Man of Steel Review

Subtitle: Well shit.


SPOILERS BELOW.


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A few thoughts in free association:

*I was worried when the critical reviews were not favorable. However, when I saw that Roeper's complaint was about a lack of fun and romance, it actually gave me hope. I was OK with the idea of it being darker and more serious. But instead, it winds up being dull.

*I get the need for backstory and exposition. But the part at the beginning involving the parents and the destruction of Krypton felt too long and labored. Get on with it.

*Zod is not particularly compelling to me. He even says at the end that he was born to defend Krypton and that is his only purpose. No Krypton means no need for him. (Yawn.) See, that is the beauty of Marvel's villains to me: they are multi-dimensional. Even Magneto worked for the greater overall good sometimes. If you are going to create a villain who is pure evil-- like the Devil,  for instance-- that villain better damn well be nasty and irredeemable. Make me hate him. Zod is persistent and annoying but I never felt like he was the embodiment of evil or that he was capable of working as an ally. By the time Superman breaks his neck, I was nearly asleep. I was relieved because it meant we could go home soon, LOL. When Magneto kills Shaw, for example, you are sitting in theater like, "Fuck yeah. He deserved what he got!" You don't get that type of emotional investment or pathos in MOS. By then, you just don't care.

*You will rarely hear me complain about action, explosions, etc. Yet here we go. What the hell? The action in this movie is overkill and jerky. Sometimes things were so fast that I didn't comprehend what had even happened. And largely, I didn't care. The overall mise-en-scene is dark, overloaded, and jerky.

*The theater was butt ass cold. Between that and the scenes in the arctic, I thought I might freeze to death. My ears and toes were aching from the cold. (None of this is the film's fault, of course.)

*Henry Cavill is mega gorge. I wanna be the koala and make him my eucalyptus tree. Meow, bitches.

*Ironically, I feel like we don't see as much of Superman as I expected for an origins story. In the same way that I was irritated that Ben Kingsley's character was a giant joke and not, in fact, the Mandarin, I was irritated that we didn't get a lot of Superman. I would have liked more scenes like the one on the oil rig: people are in danger and he swoops in like a bad ass to save everyone.

*For some reason, the laser vision/heat vision thing turns me on. I don't know why, but I think it's cool. If I had that power, I can name plenty of former friends and ex-bfs that would have been victims to it.

*The battle in the streets of Smallville seemed like a ripoff of Thor's scene where the Destroyer tears up the small town in New Mexico. The film overall reminded me of a mash up of Thor, Star Trek, and Star Wars. Perhaps Zod should have had an alien assistant named Bar Bar Jinks. In the next film, Superman does battle with super villain Joki Jaufeyson.

*When Lois Lane walks in the alien ship thing in Antarctica, it's kinda like, "Well, isn't this convenient?" Too convenient, too contrived.




It didn't live up to the hype for me, sadly. I wanted to love it and I expected it to outshine IM3. But no. I was not impressed. I'd give it 2.5/5 stars. Not terrible but no plans to see it ever again.