Gets so much right, and then so much more wrong

Rating: 4/10 (7 July 2013)

To paraphrase another iconic comic book character, Christopher Nolan's Batman movies changed everything. Afterward, there was no turning back. Their darker, more "realistic" spin in a post-9/11 world connected with audiences and revolutionized genre filmmaking. Perhaps this is why Bryan Singer's bubblegum homage to Richard Donner inherent in the more idealistic "Superman Returns" never really flew -- truth be told, though, it wasn't nearly as terrible a movie as the fanboys would lead you to believe, and got a lot of things right with Superman and the universe. But Warner Bros. wasn't satisfied with its $400 mil box office and thought it could have done better, and, after a long gestation period in Hollywood terms, they decided to reboot the franchise. The key words here being in a darker, more realistic manner. They even got Nolan to sign on as an in-name-only producer.
Zack Snyder tries desperately to ape Nolan's style, while still maintaining some of his own trademarks. Gone is his usual over-emphasis on slow-motion theatrics, but kept intact is the tendency to have moments of brilliance padded out with long stretches of mediocrity.
So much of "Man of Steel" is right. They somewhat successfully manage to update Clark Kent, an ostensibly outdated character, by focusing on his struggles: the X-ray vision and superhuman powers are treated more as a plight, rather than a joyous revelation, and we see flashbacks of his childhood with parents Kevin Costner and Diane Lane that mostly do a good job of highlighting the downside of these gifts, and the influence his human parents had on his upbringing. Some of this is almost beautifully well done, and Snyder gets so close to pinpointing the human core necessary to make this character relatable to human audiences.
But then there's the typical bloating. Twenty or thirty minutes of Russell Crowe prologue that is just a big, long excuse to show off their $200 + mil budget. The Krypton scenes look pretty, but they ramble on endlessly, and the interplanetary government stuff reeks of George Lucas' attempts to make such boring crap entertaining in the Star Wars prequels. The costumes, the dialogue -- all uniformly terrible. Took me right out of the movie before it even got started.
Crowe, you start to feel, is only in the movie because he is Russell Crowe. Brando's scenes in the original Superman (and Brando was a bigger star than Crowe was today) were more restrained and vital to the storyline. A solid 20 minutes could have been cut from the film to make it tighter and leaner, and the plot -- which really services the movie less than Snyder seems to think -- wouldn't have been faulted any more for omitting them.
For a 2.5 hour movie, the Lois Lane/Clark Kent relationship is surprisingly muddled and the two leads share no chemistry, but that may be because the film never affords them the opportunity. Amy Adams is incredibly gifted as an actress, but she's constantly running around in a hurried fashion whenever we see her, already closing in on Clark's identity (err, Superman's) as the film begins. They seem to take a liking to each other out of necessity rather than for any organic reason. Perhaps the studio wanted less character development because Singer's film was faulted for placing TOO much of an emphasis on Lois and Clark, but honestly, this is a glaring issue with the movie, because it expects us to care about their relationship towards the end.
The first hour of the movie gets a lot right, but when it spirals downward into a cacophony of endless, cartoon violence in the last hour and a half, it just falls apart chaotically. One car explodes after the other. Buildings are razed. The damage is in the billions of dollars.
But here's the problem: the characters turn into invincible caricatures. Nolan's films worked when there was violent conflict because we believed the characters were mortal. There don't seem to be any defined limits on the strengths and weaknesses of these Kryptonians. They toss about through the air endlessly, smashing each other into one object after the other, and not very convincingly (the special effects become increasingly sloppy). The noise becomes deafening and the visuals tiresome. Snyder gets all of this wrong and it completely derails his film.
Superhero mayhem can work. I'm not a huge fan of Joss Wheden but he managed to pull it off in The Avengers' climactic finale, and you could comprehend what the hell was happening on screen in his movie. In stark contrast, Snyder's whip-fast editing, random ultra-close-zoom shots and generally endless mayhem on screen just completely asphyxiate the film's drama and heart. It's a shame, because for the first hour or so he gets quite a lot right. Then it all falls victim to his usual excesses.
Audiences often aren't looking for more in their summer blockbusters, so of course the film is doing well financially. But in the long run it won't be considered in the same breath as the superior films it has been overly influenced by, and Snyder bears most of the blame for that.