulvey (Anatoli Knyasev), Tao Okamoto (Mercy Graves)
Composers: Junkie XL, Hans Zimmer
Cinematographer: Larry Fong
Editor: David Brenner

Man of Steel (2013)

2/4 stars

I believe that movies are best viewed on their own and on their own merits without constantly comparing them to other movies that they were not intended to be like. So when Warner Brothers finally saw fit to reboot the Superman franchise there ought to be a little latitude for reinvention. But, while Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is not beholden to the Christopher Reeve canon, it is still beholden to Superman as a character. And that is where the movie fails.
Superman is more than Christopher Reeve. By a long tradition of comic books, movies, video games, and television series Superman has entered the cultural mythos as an established character whose lore, values, and personality have become sacred.

My objections to Man of Steel are not solely due to my preference for Christopher Reeve. What I object to is how the heart and soul of Superman has been so thoroughly sucked out. Even his costume is drab and colorless. Henry Cavill plays the role without personality. Instead of the idealistic boy scout we have grown to know and love, he is angsty and much too serious. His performance is like that of a robot. Instead of being Superman as I know him, Cavill plays the sort of impersonal hero that I would expect to address everyone as “Citizen!” As Superman he is dull and emotionless. As Clark Kent he is constantly anxious and facing existential crises.
It is not until the end of the film that he dons the glasses and becomes a reporter at the Daily Planet. The scene is too brief to say much, but in those brief seconds I saw little sign of the winsome mild-mannered reporter that he is supposed to be. He strides in with confidence and makes a charming smile. He is more like an adolescent fantasy of a handsome intern.

Clark’s childhood in Smallville is handled differently than it is in the original film, Here it is doled out in a series of flashbacks that come and go throughout the first act. These scenes run parallel against his adulthood right before he puts on the cape and boots. Clark is unsure of himself and desperately wants to know what his destiny and purpose in life is. As a child we see him struggle to adjust to his powers and his relations with his peers is strained and distant. Pa Kent (Kevin Costner) raises Clark to try to find the right outlet for his powers and to maintain a sense of self-restraint. To the film’s credit these scenes do a great job at revealing how Superman came to be responsible with his abilities without becoming corrupted and tyrannical by them. There is a key moment where Clark has to contend with middle school bullies trying to get him to fight. Instead of refraining from violence out of sheer goodness of heart, the scene more realistically shows how difficult it is to maintain self-control when one is angry. While cornered he is gripping a fence behind him which, after the bullies run off, is shown to have been crushed by his hand. Pa Kent praises Clark for not giving into his baser nature, but admits that a part of him would have been satisfied had Clark knocked their blocks off. Being a good person is hard work and the film presents those difficulties remarkably well.
But the movie never quite develops him into the character that we know. Up to the very end his uncertainties and trauma remain with him. I would have much better liked seeing these pieces of his past add up to the kind and idealistic man he would later become.
One thing I heavily disliked about the flashbacks is how far Pa Kent takes the lessons in self-restraint. His dialogue and actions suggest that he doesn’t want Clark to become a hero at all out of fears for what it would do to society. After saving a bus full of schoolchildren his dad seems more concerned about the attention it would draw to Clark than the lives he saved. And the way the film handles the death of Jonathan Kent is unforgivable. In the original lore Pa Kent’s heart attack was a poignant lesson to Clark about the limitations of his powers and how he cannot save everyone. But, in Man of Steel his death is something easily preventable, but occurs anyway due to over-caution.

The film opens, like in the original, on Krypton. The planet is about to explode thanks to over-mining that has destabilized the planet’s core. Superman’s father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), is fed up with Krypton’s stagnant culture which is portrayed as being built on eugenics. The Kryptonians are grown in labs with preset destinies and roles to play. Jor-El would rather see his race breed freely without governmental controls. He steals a codex of DNA that he implants in his son in the hopes of reseeding the Kryptonian people somewhere else.
When General Zod (Michael Shannon) stages a rebellion he seeks to acquire the codex for himself so he can rebuild Krypton’s civilization under his rule. With Superman now safely flying in an escape pod for Earth, Zod is too late and his rebellion is quelled swiftly. As we have seen before Zod and his cohorts are sent into the Phantom Zone.

Back on Earth the adult Clark Kent makes his first acquaintance with Lois Lane (Amy Adams) when she stumbles upon an old Kryptonian scout ship that Clark was exploring. The movie dodges entirely the whole notion that Lane doesn’t know Clark Kent is Superman by having her uncover his identity early on. At the end of the film when he starts his first day at the Daily Planet she already knows who he is.
Man of Steel handles their love story even worse than the Reeve films did. Their first kiss comes out of nowhere, following only a small handful of meetings, all of which are professional and unflirtatious. The kiss is, in fact, the first indication that Lois was attracted to Superman at all.
Adams’ performance as Lois is markedly different than Margot Kidder’s. She is more like a journalist who stubbornly puts herself in dangerous situations for her paper. Kidder’s Lois Lane was more like a gossip columnist. Amy Adams plays the sort of stubborn journalist who sniffs out cover-ups and pesters the powers that be to find the truth. What is unfortunate is that that is all there is to her personality. Kidder was full of personality while Adams has virtually none.

During the final act, after Zod comes to Earth to take back the codex and terraform the planet for a new Krypton, the action scenes have the same problems that I have had with Superman Returns. The CGI, instead of being put to any artful use, is used to show things moving so fast that they are hard to make out. Superman zips about at high speeds, burning objects are hurled around in hundreds of shots per second, and explosions dominate much of the foreground. A lot of the action shots are also done in close-up which only furthers obscures a clear view. Computer generated special effects are at their best when they are used to show the audience things they haven’t seen before and couldn’t have seen otherwise. Too often they are utilized, like in this movie, to create highly kinetic action that is impossible to process and appreciate.

At the end of the day Superman is not an action movie star. Who he is as a character is just as important as what he does. Probably even more so. What the makers of Man of Steel don’t seem to understand is that when reinventing a character certain core traits need to be preserved if he is to be that character at all. What I saw was a very depressed and beleaguered man wearing a Superman costume. But I didn’t see Superman.
Back in 2013 I heard a few yea-sayers claim that “this is not your father’s Superman!” Perhaps we should consider that our fathers were right.

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan
Producers: Christopher Nolan, Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Emma Thomas, Jon Peters, Lloyd Phillips, Thomas Tull, Wesley Coller, Curt Kanemoto
Cast: Henry Cavill (Superman/Clark Kent), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Michael Shannon (Zod), Diane Lane (Martha Kent), Russell Crowe (Jor-El), Antje Traue (Faora-Ul), Harry Lennix (General Swanwick), Richard Schiff (Dr. Emil Hamilton), Christopher Meloni (Colonel Nathan Hardy), Kevin Costner (Jonathan Kent), Ayelet Zurer (Lara Lora-Van), Laurence Fishburne (Perry White)
Composer: Hans Zimmer
Cinematographer: Amir Mokri
Editor: David Brenner

Superman Returns (2006)

3/4 stars

Superman Returns makes a solid effort to recapture the spirit of the original Superman movies. This is most clear in the film’s casting, where the performances are largely imitative of the original actors. It all makes for a conscious and deliberate attempt at producing a theoretical reconstruction of what a Superman 5 could have been had it been made back when Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, and Gene Hackman were in their prime. And it mostly succeeds.

Kevin Spacey, in particular, fills in Hackman’s shoes as Lex Luthor remarkably well. Spacey doesn’t stoop to parody, but makes the role his own while keeping Hackman’s mannerisms and tone largely intact. What he does best is recapturing the narcissism of the character. He portrays arrogance and indifference to humanity a bit more convincing than Hackman did, but he is not as charming or funny. Their respective performances complement each other, broadening Luthor as a character, while each puts their own spin on him.
Among the more minor characters like Jimmy Olsen and Perry White, the recasts involve performances so spot on in imitation that there isn’t much to say about them if you had seen the previous movies. Sam Huntington is the spitting image of Marc McClure as Olsen, aside from being slightly more animated than McClure was. Frank Langella meanwhile plays White exactly as I remembered him when Jackie Cooper played him.
Brandon Routh as Superman, however, is a bit of a mixed bag. He has the right build for Superman, square jaw and everything. But, Routh’s performance as Superman is a trifle dull. He has the physicality of the character down, but not quite the personality. As Clark Kent, he is a bit better, although his imitation of Reeve’s winsome mannerisms boil down to mere mimicry. Reeve’s behavior as Kent was more charming and believable than Routh’s which is flat at times and doesn’t command as much attention.
Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane is the most transformative of all the performances in Superman Returns. Margot Kidder was more charismatic and more fun than Bosworth, but Bosworth adds a level of maturity and emotion to the role that Kidder didn’t quite capture. Of all the recasts Kate Bosworth is the least convincing as a continuation of the character in the originals, but she is better written.

The film opens with a bit of expository text saying that Superman had left Earth some time ago – later revealed to have been five years – after learning that scientists had discovered Krypton, his homeworld. He had flown off to go find it, but the movie never quite makes it clear what he intended to do when he got there. When he returns he says the planet was completely barren of life and that he truly is the last of his race. Would he have stayed if he found living Kryptonians there? Superman never says.
What makes for a point of contention with his friends and family is that he never said goodbye to anyone when he left. Lois is still angry with him and we discover that in his absence she had written an article for the Daily Planet called Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman which earned her a Pulitzer for journalism. The contents of the article are not specified other than that Lois began to feel that the Earth’s reliance on a godlike savior was not in the people of Earth’s best interest. She later expresses some regret for writing it, although she obviously keeps the Pulitzer. I know I would have.
Clark Kent, speaking for Superman, tells Lois that perhaps the reason he had not said goodbye is because it was too painful for him. I find this flimsy at best. It’s not a strong and emotionally detailed explanation and I couldn’t but wonder about his poor mother, Martha. The old woman spent five years wondering if Clark was dead and I don’t think avoiding a painful goodbye justifies putting one’s widowed mother through that.
When he comes home he finds a lot of things have happened since he was gone. Lois is with a new partner (James Marsden) and she now has a son. The revelations of what Clark had missed while he was gone suggests that Superman was mistaken in thinking that his kinship with Krypton was more important than the relationships he had on Earth. The theme is not dealt with explicitly, but these events say something about what family really means. Family is not always blood.

Luthor, meanwhile, is involved in a plot to raise a new continent from the sea where he would be its absolute ruler. That’s good old Lex for ya. After acquiring several of the same Kryptonian crystals used to build the Fortress of Solitude – Superman’s base in the North Pole – Lex wants to use them in a similar way to create a new landmass in the Atlantic. The only problem is such an event would eliminate much of the American east coast and even destroy parts of northern Africa. Naturally, Luthor doesn’t care. But the return of Superman won’t make this easy.

Superman Returns is a breath of fresh air. It’s story is solid and ends the series on a poignant note. Director Bryan Singer, who had given new life to X-Men a few years prior, salvages the Superman series from the dimwitted dreck that characterized the earlier sequels. It is certainly the second best film in the series after the first one.
It’s only weak points are the occasional pale imitations made by some of the cast and I have some reservations about its visual treatment of Superman. In the original movies when Superman was flying and saving the world he was the central focus of the camera. He soared gloriously with each shot good enough to hang on a wall. But, by 2006 Superman in flight is achieved through CGI which was still a bit primitive at the time. To avoid these problems Superman is often shot from a distance or in shadow, obscuring a clear view of him. When he flies he zips past the screen quickly instead of letting the camera remain fixed on him like in the original movies. My favorite parts of the older films were when Superman would fly toward the screen, his fist thrust forward heroically as John Williams’ classic score heightened the excitement. That is sadly lacking here most of the time and I missed it. This movie was made in a time when CGI objects would move at high speeds to disguise the fakeness of the special effects. The older filmmakers, however, didn’t balk at the matte lines and obvious super-imposures the flying scenes entailed and they were better for it.

As throwbacks go, Superman Returns is satisfying and a joy to watch. The series at the time was in sore need of revitalization and Singer delivers. Binge-watching the series has altered the experience a bit, but in 2006 this movie was like revisiting an old friend and it was a happy reunion.

Director: Bryan Singer
Writers: Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Bryan Singer
Producers: Jon Peters, Bryan Singer, Gilbert Adler, Loren Orleans (IMAX version), William Fay, Chris Lee, Scott Mednick, Thomas Tull, Stephen Jones
Cast: Brandon Routh (Superman/Clark Kent), Kate Bosworth (Lois Lane), Kevin Spacey (Lex Luthor), James Marsden (Richard White), Parker Posey (Kitty Kowalski), Frank Langella (Perry White), Sam Huntington (Jimmy Olsen), Eva Marie Saint (Martha Kent), Marlon Brando (Jor-El [archival footage])
Composer: John Ottman
Cinematographer: Newton Thomas Sigel
Editors: Elliot Graham, John Ottman