Movie of Steel: Digital Nihilism in the Post Post Modern Age

Rating: 3/10 (30 June 2013)

This ain't your granddaddy's Superman - it is your cyborg great grandson's. Zack Snyder has become the Michael Bay of superhero movie makers: all flash, all sizzle, sound and fury signifying - etc. He has seen the future of film art and it contains no film. Only the vapid vapors of what came before, absent of memory, beauty, hope and real heroics. Hollywood is a Xerox machine duplicating comic book movies for two dimensional moviegoers. We get the carbon copies we deserve.
An insult to Christopher Reeve's memory from the beginning, this CGI-soaked space opera is nothing like any Superman movie that has come before. It's like E.E. "Doc" Smith rose from the grave and tapped J. Michael Straczynski on the shoulder and gurgled "let's make a flicker, sonny boy - with ray guns and spaceships and army men, oh my!" Juvenile from beginning to end, a wet dream for the geeky programmer/graphic novel collector, MAN OF STEEL is nothing if not - nothing, an empty metal bucket clanging noisily as it bounces down the Kent's farmhouse stairs outside Smallville.
No heart, no soul, just a blurred gray background painting with no definition - except the detonations. Never has a war movie seemed so desolate. Battlefield Earth, under siege by megalomaniacal aliens in bondage attire, is laid waste, razed by the utter lack of imagination of the boys in charge of this adolescent mess. They should have called it MAN OF KRYPTON, for all the short shrift given to actual human characters. General Zod might be ticked off her spent all those years in the Phantom Zone, but we all had to sit through this overlong epic delivered by overpaid paperboys.
Digital era directors think if you throw a few talented "heavyweight" actors into a computer-generated stew the seasoning will lighten the metallic taste. No human actor or character could survive such a travesty of industrial design. MAN OF STEEL is not movie-making, it is post post-modern myth-making, by the pretentious half-minds that brought you a whispering, sulking Bruce Wayne haunting his own mansion. Just add a dash of steel gray cinematography and presto, the machine world replaces the movable human feast of emotion, and soul searching, and other traits of real dramatic characters.
Flaming wreckage and toppling skyscrapers - so reminiscent of 9/11 you'd think no one involved in this ill-fated production was born in America - overshadow love, caring, compassion - all the beauty of human life that the world's best IBM servers cannot salvage. Ma and Pa Kent, the audience's only real down to earth connection to the story, are relegated to cameos and flashbacks, as if Snyder were angry he had to include them at all.
MAN OF STEEL should be the nadir of digital movie-making, a long, cold blast of stale wind down a financial district canyon. Instead, all big budget movies aspire to its inhuman madness, for the Terminator lurks in us all. Cameron, Nolan, Bay, Snyder, et al have an utter contempt for humanity in every frame they shoot - er - digitize. Billions are spent on visualizing what they dream about after late night chili. And everyone must DIE in the end. Metropolis, looking every inch like New York, is blasted to hell with abandon, like these men-boys were knocking down plastic army men in the backyard mud.
When adults made movies they aspired to cinematic art, with fleshy beings just like you and me populating their original stories. The Cyborgs of Wall Street run the show these days, and the adolescents in the director's chairs - the slaves of multinational shareholders - want bigger and louder explosions, not any real relationship between Clark Kent and Lois Lane, or a narrative that even makes the slightest sense. Comic book movies are silly in the conception, but at least Chris Reeve's smile and the warmth of his performance made his Kal El just as human - heroic and frail at the same time - as us. The best effect this flick can give us is Diane Lane's "old lady" makeup. We only wish we could have seen how she got that way.
MAN OF STEEL is a perfect statement of matter over mind, the worst of old school sci-fi fascism, and an inglorious proof of the "singularity" theory. Only the machines have won already. There was no subtle blending of technology and humanity. No Asimov's laws of robotics. It's too late for all that. We already surrendered. George Lucas waved the white flag decades ago. And somebody check under Zack Snyder's hood. I believe you will find nothing but cheap batteries.