Zack Snyder's Meh of Steel

By Dan Hagen

I know, I know, it sounds ludicrous to charge a Superman film with implausibility, but my problem with Man of Steel is psychological implausibility.

Art by Kevin Eslinger

As my friend Mary Maddox said, if a film is physically impossible, it’s doubly important that it be psychologically plausible. And here, at certain points, characters act out of character in ways that shatter the mood.

The other things that break here are buildings. Lots of them. Maybe half of them on Earth for all I know. No shortage of action, boy, and people seem to shrug off the deaths of what must be hundreds of thousands without a backward glance. In "Superman II," the direct inspiration for this film, Superman feigns cowardice in order specifically to AVOID wrecking Metropolis in his battle with Zod. Here, Superman and Zod display a video gamer's indifference to the thousands of people they crush.
I'm afraid the world would never trust Superman after the events in this film. He and his race have just caused the destruction of about half the planet, something the crowd shrugs off to give the obligatory Superman cheer. Like much in the film, it is remarkably perfunctory and unconvincing. 
Weirdly for a Superman movie, the film is even short on effective rescue fantasy. Compare it to the first Iron Man movie, where the villager has been torn away from his son and is about to be shot on the spot by terrorists. Iron Man plummets from the sky, and the audience cheers. Where is that scene?

The movie has a somewhat jarring, worshipful level of military hardware in it. The vibe is creepy. Also, as my friend Jerry Sheehan pointed out, all the decisions about the Earth's fate are made by generals. Not even a nod to civilian control of the military in a democratic society. So much for "the American way." The National Guard got good product placement value for its money.
And I hate the washed-out gray-blue color palette. You keep expecting Batman to show up instead of Superman. Composer Hans Zimmer decided to do the soundtrack without trumpets — a bold choice, and a sadly ho-hum one. John Williams cannot be equaled.

The idea of telling Superman’s story in a series of flashbacks was a mistake. We need a linear storyline here so we can develop full empathy for the frightened boy who is Clark Kent. His vulnerability then emotionally justifies his power later for the audience. We absolutely must have that human connection before we get to the superhuman mayhem. I should not be checking my watch in a Superman film.
The film’s story is similar to Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel “Gladiator” about Hugo Danner, a young alienated superhuman who travels the world trying to figure out his purpose in life. Jerry Siegel was heavily influenced by that book when he created Superman.

Superman’s alien nature is underlined six times in red in this movie, putting him up against the 21^st century American military-industrial complex — a point that makes the movie ring true in a dark contemporary way. 

But the film lost me, finally and forever, early on. Clark Kent would NEVER have let his beloved foster father die in a tornado just to preserve his secret. That's the phoniest bit of plot-driven characterization I've seen in a long while. 
You see, the essence of Superman's character is to be a compassionate rescuer of people in dire circumstances. His empathy and ethics do not permit him to leave even strangers in fatal peril if he can help it. So a Superman who refuses to save someone he loves from certain death in order to protect himself is no Superman.
Granted, fictional characters have no fixed biographical identities. But they do have an aesthetic essence that can be violated, as Superman's was  here. And by the way, Martha Kent, having had the family home she's lived in for decades smashed to pieces by space criminals, would not merely shrug and say, "It's just stuff." I admire stoicism, but let's try to keep it within the bounds of human nature. Donner's Superman won us at the moment that young Clark cried out, "All those things I can do. All those powers, and I couldn't even save him." This film's answer is, "I could have saved him, but I chose not to."
And, no, Superman DID NOT kill Zod at the end of "Superman II," and supporters of inferior "Man of Steel" movie need to stop saying that. This deleted scene from “Superman II” reveals that the villains were all arrested by the "arctic police." 

Jerry added, "And let's not forget that this Superman appears at times incapable of independent thought ... that is he basically defaults to whatever the closest 'old man' tells him to do. I would have loved the tornado scene if he had rescued his father which would have been the plot moment at which he had to 'disappear' from people who knew him." Jerry's idea is a good one, and it would have worked perfectly in the linear plot line that his film so badly needed. As it is, his poignant decision to wander the world was a completely lost dramatic opportunity. 
The best performances are by Kevin Costner as Pa Kent and Russell Crowe as Jor-El, two actors strong enough to lift any kind of material. Henry Cavill absolutely looks the part of Superman, and I have no particular problem with Amy Adams as Lois Lane. But Richard Donner spoiled us there with the romance he built into the 1978 film. We keep expecting a spark of charm and longing to fly between them, and it doesn’t.

One advantage this Superman film has over all others is that for the first time, Kryptonians move the way we have always expected them to move, the way they logically should move — with breathtaking speed and frightening power. But the writing is sometimes remarkably amateurish. Lois tells her editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) "I'm a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist." I guess he didn't know. Maybe I'd better tell my faculty colleagues, "Look here, I'm an journalism professor at a midwestern public university!" Jimmy Olsen has apparently been turned into "Jenny" Olsen, a meaningless change that substitutes or originality. A character for whom you can't find a use doesn't become useful with a sex change.

There's nothing very original about the overall plot, either. It echoes not only "Superman II," but even an unproduced, Jackson-Gillis penned 1957 movie "Superman and the Secret Planet" in which surviving Kryptonian criminals attack Earth and are opposed by Superman George Reeves. "Krypton" means "secret," of course.
Finally, Superman should not have been pushed into the nasty situation of being forced to brutally kill the villain. In other words, the movie went out of its way to make Superman a character who kills and/or lets people die. A neck-snapping, militarized Superman the National Guard ad people can love. Disgusting. As Andrew Wheeler writes in his excellent essay, “That is a revealing choice. It tells us that director Zack Snyder and writer David Goyer wanted to establish that there are times when killing is necessary, even for Superman. They believed that this bleak message is the right one to convey using one of the most moral characters in modern fiction.

“Can Superman kill? You can contrive a situation in which he has to; it has been done before. Yet I think most people would place the character at the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to the preservation of life. The moment he absolutely has to end one life to save another should carry so much weight that the story contorts to serve it. I don't think Goyer and Snyder earned that moment in Man of Steel. You may disagree.

“Either way, the choice is troubling, as the movie neglects to send any other moral message. This is not a movie about truth, or justice, or heroism, or sacrifice, or hope.” Can't we have one hero who doesn't break people's necks in this ugly 21st century society of ours? Killing is not the solution to everything, and it should not be suggested to children that it is. Killing is not the solution to much at all, something that an advanced being from Krypton would already know. But you'd never know it from all the promiscuous, gleeful and/or casually indifferent "heroic" killing in 21st century Hollywood movies. I always get the feeling that we are being softened up by 21^st century popular culture, in a dozen ways simultaneously, to regard human life as cheap, if not valueless.

The pieces of the familiar Superman mythology don’t all fall into place until the very end of this film, along with the film's best line ("Welcome to the Planet.") That means that the next film is the one I really want to see. As I told Matt Mattingly, I’m hoping this situation will parallel that of the first two Star Trek films, which didn’t really soar until the sequel.
In the meantime, as someone once sagely observed, Superman is invulnerable. He can survive anything, even bad writing.

 

Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent and Dylan Sprayberry as young Clark Kent: "Just let me die, kid."