MOVIES – Why I Liked Man of Steel

This is a scene I storyboarded.

Simpsons Quote:

“I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me, Superman!” ~ Homer

So I’m a big Superman nerd.  I’m a big Superman fan.  I love Superman.  And I thought I’d give you my two cents on Man of Steel and all the things around it and all the arguments I’ve been getting into about the movie.

You can either watch the video or read the transcription.  That said, there’s A LOT of links and videos below.  LOTS more. This video only covers SOME of what I’ve got to say.  So scroll down for the rest of it:

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My Favorite Superman Movies

Now, Man of Steel and Superman.  Like I said, I’m a big fan of Superman.  I love Superman.  My favorite Superman movie is All-Star Superman.

What?  It’s not the Christopher Reeve Superman that everybody else— the Donner Superman— what’s going on?  What is wrong with you?

No, All-Star Superman is my favorite Superman movie, okay?  You now know my tastes and where I’m coming from and how different my tastes are.  My second favorite Superman movie is Superman vs. the Elite.  I love that movie and the story in it.

I like the Donner movie just fine.  I liked watching Smallville.  I watched all 10 years of Smallville.  I’ve watched and own all the episodes of the Bruce Timm Superman animated cartoon.  I watched Superman in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited and in Young Justice and in Legion of Super Heroes, all those animated cartoons.

I’ve seen every single animated movie that they’ve made of Superman.  And on top of that I also happen to read the comics as well.

What I DIDN’T and DID Want to See in Man of Steel

Okay,  so I go in to watch Man of Steel.  Here are the things I do not want to see.  Let me start with that.  What I don’t want to see from Man of Steel going into the theater is:

1. The Donner movie.  I do not want to see the Richard Donner Superman movie redone.  I want this new movie to have nothing to do with the Donner movie.  I don’t want the actor to look like Christopher Reeve.  I don’t want to see Lex Luthor being a big joke.  That’s great for the Donner movie.  It worked great for the silver age.  Fine.  I didn’t want to wait half an hour before I got to see Superman or an hour before I got to see Superman because he’s living his life in Smallville.  So here’s another thing I didn’t want to see.
2. I did not want to see Smallville The Movie.  I did not want to see young Clark growing up, pining over Lana, having relationships with his teenage friends, growing up on a farm, discovering his powers.  I saw that.  It was called Smallville.  It went on for 10 years.  I don’t want to see that again in a movie.  It’s been done.

So already, two things I did not want to see from this movie, Smallville: The Movie and the Richard Donner version of the movie remade.  What did I want to see?

1. I wanted to see Superman punch somebody in the face.  I wanted to see Superman have superpowers and fly around and have super fights and be super.  That’s what I wanted to see.  I wanted to see that Superman.  If he was Clark Kent sometimes fine.  But I just wanted him to be mostly in the suit being Superman, fighting giant gorillas or whatever almost like an updated version of like the Fleischer shorts where it was basically just an excuse for Superman to be super.  That’s all I wanted to see in this movie.

So I go into the movie and guess what I got?  Pretty much everything I wanted to get from this movie.  To the point where it was almost too much of everything I wanted.

So in a lot of ways be careful what you wish for.  On the other hand, I can’t complain because I got it everything I wanted and I got too much of what I wanted which was okay with me.  I left happy.

So if you haven’t seen the movie I am going to spoil it now.  Stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie.  You can come back to this later, but at least now you know two things.

1. One, I liked it and
2. it’s not Smallville: The Movie and it’s not like the Richard Donner movie.

Now that you know that, you can go watch it and then come back and read the rest of this.

The Spoilers Begin

I’ve gotten into all kinds of arguments about this movie with friends who basically wanted this to be the Richard Donner movie.  And because it doesn’t hit every beat it’s no good.

It’s like a bunch of people who grew up with Batman: The Movie from the 60s and then going to watch the Tim Burton version or the Chris Nolan version and deciding that it’s too dark and where’s the zap and the pow?  Right?  I have a problem with people that keep trying to shove the Donner movie into this movie because that’s not what it is.

Superman, the Dick Donner movie, was done in the 70s.  It’s done.  Superman in the comics has moved on from that, gone past the silver age into the bronze age, into the iron age, into the modern age, into The New 52.

He’s a different character.  In its trappings and the way it feels there’s lots of different stories.  Man of Steel felt a lot more like a comic by the name of Superman: Earth One .  The first volume felt a lot like this.  It had  a lot of similarities to it.  In Superman: Earth One Vol 1, Clark was even pushed into becoming Superman because of an alien invasion just like in the movie.

What I Didn’t Like

A few things I didn’t like about the movie and very there are only a few.

Yes, there are plot holes as big as a truck but I’m going to link below to some  articles that defend the movie.

This Superman movie was great, BUT I’m also going to link to this hilarious critique of the movie done in almost a MAD Magazine style and it’s hilarious.  There’s just a lot of, kind of goofy stuff about the movie that just kind of doesn’t work, but that’s okay.  I completely ignore those things because Superman got to have super fights in this movie.

Here’s the link to the crazy funny article:

http://io9.com/the-most-important-scenes-from-man-of-steel-as-i-remem-516405346

But the one thing that really, really, really bothered me was Jonathan Kent and his portrayal.  And I’m going to link to two really great videos from Smallville,  that really shows what I would have liked Jonathan and Clark’s relationship to have been like in Man of Steel:

And here’s one of my all time favorite scenes from Smallville where Clark talks to Jonathan’s ghost years after his death:

And that’s me comparing Man of Steel to that Smallville, but here’s the thing about Jonathan that I thought kind of needed to be there.  I wanted him to be much more supportive and less paranoid.

It’s okay to be guarded and trying to protect Clark, but I did not want him to be so negative to the point where it was as if he did not believe in Clark and did not believe in his son.  And it was just like, what?  You saved a bus full of kids, maybe you should have let them die.  I mean, really?  And it’s like, “yeah, don’t save anybody, ever.”  Really?

You could have at least had him go,

“Well, uh, you know, find a way to do it without being seen,” or something like that, right?  But it was really cold.  It was a very cold portrayal of the character who is traditionally very, very, very supportive.

And the way he ends up dying was lame.  It was dumb.  Everything, everything that Jonathan did in that scene in the hurricane before he dies he could have allowed Clark to do and he wouldn’t have had to use his powers.

Jonathan wouldn’t have had to die.  Clark couldn’t die.  It was a win-win.  It felt so forced and lame.  There wasn’t a good reason why Clark shouldn’t have been doing what Jonathan was doing while Jonathan protected his wife.

The Two Biggest Critiques of the Movie

The two big critiques of the movie is Superman kills Zod and Superman doesn’t save people while he punches Zod into buildings.  Besides the giant plot holes that you can drive trucks through, that one is the main complaint. The the death toll and Superman kills Zod.

First of all, let’s not forget that the Tim Burton Batman killed a ton of people and eventually tied a gargoyle around the Joker’s leg and threw him off a building.  So yeah, Batman in that movie killed people.

In the Chris Nolan version he indirectly kills Ra’s al Ghul, you could argue.  He didn’t save him, right?  But he has a code against killing mostly because at least, my logic is that, he experienced murder.  He knows what killing is like.  He understands the pain that death and killing somebody leaves, what it can do.

In the Man of Steel this Clark Kent doesn’t.  In Man of Steel, you don’t get a fully formed Superman until perhaps near the end of the movie when he’s destroying the drone.  Perhaps that is the fully formed Superman we were waiting for and he really only has a few lines of dialogue.

In the rest of the movie, Superman is not complete.  He is not Superman.  Just because he’s wearing the suit doesn’t make him Superman.  It just makes him Superman in training.

So, the first time he’s ever let loose was on Zod’s face.

“You think you can threaten my MOTHER!” and he starts whaling on him, right?  He’s never been in a real fight.  He’s always been holding back.  So he starts getting into a fight with a bunch of Kyptonians.

He knocks them into an empty place.  They knock him back into Smallville.  And then he has a big fight, it’s all he can do to be fighting much less saving people.  He can barely save himself, right?  He’s barely trying to hold on and do what he can.

Same with Zod.  He fights Zod.  He punches Zod into outer space.  Zod comes back and knocks him back into Smallville.  I don’t know if it was Smallville or Metropolis, I would have to see the movie again.  But the point is he knocks Zod into space, tried to get clear him of the crowds and the places and Zod takes him right back.

You could argue that Zod strategically picks this, Metropolis, to fight in because he’s a tactician.  Superman is not.  Superman is not thinking and he’s knocking, punching Zod across into buildings and stuff because he’s not thinking.  He’s just fighting Zod.

He’s trying to survive.  He’s trying to deal with the matter at hand.  He is not Superman.  He doesn’t think the way Superman thinks yet because he hasn’t been in a situation like this.  He ends up killing Zod in an impossible situation.

Zack Snyder has said that the reason why they put that into the movie even though originally it wasn’t, Zod was supposed to be sent back in the Phantom Zone with all the other Kryptonians, was because he wanted to show the reasons why Clark doesn’t kill, why Superman doesn’t kill.

Here’s the link: (http://collider.com/man-of-steel-ending-christopher-nolan-mark-waid/)

He basically killed the last Kryptonian.  He understands the pain of what he did.  He doesn’t want to ever go through it again.

The flaw, of course, being that he didn’t get enough chance to grieve about it.  We never got to see him really, truly process it and grieve.  It just kind of— the movie turned happy too quickly, so you didn’t get that effect.

But that was the logic behind it.  I was okay with that logic, as long as you pay it off in two ways in the next movie:

1. He makes sure that the next super fight he has, he tries not to have the same thing happen again to Metropolis,  and
2. He doesn’t kill again.

It sets up Lex Luthor great.  It sets him up as the savior of Metropolis who put Metropolis back together after the two aliens destroyed it.  It creates a great antagonism.

So I think that, to me, as long as it gets addressed in the next movie, it would make it okay.  There’s nothing I can think of, unless they put more flashbacks with Jonathan, that can fix Jonathan at this point.  I thought Jonathan was really poorly written.

The Stuff I Really Liked

Overall, I loved Man of Steel.  I loved it.  I thought it was great.  I had a lot of fun watching it, except for Jonathan Kent.

I liked Jor-El being an action hero.  I liked how he was a maverick, so maybe he was trained to fight by Zod.

I liked how Clark got his suit.  Where did that suit come from?  Come on, man, where did the food come from in Star Trek?  Replicators, right?  Who’s to say that there’s no replicator room or was an ancient piece of armor or the armor can’t be created by the machine run by Jor-El?  I don’t have any problems with that stuff.

I don’t mind Lois immediately pretty much knowing who Superman is from the very beginning.  Not having the traditional Lois doesn’t know that Clark is Superman thing.  Yeah, let’s skip that.  Go straight to the other thing. Because if Smallville has taught us anything, it’s that if you don’t know Clark’s secret, you are pretty much a useless character in the show.  And you look like a big dope because you can’t help Superman out.

So yeah, I liked Man of Steel.  I thought it was great.

I think you should read the comics to get acclimated if you only know the Donner movie.  Nostalgia doesn’t make Man of Steel bad.  It just makes you nostalgic.

If you liked the Donner movie, buy it and watch it.  But if you want something else, go watch Man of Steel.  It’s a different movie.  It’s a different take on Superman.  It’s still Superman.  It’s just not the fully formed Superman that flies out of the fortress of solitude in the Donner movie fully formed.  We’re watching the actual formation in this movie.

Some Last Thoughts

All right, I’m sure you disagree.  There’s many of you who disagree.  Chime in.  I don’t mind.

Oh, if you don’t like how long those fights took there’s a video of a very well choreographed fight that is very, very similar to that fight.  I put it down below. Go watch it.

One more thing, somebody on Facebook wrote this about the movie:

I had some problems with the movie, but at the end of the day I’m willing to cut Snyder a little slack. He only had to bring the most iconic and difficult to adapt superhero to the screen for a 21st century audience, satisfy the nerdboys like us who were going to dissect everything he did, and bring in the casual fans who they really need to make the movie profitable. As Hollywood movies have ballooned in costs, this one cost right at about 450 million to make and market, I’m sure some artistic choices were sacrificed because he had the studio up his ass. Let’s not forget that The Dark Knight was the second film of the trilogy, after Nolan had established that he could sell his Batman Universe and was given some leeway from the suits. Batman Begins was nowhere near as ambitious. Textbook origin story.

All right so, I think that pretty much sums it up.  And those are pretty much my feelings, too.  Give it some slack.  All right.  That’s my incredibly long rant on Superman.

Leave a comment and I’ll talk to you next time.

MOVIES – My Superman Rant Continues

A commentary of Superman by Max Landis:

Here’s a great defense of Man of Steel:

http://www.genjipress.com/2013/06/man-of-steel-with-feet-of-clay.html

Superman having an epic battle in metropolis, destroying the place and punching villains through buildings is nothing new.  It’s just new to some. Case in point:

Seemed familiar right? A lot like this? (Don’t watch if you haven’t seen the movie):

And here’s the cover art for Action Comics #3 of the New 52, showing how happy people are at Superman for being an alien that tends to destroy their city.  Pay close attention to the newspaper subheading the guy is holding at the bottom of the drawing:

And let’s not forget that Superman kills Zod in Superman 2:

I don’t know about you but I think the Man of Steel version had more of a reason.  I mean, Zod was helpless in Superman 2.

Also, as flawed as Man of Steel was, at least it didn’t have “what the heck?!” moments like this:

Also, the first episode of Superman the animated series from the 90s had a very action adventure Jor-El as well:

Here’s a really early Superman comic where Superman makes a choice as to who he has time to save and is a bit of a jerk about it.

So yeah, I liked this movie.  Don’t watch the video below if you haven’t seen the movie. Otherwise enjoy:

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