Almost Super: MAN OF STEEL

There are superheroes I enjoy more as characters, but none I enjoy more as resonant myth than Superman. He is an icon, a titan, a God. He’s Greek myth, Messianic, a Shakespearean conflicted hero, a piece of Americana and refutation of it. He’s not merely a superhero; he’s the superhero. And so, like the rarified company in which this character can be placed, his story is one worth retelling and one that can survive a bad telling. In Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman and its first sequel, a light touch to the myth was sunny and inspiring in its classically endearing earnestness that flirts with corniness without giving over to it. By the time the blue-suited, red-caped hero flew back to the silver screen care of Bryan Singer in the retro-modern stylings of 2006’s Superman Returns, he was suffused with regret and longing in a film that’s both mature and lyrical. Now, with Man of Steel, he’s back, this time in the hands of Zack Snyder, director of 300 and Watchmen. He’s a generally talented visualist who ramps up the surface spectacle and brings admirable weight to the myth before sinking into the same lumbering traps that so many modern blockbusters settle for.

It starts, as it must, with the birth of Kal-El, last son of Krypton, born in the final days of his planet’s existence. His father (Russell Crowe) and mother (Ayelet Zurer) send him away in an escape pod that crashes on Earth. There, the yellow sun and rich atmosphere give the alien, who to all appearances looks human, powers of strength, flight, and speed, among other superhuman feats. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. From a distance you just might mistake him for a bird or a plane. Nope. He’s Superman. But not right away. The script by David S. Goyer, from a story he co-created with Dark Knight auteur Christopher Nolan, cuts between a lost young man searching for evidence of his identity and a little boy scared of what these strange abilities mean for his life with his adoptive parents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). In the fractured chronology, we catch glimpses of important moments – discovering his powers, saving people, wrestling with his sense of purpose – building towards the crescendo that is the unveiling of the man we’ve been waiting to see.

I find the Superman origin so deeply moving and archetypically resonant that the glimmering, artful opening passages of Man of Steel are an often stirring experience. Snyder and his team emphasize the alien in the story, focusing on what isolates Clark Kent in the days before his Superman identity. As a young boy his powers are strange. He’s not sure to what use, if any, he should put them. They scare him.  As the origin story starts to fade, villains, in the form of exiled evil Kryptonians led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) arrive on Earth demanding to meet Kal-El or else. Between an identity crisis on a galactic scale and otherworldly villains, this is less a superhero movie as we’ve come to understand them, more an alien invasion space opera, dark, complicated, and endlessly explaining itself. Krypton’s a fantasy world (like something out of Star Wars or John Carter) brought into conflict with our world and Superman must choose which to save. It should be a real struggle, but the film makes it awfully clear for the man which way to go. He doesn’t have to decide to be a hero; the decision is forced upon him, no matter how heavily Snyder underlines the Gethsemane moment.

The film is expertly cast and beautifully shot – though the action is sometimes barely contained by the frame – full of the story beats one would want out of a Superman movie. It purports to tell the story of Superman, but eventually it becomes clear that it has skipped out on deeper characterization. As Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman Henry Cavill fits the suit and fills the angst, but he’s otherwise a symbol. It’s a demanding, unforgiving task and he handles it well. In the supporting cast, great actors show up in roles we recognize and the film’s attempt to flesh them out mostly stops there. Amy Adams plays Lois Lane. Cultural osmosis tells us she’s a smart, capable, Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter at the Daily Planet and the movie follows suit. As expected, she takes an interest in this Superman story. Her tough-but-kind editor is Perry White, played by Laurence Fishburne, so wonderful you wish he had something more substantial to contribute to the plot. There’s endless fatherly gravitas from both Crowe and Costner (his casting alone causes the farm scenes to play off of Field of Dreams echoes) and Lane is a beacon of maternal warmth. Shannon, all crazy-eyed, gargling intensity with each barked shout, makes for a good hateful villain.

And then it all goes to pieces with an extended action set piece that grows more weightless and small the bigger, more destructive and depressingly weighty it becomes. Snyder spends much time lingering on skyscrapers tumbling in cringe-worthy bouts of collateral damage. Evenly matched superpowered beings slug it out around and, more often, through buildings of all shapes and sizes for extended periods of time, zipping away while debris falls and massive structures collapse. There’s such an overpowering sense of seriousness that we can’t even luxuriate in the serious silliness of it all, the spandex, scene-chewing mythos that should be able to carry us through. Instead we have to pretend yet another sequence of violence erupting around a world-ending alien laser beam shooting into the sky in the center of a cityscape is something we haven’t seen twice a summer for half a decade.

The film is both too much and not enough. I loved seeing Superman on the big screen again, but found myself wishing it could have been in a film that did more than satisfy the basic demands of a summer blockbuster: percussive score, excessive property damage, recognizable symbols, muddled ideology, self-seriousness. Sitting through the protracted climax, it all felt so endless. But by the time the credits rolled I found myself thinking, “That’s it?” After over two-and-a-half hours, I realized I knew the characters, but I barely knew these characters. It’s a film that plays with iconography and summons all the best that Superman can offer, before leaving it thin and pushing it aside to give us a big, repetitive superpower slugfest that’s just like any other grim, grey blockbuster conclusion. Maybe they’re saving the really inspiring stuff for the sequel.

Angels & Demons (2009)

There’s an entertaining thriller somewhere within Angels & Demons, but it’s hidden behind a creaky pace. Tom Hanks is back, looking unusually exhausted and once again without his charisma, as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist (ha!) who cracked the DaVinci Code. This time he has to stop a plot to destroy the Vatican. The movie is helped by the presence of a literal ticking-bomb scenario but why, then, does everything seem to happen at such a sleepy rate? The movie is intermittently thrilling but never really involving or frightening. By the time the movie turns splendidly pulpy in the last act, it’s too late.

There’s a solid cast of supporting characters. If there's one sure way to liven up a dull B-movie, it has to be: hire European character actors. Ewan McGregor and Armin Mueller-Stahl play officials of the Catholic Church who billow through the ornate cathedrals and archways with a grand sense of purpose and grave portentousness. Stellan Skarsgard is also on hand to huff and puff as head of security and Ayelet Zurer - as a bioentanglement physicist (double ha!) - gets to stand in the background of many scenes (sometimes she even gets to say something). On the whole, this movie is less ponderous and pretentious than DaVinci Code, which leads me to assume that director Ron Howard realized that, despite the high gross, all the people who found the first film a little on the stuffy side were correct. But Mr. Howard has not swung far enough the other way. This time, instead of quietly murmuring monologues of pseudo-historical hogwash, the characters shout it or gasp it while racing through Rome but it’s just as repetitive as the first film. “Blah blah blah cathedral! Blah blah blah statue!” Repeat. The film also helpfully reminds us of major plot points regularly, for the convenience of those who have nodded off between murders.

Speaking of murders, the movie manages to be quite bloodthirsty and the MPAA ratings board has had no qualms about giving the film a PG-13 despite lingering upon brandings, rats gnawing a fresh corpse, one bloody slit throat, and, oh yes, a delightful scene in which a man with a chest wound is given CPR that causes a spurt of blood to soak the face of our hero. And yet Slumdog Millionaire received an R? It would be one thing if the carnage here served a fun, fast plot but it's merely a sad attempt to liven up some dusty proceedings.

In the face of all that brutality, it’s a shock to find that the movie goes soft in other aspects. There’s a legitimate conversation to be had about the respective roles that science and religion play in modern life, and perhaps a summer blockbuster is not the appropriate place to have it, but this movie pays lip service to grander ideas, uses them to fuel its plot, but is never honest about the conflict or lack thereof. I can understand not taking sides so as not to offend any member of the audience, but Ron Howard, and his writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, downplay both sides to such an extent that a member of the audience could be forgiven for assuming that neither side has any point at all. Though such intellectual dishonesty has long marred all movies focus-grouped beyond the point of making any statements about anything, it’s rare to stumble upon one that, if thought through, has the capacity to make one question the basic meaning of life. If both science and faith are wrong, where does that leave us? It’s a good thing that no one goes to these kinds of movies looking for answers to life’s big questions (I hope).

Grotesqueries and hypocrisies aside, the movie manages several scenes of competent thrills and spills amongst some gorgeous production design. Mostly taking place at nightfall, the characters run and stalk through settings choked with atmosphere: cobwebbed caverns and shadowy passageways with dramatic lighting (and dramatic camerawork) accentuate the beautiful architecture of the city. The plot is appropriately twisty and the last act, as previously hinted, goes pleasantly insane with some last minute twists, some Vatican backstabbing and skullduggery, an act of self-martyrdom, and one very large explosion. It’s too bad it takes so long to get there. There’s a fun summer movie to be had at times, and if you’re forced to see it, there are certainly worse ways to spend two conspiracy-minded hours (see, or rather, don't: National Treasure or The DaVinci Code). I just wish someone had been let into the editing room to shave thirty to forty minutes off this thing to make it sail past its tepid attempts to tackle serious topics and get us even faster to the fun.