It's a bird! It's a plane! Oh, wait, it's just some guy. And a flock of spoilers.
When I went to see
Man of Steel the other night, I made the same mistake I've made with every blockbuster I've seen the last few years: I believed the trailer and harbored the faint hope that I would leave the theater not feeling cranky at the current state of storytelling. Alas, it was not to be. To be fair, I should have known better. I've seen this movie before. Which is a shame, because I was really hoping to see a Superman movie this time.
Frankly, we've all seen this movie before over the last few summers. It has the same metal ships, tentacles and robots menacing the hero, the same kind of gritty debris and explosions, the same kinds of plot holes, the same cardboard thin characters, the same disconnected scenes, the same lack of reasons to care about much of anything going on on screen. This is a problem endemic in the industry right now, so it's hardly to fair to single out Man of Steel in this regard. To be fair, I was expecting some of this anyway, but it's not really why I didn't like the movie. I didn't like the movie because, in their rush to reinvent superman with as much spectacle as possible, they abandoned the core principles of the character. It's a great movie about people getting punched, but it's not a great Superman movie.
It starts well enough, with Jor-El on Krypton. The core story here is still the same, but this is probably the most interesting interpretation of Krypton I've ever seen visually (including Kelex!!) and sets up the most interesting plot elements in the story, although even then it's not super deep. The basic rivalry between Zod and Jor-El is not terrible (although there are nits that could be picked), and I like that Zod, while the typical movie jerk, is at least a typical movie jerk genuinely attempting to save his culture. It's shortly after baby Kal arrives on Earth that the movie starts to go off the rails for me.
Skipping 33 years into the future, we find Kal saving an oil rig crew quite heroically when the fishing ship he's working on happens by. This seems to bode well for the kind of man he'll be in the future. Alas. His next job, after swimming to shore, is working at a diner, where he backs down from a bully for fear of betraying his secret, and takes his revenge by trashing the guys logging truck with super-strength. This was my "uh-oh" moment. For a 33-year-old, that's not so awesome. I don't usually look up to people who "win" arguments by slashing the tires of people they don't like when no one is looking. To be fair, similar scenes played out in Smallville and Superman 2, but it doesn't really fit there, either. And at least in Smallville, Clark has the excuse of being a teenager.
The problem, as we've been learning in a series of childhood flashbacks, is that in this universe, Jonathan Kent doesn't have quite the moral center he does in his other incarnations. It seems all right at first, right up until good ol' Pa Kent mentions that Clark should maybe have let his classmates die rather than reveal his secret. And becomes utter bullshit when his father insists his invulnerable son take shelter under an overpass while his vulnerable father rescues the family dog. And when this predictably goes awry, waves him off, in an effort to teach him that secrets and personal convenience are preferable to doing the right thing. Which is a lesson so well learned, that Clark wanders the world aimlessly, with no apparent sense of purpose or responsibility to use his gifts to help people. Although he'll graciously help people who happen to endanger themselves in his general vicinity. What a nice guy. Ish.
This lack of purpose and responsibility plagues his actions through the rest of the movie. When the Kryptonians show up in Smallville, and an otherwise entertaining punch-fest ensues, Kal never once attempts to minimize the damage, or put people out of harms way as he's fighting. It's all about the punching, civilians be damned. And clearly, people are being injured and killed in this conflict given the extent of the destruction, even though they never show it. He doesn't even help clean up. What a guy.
Oddly, it's the cold Kryptonian Jor-El that tries to provide Kal with a sense of purpose and responsibility. While Lois is burning alive in a bungled attempt to escape Zod's ship, Jor appears to Kal and tells him he can save her and, in fact, all of them. "Ah!" I thought, "I judged him too soon. This is where he figures it out." Alas. The lesson doesn't stick. For a Superman, he has very little agency. Or character. Or personality.
As the final battle begins, Zod has deployed his ship and a smaller terraforming machine on opposite sides of the planet, both of which are required to start a doomsday effect to terraform the planet. Through a profound error in judgement, it's decided that the invincible flying guy is going to assault the machine situated in an unpopulated area on the other side of the planet, instead of heading to the one currently beating the everliving shit out of Metropolis, even though destroying that ship would be just as effective. Leaving the military to a futile frontal assault against an alien army with technology vastly superior to our own, the plan being to drop Kal's weaponized cradle on the Kryptonians. This goes as poorly as one might expect, although with a last minute save from Kal, they successfully kill most of the Kryptonians with a kamikaze run and large bomb with the Kryptonian symbol for hope emblazoned on the nose cone in large, friendly iconography. Which seems oddly appropriate for the American military mindset post-9/11 now that I think about it. "Don't run, we are your friends. Can't you see the hope exploding from our weapons?" And that's not the worst of it.
One of the reasons Kal's decision to tackle the less-dangerous terraforming machines is terrible is how much carnage Zod's ship causes in Metropolis while Kal's busy robot-wrestling half-way around the world. The ship is releasing a gravity wave increasing steadily in radius from around his ship, which lifts everything up, and then smashes it brutally back down every few seconds. It is clear from the footage shown that this is killing hundreds, if not thousands of people. By the time Kal finally gets back, the staff of the Daily Planet is nearly dead, and the carnage and debris is incredible. Kal, in his penultimate confrontation with Zod, has just destroyed a seed ship with the potential to grow new, not-psychopathic Kryptonians and save his race. He does this with his heat vision, growling that "Krypton had it's chance."
Which sets up the second funniest moment in the movie. The first funniest moment is the soldier in the military command center yelling that Zod has infected their RSS feeds. Not even their blog updates are safe! The second starts as Kal floats down to the ash-covered hellscape in what remains of the center of Metropolis. One of the few survivors of the disaster says, absolutely glowingly, "He saved us!" Well, he saved SOME of you. There's tens of thousands who were shit out of luck. And it's there, amidst the screams of the dying, injured and trapped that are not shown, but that he MUST be able to hear in the city around him for a mile in every direction, he kisses Lois, a woman who he's spent about 20 minutes talking with, and they have a completely unearned and unrealistic moment. It's really a meet-cute situation. They will one day tell their children that their first kiss tasted like the ash from the remains of mommy's co-workers. But wait, there's one final indignity.
Of course, Zod has survived the crash of the seed ship, which leads to an epic series of punches that is really some of the best super-fighting I've seen in a movie. Which might have been easier to take if they weren't obviously killing hundreds, if not thousands, more people as they fought. Again, they don't show people dying, but they show destruction on such a scale that people HAVE to be dying, and again, Kal never even notices that people are endangered by his actions, let alone tries to get people out of harm's way. It doesn't even cross his mind. It all culminates with Zod in a headlock, trying to burn unlucky citizens with his heat vision, daring Kal to kill him to make him stop. In a final act of brutality, Kal obliges, snapping his neck. Kal, a man of many fantastic abilities, and therefore many non-lethal choices in that situation, chooses to be a super-murderer. To be fair, they try and make it look like the decision pains him, for a few minutes at least. But there is no lasting weight to the decision. The next time we see him he seems unaffected.
When we next see him, he's throwing a crushed drone into the path of his military contact, and for one insane moment, I thought he might be about to make a pointed statement about drone killings, because he's just killed someone and he's learned something about the heavy cost of murdering someone, even a mass murderer, let alone people under suspicion because of how their movements look from a telescope. But no, he's just mad that they're spying on him, and insists on unaccountability. Because that's how his dad raised him.
Superman is many things to many people. To some people he really is super-bro, the ultimate bully, whose sole virtue is that he is stronger than other people. And if that's your thing, you'll probably like this movie. But to me, even though I have some problems with the character, what I've always found most powerful about him is that's he's a tiny, alien god, in a world made of cardboard, who takes great care every day to solve his problems the tediously moral way, instead of taking the simpler, more brutally expedient route. He has so many choices, including ruling Earth with an iron fist, but instead chooses to do the right thing, the KIND thing, even though it is frequently personally inconvenient to him.
I didn't like Nolan's Batman, because I thought he changed the core of the character, when he portrayed him as a man who gives up pretty quickly. I don't like Snyder/Goyer/Nolan's Superman for the same reason. They change the core of the character by making him someone with no sense of responsibility, no personal vision of a better world, no apparent motivation outside what other people tell him to do and a casual acceptance of the idea of collateral damage. Warner Bros, who thought they might as well completely miss the point of Christianity while they were completely missing the point of Superman, actually
attempted to market Man of Steel to churches and pastors while delivering the LEAST christ-like version of Superman ever put on screen. Sure the symbology is there, but in giving us the form (he's 33, he's here to save us, he has a beard, and here's some cross imagery to seal the deal), they completely fail to deliver the underlying philosophical substance of each. In the same way that a guy dressed like Jesus isn't Jesus unless he's preaching hope, forgiveness and compassion, a guy dressed up like Superman isn't Superman just because he punches people really hard.
Look, I understand at least part of the spirit of the age. Our institutions are failing us, we're undergoing a deconstructive movement philosophically and Superman is the next too-good-to-be-true statue we're pulling down into the nitty-gritty with the rest of us. But a gritty reboot of Superman doesn't work for the same reason a gritty reboot of Christianity wouldn't work: it destroys the core of the story. You can't paint a symbol of hope on a guy and make him as flawed as the rest of us. And you can't put him through a story where he learns nothing and holds to no higher standard and tell us he gives us something to hope for. You can't have the villain give a speech about how Superman's weakness is his morality, and then prove it by requiring Superman abandon his ethics and adopt his enemies' values to "win". You certainly can't call it hopeful.
This is Superman as envisioned by Lex Luthor: an unaccountable alien menace who's no better than the rest of us. It's a cynical attempt to bring him down to our level, because we find the idea of an american icon NOT using "bad guys" as a cynical excuse for collateral damage, summary executions and hope bombs too uncomfortable to contemplate.
I think we can dream up better heroes. I think we owe it to ourselves to tell ourselves better stories and challenge ourselves to be better people ethically and philosophically, not just physically. And while I wouldn't put any money down on the existence of Jesus or Superman, I don't see how things get better unless we strive for the ideals they represent.
We could aspire to be super instead of merely steel.
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett