DC Universe

[James]

Aw man. Why is it so hard to make a good Superman movie? Actors were fine, and did what they could with what they had. But writing and especially directing killed this one.

Sorry Ben!

[Ben]

I was hoping for Monday, but it looks like Wednesday for me. We're going to the 5pm showing so that we don't have to see it in 3D. It's a post-conversion job, and even Snyder has said it wasn't something he thought about while filming...they just added it later. The 8:15 later is 3D only and I just don't see the point.

Even when people say "oh the 3D was great" I don't really agree...there are very little films that an added dimension really adds anything to, or has any reason to be there, and if the director even says that it was an "afterthought" then what's the point. Also, I haven't seen a post-conversion that I felt even had the slightest of merit, so the 5pm it is for me.

Don't worry, James...my expectations are under control. I'm excited but not pumped. The best Superman film, by the way, is the one I would make...

[Dacey]

I'm actually on the other side of that argument, even though I felt MoS had "average" 3-D, but in many cases I've found post conversions often look better. Look at Pirates IV. They shot the whole thing in 3-D, and it was barely noticeable. Likewise, The Amazing Spider-Man was shot in 3-D. Again, most of the time, it looked like freaking 2-D. Compare that to The Avengers and Star Trek Into Darkness. Both looked excellent, and they were post-converted.

Not that I'm saying anyone should feel the need to have to see MoS in 3-D. The conversion in this case was alright, but nothing special.

[Ben]

I think the reason post-conversion *can* look better is that its more layered than the native rig recording that information in real space. Post means having to select shots and creating the space within them so there's more room for pushing that space further. However, in my view, it doesn't always work...it adds a fake perspective.

I saw Trek Into Darkness and Iron Man Three in regular "flat" showings (I hate the description of "2D", just as with traditional animation, that suggests the images have no depth to them) and enjoyed them immensely...more so than having to wear the specs and dimming the image through The Hobbit and whatever else I saw before Christmas.

And can anyone actually remember the depth of a 3D image? Long after you've seen a film its the story and characters, framing and sound experience that you remember. You might have appreciated the 3D but no-one remembers how deep the shots were, just the shots themselves.

By the way, MOS producer Deborah Snyder recommends seeing the film flat with a Dolby Atmos track:
http://collider.com/deborah-snyder-man- ... interview/

[Dacey]

Excellent piece regarding the so-called "controversial" ending (spoilers):

http://screenrant.com/man-steel-ending- ... iscussion/

[Randall]

Saw it last night. I'll get my reaction in here before Ben comes back from seeing it to tell us what he thought. I'm guessing he'll have some real problems with it, and he'd be right.

I won't do an in-depth review, but basically I really liked it as a sci-fi, alien invasion film. My fave part was the first 20+ minutes on Krypton. As a Superman film... it doesn't really work. Wrong tone, and questionable decisions by the writer and director (certain characters' fates). However, I could almost say that I loved it, when compared to Superman Returns or Dark Knight Rises.

However, this is squarely a post-9/11 Superman, and I found it a little sad that it had to be so dark. Zimmer's typically foreboding score didn't help either. Just a few moments of levity would have helped it a great deal; but that's not the film they set out to make. For all the talk about the "S" being a symbol for hope, however, the film never made me feel too hopeful; or inspired; or happy. Just impressed, by the effects and what was really a not-bad story. (Sure, plot holes all over, I'm sure; but on a sc-fi movie level, it worked for me.)

Overall, I give it a B. I really did enjoy it, and found it an interesting take on Superman. But it's not really "my" Superman. Not whining, just sayin'.

[Ben]

Oh dear...

I have my tickets for tonight and will post my thoughts tomorrow morning. Expectations are duly lowered (even more than I had set them, since I was trying to be good and not get excited at all, but it's hard when you see more and more of it on TV).

Interesting that you didn't like DKR, Rand...I didn't mind it even though I thought it was full of holes (Nolan and Goyer are not the iron-clad writers I think everyone else thinks they are).

Someone else I know saw it at the weekend and says I won't like Superman's last third...

[James]

With lowered expectations you might be more impressed than we who went in with high ones.

[Ben]

Okay...

!!!SPOILERS AHOY!!!

Well, expectations were never that high to start. I learned that lesson on Superman Retards, when I had been watching all the weblogs and got excited because they were using Donner lore and Williams music all through them. We all knew how that turned out.

So although I got more and more excited to see this, and really liked Cavill the more I saw of him in the role, the expectations remained at a reasonable level. Rand and I have had a few emails bounced back and forth on what we were expecting, and had guessed that Lois would know about Clark's identity, and that we wouldn't see a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet until right near the end, possibly as the final shot (totally correct, as it turned out, almost down to the "welcome to the Daily Planet" line that closed the film). I/we'd guessed a few more things, too, but they were a little more minor.

But did I like it? In short, I thought it was awesome. Often stupid, and not a Superman movie, but awesome all the same.

But let me clarify: while the thing was obviously well made, there was much that I didn't feel sat right, and when I say I thought it was "awesome", I can't say I "enjoyed" it as such, but it was just an entertaining film for this day and age, and it was more "awesome" because of the epic scale and scope of the movie.

I do have some major problems with it though. It does seem that the "way to solve the Superman problem", as Goyer had it, was simply to remake the first half of Superman: The Movie and the second half of Superman II, with more than a bit of the Star Wars prequels and a slice of Smallville thrown into the mix.

I quite liked Krypton...the way the planet had been ravaged by opposing factors as well as its natural doomed fate. As I said from an early trailer, it seemed caught in pretty standard sci-fi trappings, though, design-wise. It took a few lifts from Donner's film: each Kryptonian had various emblems on their chests, which I think the 78 movie did better. Here they were more abstract (and I think too close to other signs we know: Zod's was like a scorpion, which makes some sense, but there was another that looked like the USSR, which was a little wrong to do, I thought). There was also "the Jedi Council", and we had the same kind of action from Zod and his cohorts, ending up in the same place in the Phantom Zone.

I thought this was pretty dumb: it was a shame they felt they had to repeat Zod and co since I really liked what the Animated Series did with setting up Braniac as the orchestrator of the planet's demise and thought they could have had the exact same story but with Braniac as villain, which would have suited things more anyway, as it turned out. And I hated how the Kryptonians traveled around on creatures borrowed from Star Wars or Avatar. Krypton is a technologically advanced people...they should be teleporting from place to place or moving around by hover conversion or bikey/capsule things that speed from place to place. Jumping on a winged dragon thing was not the thing to do here.

So anyway, they ship the Kryptonians off in little freezing capsule things that only last five minutes because the effect wears off when Krypton explodes! This is a problem with this storyline anyway: knowing the planet was doomed, I never saw why Jor-El wouldn't jump in there too, knowing it would survive, and then use his brain to work a way back out rather than just perish.

So...Zod is out before he was ever really in, and then spends the "next 33 years" (how does a Kryptonian know what a "year" is?) working their way to Earth to catch up with Kal-El. I didn't mind the constant jumping back from "now" to Smallville's past, since it dealt with Clark growing up but without repeating the Donner film, but it opens up the fact that so many people know he has abilities that it can't be hard to figure out he and Superman are one and the same.

As I feared, I didn't like Michael Shannon as Zod. I didn't find him scary or theatening, just shouty and, to be honest, a pretty lousy General who didn't really think out his game plan. The one moment I liked was when he explained who he was and why he was born. Turns out it wasn't his "fault", he was only doing what he'd been programmed for. Fair enough, and I think he knew he had to die, which is why he teased his heat ray on the family at the end. I don't think he really wanted to hurt them, or else he'd have just zapped 'em right off, but he knew - and had said - that either he or Kal-El would have to die, and he probably saw he didn't have a future here on Earth. Knowing this, and giving Kal-El only one option, was I think his plan, so that he could die doing what he wanted to do and in the honor of battle. It was, I thought, one of the better dialogue scenes.

I also liked Jonathan Kent's demise. Costner was great, I thought, and his silent holding his hand up to stop Clark from helping actually brought a lump to my throat. It was, I think, my favorite part of the whole thing. I'd liked all the Smallville scenes and thought the kids playing Clark were all good.

I did not think, however, that this is what would happen if Superman had come to Earth.

The whole premise of their film was how to deal with this as if it actually happened. Okay, so we can let it slide that Kal-El's ship landed without detection and the Kents took him in. I can understand him growing up and wanting to keep things secret. I get that from his decent upbringing he wants to help people. That's all cool.

But the only reason he decides to "come out" is because Zod turns up? I thought that was pretty weak. And it turned it from a Superman movie into an alien invasion sci-fi movie in which Superman was a bit of a co-star. It also turns out that because of Jor-El's codex shenanigans that Superman appears to be a "mom"!? And that was another plotline that didn't play out, meaning that, if I have got it right, there are many Kryptonian heirs floating around in Kal-El's DNA...!? Oh. Kay...

I thought the action scenes were good, if excessive. Quite why Superman waited until near the end to break Zod's neck when he had been killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people already in the many office blocks and skyscrapers that were destroyed was a mystery, just like if the girl called "Jenny" was supposed to be a Jenny Olsen. I thought Fishburne was okay as Perry (no-one called him "Perry White", I don't think) but didn't have a lot to do. Amy Adams - has she had a nose job!? Her conker seemed *very* pointed and pert throughout, especially at the beginning - was good enough but I don't think she was too sassy enough. True that she spent half the movie reacting to a big guy in a blue suit who could fly, but she didn't really make much of an impact and could have kicked some butt toward the end in the plane rather than just watch (and then fall out in the film's worst visual effects shot...really? Something so simple as that and it looked so bad?).

I liked Superman's flying and didn't have a problem, in the end, with the super-speed stuff, which seemed to work in context. There was one clear CG shot (in the office block when Zod threw him in through its side and he screeched to a halt and then started to get up) and it was quite well done: I bet no-one else spotted it and the CFX guys were slapping themselves on the shoulder, but it was a CG shot and was pretty clear. I got a but fed up with all that screeching across the various floors and along the ground too, though.

I couldn't get, if Superman cared for us, why he didn't lead Zod away from the big city? Or sort things out much earlier on so that there wasn't so much destruction? I know movies have to top the last ones, but really it got a bit silly in the amount of carnage. Yes, you can say it's a cartoon, but why did they have to pick Metropolis to set off their terra forming thingy? Surely the desert or somewhere with a more malleable surface would have been better?

I think my biggest problem with the movie was that things happened not with logic but just to provide spectacle. This was supposed to be the "this is real" take on Superman and yet it was more far-fetched than any previous take, not just restricted to the previous films. The whole Zod storyline didn't actually make sense, the whole thing with their masks and when they worked or didn't, or how they had their powers when they were technically encased in Krypton's environment...it didn't work out.

And why would Zod want to make Earth like Krypton? Surely this would wipe out their powers like it did to Superman on Zod's ship? Wouldn't Zod want to take advantage of this and be pretty-freaking powerful over us, like he wanted to in the earlier Superman films? That makes more sense! So he has to adapt to Earth's environment for a couple of hours...but after that, he can fly and do whatever the heck he wants, so it's game over for everyone. And why, if Earth's environment affects Kal-El on Zod's ship, doesn't it affect Lois when she's on it? Okay, she's either got the mask on or Jor-El's adjusted the temperature, but there's a shift in mass that isn't accounted for and she moves around quite freely.

I also had a teeny problem with the cape: they do away with the pants on the outside but they keep the cape? I didn't see the problem keeping the pants anyway: there's a way they could have done this that didn't look like Superman was wearing a belt buckle but no belt. He should have had some kind of more noticeable belt or we should have at least seen how the suit comes on and off, using the buckle as some kind of "activator". There was no point of it being there otherwise and, when you think about it, no reason for him to have a cape. His Dad's suit didn't have a cape: why does he have one? Who thought it was a good idea? Couldn't we have had Martha add it as a "touch" when she saw the suit and made her comment? "Hmm...needs something more", to which she makes/gives him the cape made from the blanket in which he was wrapped from the space capsule? Would have made a nice point, him having his suit from Krypton, but an extra finishing touch from his Earth parents. It would also explain - when Superman's suit is supposed to be as indestructible as he is and remain clean at all times - why the hem of it was yellow and dusty as anything in the desert scenes...most annoying!

What else, what else...? Oh yes, Hans Zimmer's freakin' DRUMS. Oh dear...it was either a piano (recalling the old United Artists logo theme) or the thump-thump-thumping of those darned drums, throughout THE ENTIRE PICTURE. I'd gotten quite used to the music in the past couple of weeks, and have listened to a lot of it online, but I held off buying the CD until hearing it in the film. Wow...so repetitive! Over and over again with the drums! Or the same soft piano in the smaller moments. What a lack of melody, theme or structure...in some strange way it did its job, but it's a terrible Superman score. While it may well work for this story, I can't see how he can expand that for the second film, which looks like it will be a lot lighter and more like the Superman we know. There was none of the "anticipation" that we expect from all Superman lore, and which Williams' strings ("dun, dun-dun...") always had us getting excited for (I'm not asking for Williams score on the picture here; I'm suggesting that Zimmer has not provided a good *Superman* score).

Actually, the lack of humor was a big thing for me. There were a couple of laughs (the truck, a line or two, the Jon Peters Entertainment logo) but overall this was a dour movie. Thankfully, Cavill kept it fairly light and I thought at times looked just like Chris Reeve and Tom Welling rolled into one. At least a handful of shots showed us what it could have been like with Reeve in a modern Superman movie with all the bells and whistles effects, while the last shot of Clark at the Planet gave a glimpse at what it might have been like with Welling in the role. All would have worked, but Cavill is a great choice, I think, and I think will carry the next film along into a more traditional direction.

Ultimately, I'm disappointed that their answer seems to have been to just lump Superman: The Movie and Superman II into one film. It's repeating an old (and originally non-comic canon) villain and storyline, and I don't think nailed the "what if this really happened" angle. At. All. The military stuff was surprisingly all pretty low-key, leaving us with - as Rand said - more of a sci-fi movie. The citizens of Metropolis didn't seem that bothered either, all staying at their desks and watching things on the news while blocks around them fell to the ground.

I did like how Superman would zoom in to save someone at the last second in traditional style, but they pulled the same trick too many times, and the lack of a Superman fanfare hurt those moments to feel triumphant...they just seemed to happen, like so much of the movie.

That all said - and I'm sure more will come back to me, or I'll wonder why I didn't mention such and such the second I hit submit - I did think the film was an experience. It's truly a big-screen, epic movie that has its heart in the right place, and I think they probably made the best film this particular team could.

But no...it's not a great Superman movie. It's a big, epic, alien invasion science fiction film in which Superman is here to save the world, but it does so - ironically - at the expense of being able to be taken seriously and forgoes the very aim of setting things in our real world. Yeah, so it's cool to see Superman whacking the stuff out out of Zod, but it's done without much affect to either Zod, Superman or anyone other than a ton of CGI buildings. Where, in this supposedly real world, are the real world effects of something like this?

It's epic, but not an epic fail. But it doesn't really achieve any of the aims that the filmmakers set out to do either. It is entertaining, even though I didn't "enjoy" it. I'll likely get the Blu-ray and enjoy it more, and at least I didn't come out of the theatre hating the thing.

I'm not sure if they got more right with it than wrong, but there are good elements here that could have made for a really great Superman movie, not just a passably good one.

[Dacey]

So...after reading all of Ben's thoughts...I'm somehow not sure how exactly he felt about the movie.

[Ben]

Well, that's the thing...I'm not so sure either!

I kind of liked it, I did think it was "awesome" in execution. I thought it was an experience, and yet I had so many problems with it. I *didn't* think it was crap, though, if that helps...!?

[James]

Another guy I read online said "it was a great movie and an awful Superman movie"!

[Ben]

not a Superman movie, but awesome all the same

Yep!

[Randall]

Looks like we felt much the same. I've been telling people it was an "A" sci-fi movie, and a "C-" Superman movie.

The dour tone and the oppressive music kept it from feeling like classic Superman. But then, this is a different take altogether, even though more was kept than was lost, really.

I can forgive a lot of the (generally valid) criticism people have of the film, but there are two things that were big departures and that prevent me from loving the film outright:
- Pa Kent's attitude, borne of fear and paranoia, may have been "true to life" in a post 9-11 world, but this was a very different Pa Kent than what we've seen before. It's a valid interpretation, but it is certainly new. And not really for the better in my view.
- Superman killing Zod in such a brutal fashion was, again, actually understandable in context, but a big departure all the same. Okay, he kinda offed the Zone criminals in Superman II, but... snapping someone's neck is so... un-Supermanny.

However, I'm feeling surprisingly nearly-OK with it all. I actually do appreciate that they tried some new things, and overall it was an interesting way to go. I do feel like a few good things were lost in the transition, but... I can deal with it. Nothing will ever replace Superman The Movie in my heart, so I feel alright that this one didn't even come close.

I even think I'll like it more over time. But it's not "classic Superman" by a long shot. It is, however, an interesting new version. I liked Krypton, I liked Lois being in on the secret all along, and I liked the "wandering guardian angel" angle. And I'll be excited to see where they take things in the next one, where we see something closer to classic Clark.

As a sidebar, this is amost an opposite situation to Smallville, where much of the mythology was changed, but the heart of the character (and certianly Pa Kent's) was left intact. In a way, Smallville prepared me to accept some radical changes while still leaving enough to appreciate.

[James]

Read another recent review with a great realization for what felt wrong about this film. The Man of Steel didn't win or save the day. Zod and Superman's battle kills half a million people, causes billions in damages, and in the end Superman had to do something completely out of character to end it. Everyone lost.

And a thought that just crossed my mind about that neck-breakiing ending. A lot of people justifying it saying he had to do what he had to do. If this were real life, yes that'd be true. But for a Superman movie it almost felt lazy and definitely unsatisfying. It'd be like at the end of an epic battle with the Joker, Batman picking up a dropped gun and shooting him in the face.

BTW - Disaster expert calculates damages from battle:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jordanzakarin/m ... h-analysis