Man of Steel (2013)
Directed by Zack Snyder
A young boy learns that he has extraordinary powers and is not of this earth. As a young man, he journeys to discover where he came from and what he was sent here to do. But the hero in him must emerge if he is to save the world from annihilation and become the symbol of hope for all mankind.
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What critics say influenced Man of Steel
The art direction nods to H.R. Giger’s designs for “Alien,” but the colors are leaden, and so is the pacing.
Where the red-booted one’s last bigscreen appearance, Bryan Singer’s 2006 “Superman Returns,” was conceived as a mash note to Richard Donner’s iconic 1978 “Superman,” Snyder, Goyer and Nolan (who also shares a story credit) labor to distance “Man of Steel” from those precursors, starting with a Krypton that looks less like an ice castle in the sky than a grayer, grimier version of “Avatar’s” Pandora (by way of “Alien”).
Baby Kal-El is sent to Earth in a rocket — the retro-futuristic designs owe a tremendous debt to “Alien’’ — as his parents die in the destruction of Krypton, though the spirit of Jor-El is brought back for more expository curtain calls than the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
(But H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist behind the Alien designs, should take a look - and then call his lawyer.)
It opens on Planet Krypton, an ornately designed landscape of rock and lasers that resembles what would happen if the sets from the Matrix movies had a baby with the ones from Alien.
It has wobbly handheld camerawork signifying "authenticity," a glum color palette, skyline-shattering super-fights, hardware whose designs crib from " Alien ," " Dune ", " Independence Day " and Spielberg's " War of the Worlds ," and a detailed mythology that can plug into an expansive, Marvel-style "universe."
Given all the film’s Christ references (Superman is 33 years old when he takes on his superhero identity, and at one point he is framed with a stained glass portrait of Jesus over his shoulder), the scene makes one think of The Last Temptation of Christ and how Nikos Kazantzakis imagined Jesus’s simultaneous humanity and divinity as a source of unrelenting torment.
That also means that the tone of the movie is akin to The Last Temptation of Christ, and a little more funereal than most.
He may be the first comic-book superhero in film who suffers the same doubts about his divine humanity as Jesus does in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ and the controversial 1988 movie made from it.
Michael Bay's third Transformers movie brazenly evoked 9/11, and one action movie after another has done the same.
Without the wit, winks, flirtation and old-fashioned sentiment of the “Truth, justice and the American way” take on the character, all Henry Cavill (“Immortals”) has to do is mix it up in a lot of “Transformers” inspired brawls with armored-plated aliens and occasionally agonize over it all.
That’s partially because he has to participate in a giant action climax that uncomfortably recalls the final battle in Michael Bay’s third Transformers movie.
The picture borrows imagery from movies much better ( The Matrix , for one) and not much worse (the Transformers films).
The moral issue is certainly perplexing, as all those falling buildings are likely killing thousands of people, none of whom are given even a second thought, but there is also the issue of artistic banality: So many modern action films end in this manner, from Michael Bay’s deadening Transformers movies to Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012), that the impact of entire city blocks being turned into rubble is virtually nonexistent.
The goal from the studio and filmmakers was clearly to emulate the gritty, more realistic style of Christopher Nolan's masterful " The Dark Knight ," but without that picture's depth of character and classical storytelling prowess it more accurately resembles the joyless, destructive freneticism of Michael Bay's mechanical (in all senses of the term) " Transformers " series.
But Jonathan instructs him to resist the urge, and this advice is largely what leads the adult Clark (now played by Henry Cavill) to wander the backroads with no real purpose, a bearded laborer who takes any job he can find (these scenes, combined with Clark's shaggy whiskers, bring to mind Hugh Jackman's wanderings in X-Men and X-Men Origins: Wolverine).
The “X-Men” and the “Dark Knight” sagas have trod this territory, but it’s new for the cinematic “Supermans,” at least to this degree.
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But even such yarns as The Avengers and the Iron Man trio, with all their nods toward world destruction and terrorists (or supervillains) seeking to curtail our freedoms, exhibit a sense of joy in the filmmaking, while the sagas that do wallow in the nihilism, like Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, have enough gravitas and dramatic heft to warrant such treatment.
It's as if the filmmakers want to reassure young male viewers accustomed to the glib swagger of " Iron Man " and the dire self-pity of Nolan's Batman trilogy that Superman is in the same wheelhouse.
“Man of Steel” provides the summer of 2013 with a stoic counterpoint to the brash wittiness of Robert Downey Jr.’s “Iron Man.”
Superman's latest revamp, courtesy of "300" director Zack Snyder, helps wash away memories of DC's cosmic misstep "Green Lantern" in 2011.Though Superman's faster than a speeding bullet, "Man of Steel" lags behind Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Joss Whedon's "The Avengers" (2012) and several others (Jon Favreau's "Iron Man" and Tim Burton's "Batman" come to mind) in the growing library of superhero cinema.Even those who have never touched a comic book likely know Superman's origin by now.
Crowe, Costner and the diabolical Shannon (who seems to be channeling his own version of the Ricardo Montalban role in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”) are by far the best things about the movie, managing to seem like recognizable humanoid types in this arid landscape.
Recall Sting in David Lynch’s Dune as far as the tone and, no less, acting-to-project quality ratio go and a concept should begin to click.
There are times when his rivalry with Clark/Superman recalls the tension between Hawkeye and Magua in Michael Mann's " The Last of the Mohicans ," in that the villain is only a villain if you're looking at him through the eyes of the people he's steamrolling.
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Seriously, is there some rule I don’t know about where every superhero movie has to have a scene of the hero flying into the mouth of a giant laser pointed at Earth? Look, Drunk Randy Quaid in Independence Day is the best that scene’s ever going to get, so stop trying.
The alien invasion-heavy result is like “Independence Day” in a cape, though at least its hero doesn’t get Green Lantern-ized.
On the other hand, it's not good, because the sci-fi feel has been overly influenced by the likes of Independence Day and Transformers.
You get War of the Worlds and Independence Day and lots of noise and clutter — but never the simple charm of the original comic by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster or the faintly self-abashed handsomeness of Christopher Reeve.
It has wobbly handheld camerawork signifying "authenticity," a glum color palette, skyline-shattering super-fights, hardware whose designs crib from " Alien ," " Dune ", " Independence Day " and Spielberg's " War of the Worlds ," and a detailed mythology that can plug into an expansive, Marvel-style "universe."
Man of Steel is an audacious undertaking, a stylistic and thematic mash-up of Avatar, The Matrix, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Independence Day, The Thing, Thor, and (especially) Bryan Singer's X-Men films.
Snyder puts together a finale more cataclysmic than Iron Man 3 , Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Marvel’s The Avengers combined in terms of wholesale destruction and massive property damage.
Director of photography Amir Mokri ("Fast & Furious," "Transformers: Dark of the Moon") certainly makes Cavill look good, but there's so much artificiality flying around the screen, it's distracting, glowing blue lights on ships calling more attention to themselves than highlighting the craft as intended.
I know some of "Steel" was shot in Chicago, Mr. Snyder, but you don't have to compete with "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."
It has a villain resembling Khan of "Star Trek into Darkness" in General Zod; the turn-cities-to-rubble battle scenes of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"; the father-son dynamic and otherworldly architecture of "Thor"; a learn-to-fly scene similar to the rooftop web slinging in "Spider-Man"; and an invasion from the sky similar to "The Avengers."
By then, the catastrophic events that have just been excessively detailed have been tidily forgotten about.There is no denying that "Man of Steel" is well-shot (if too dreary for its own good) by cinematographer Amir Mokri (2011's " Transformers: Dark of the Moon "), and the music score by Hans Zimmer (2012's " The Dark Knight Rises ") pulse-poundingly lives up to the picture's epic girth.