Man of Steel - film review

Fans will love the fact that Zack Snyder’s reboot is so respectful and that Henry Cavill is a superhero star 
1/3
16 June 2013

Superheroes are fantasies of invulnerability, even more than they are fantasies of omnipotence. They’re a dream of not being hurtable, a dream we have because we are all so easily injured. It’s difficult now to watch the classic Superman films starring Christopher Reeve as the invincible hero without remembering what happened to him.

In May 1995, while showjumping, Reeve’s horse checked at a fence and he fell off. Somehow the reins tied his hands together and he landed straight on his head and crushed his first two neck vertebrae so badly that his skull and spine were no longer connected. Despite his determination to recover and heroic campaigning on behalf of those with spinal injuries, he remained almost completely paralysed and died of septicaemia, leading to a heart attack, in 2004, aged 52.

There are no men of steel, much as we might as children love to dream otherwise, and there’s a pretty complete disconnect too between film reviewers, wearied by the unstoppable flow of superheroes over the past few years, and the fanbase. At the press screening of this treat, where the nations’ reviewers were gathered in a single sitting, there was a notable air of weariness, even depression, because these critics know from experience that anything less than wild enthusiasm enrages the fans and leads to demands for their dismissal, or worse, being posted.

There isn’t really any grown-up way of subscribing to the superhero ethos but it’s not very politic to observe time and again that these movies must be great fun for 12-year-olds either. What to do? Most reviewers find what interest they can in the earlier part of the film, noting how it plays on the familiar story and then just throw up their hands when it comes to the biffing — but the biffing is ultimately the point of the film for the fans.

Man of Steel, then, is the Superman origins story, rebooted under another name. Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) directs and Christopher Nolan (the Batman trilogy, Inception) co-produces, so this is the business in terms of pure spectacle. It’s flashy, loud and much more science-fictiony, even war-of-the-worldsy, in feel than previous superhero movies. It takes itself completely seriously, which is what the fans have always wanted, and it’s going to be a box office smash.

You know the basics? The planet Krypton is dying. Formidable scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe, ever so grave but still up to a good bit of whacking) dispatches his baby boy Kal-El to Earth to save his life, despite the raging opposition of General Zod (Michael Shannon, glaring horribly under a tufty pepper and salt fringe). “He’ll be an outcast and a freak,” his mother worries. “No, he’ll be a god to them,” Jor-El tells her.

Kal is brought up as Clark Kent by a kindly Kansas couple (Kevin Costner, convincingly blue-collar, and Diane Lane), who live on a lovely old farm, filmed as an idyllic vision of America’s rural past, straight out of Norman Rockwell or possibly Terrence Malick, if there’s any difference.

At school one day, young Clark freaks out when his X-ray vision overwhelms him — but Mom talks him down and Dad warns him against revealing his miraculous powers too soon. “You have to keep this side of yourself a secret,” he advises, the script by David S Goyer not eschewing the obvious.

Clark becomes a bit of an aimless drifter, troubled about his identity, only occasionally rescuing people in deadly peril, until one day another ancient Krypton vessel is discovered deep in the ice and its technology allows Kal’s real dad to appear to him, rather wordily explain his origins and kit him out in the red cape and boots, and a scaly jumpsuit, but sadly not the emphatic scarlet pants toted by Reeve.

The discovery also brings him into contact with the intrepid, indeed Pulitzer-winning, reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams, extraordinarily pert-nosed but otherwise not much developed as a character).

Unfortunately, activating the spaceship attracts the attention of General Zod, who arrives with his henchmen in a craft that looks like a very large Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, and demands the Earth surrender Superman or else. It’s a quandary for Kal. “Zod can’t be trusted — the trouble is, I’m not sure the people of Earth can either,” our hero muses, summing up his problems concisely.

As Superman, Henry Cavill (30, Jersey-born, Stowe-educated, the Duke of Suffolk in The Tudors, otherwise not much seen before) is pretty fetching — a touch wooden, perhaps — but in a man of steel that rates as sensitivity. He certainly has the most amazingly impressive, apparently genuine and not prosthetically enhanced torso, alas, seen properly just the once, so don’t blink. He’ll be back, for sure.

Man of Steel looks different from other superhero adventures, being filmed close-up from dramatic angles, often from handheld cameras — which, on the downside, means the 3D is retrofitted and inconsequential. It has some great alien tech design, drawing on trilobites and other creepy fossils, and there’s enough crashing through buildings, explosions and general zooming about to satisfy the most demanding fan and sate anybody less committed.

Although there’s plenty of military hardware in this film, it soon becomes apparent that the real contest must be between Superman and Zod and their main form of combat emerges as charging at each other at top speed and then ricocheting off, crashing right through the city’s skyscrapers (the massive destruction wrought here is again distinctively post 9/11, Hollywood now freely drawing on that imagery).

Once it has become clear that Superman can’t be harmed by any amount of bashing, and that these fights are all CGI anyway, the titanic biffings become numbing. Even as escapist fantasy, they cease to compel. Film-makers can now give us more or less convincing spectacle on a scale that just wasn’t possible when Christopher Reeve was pretending to fly through the air. But we still need a story we can believe in, they forget.

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