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