Why So Serious?

Rating: 5/10 (22 August 2014)

Zack Snyder's charmless reboot drudges along without its having an elite cast making a spot of difference. To begin with, as Snyder should've, why does David S. Goyer cloud, convolute and dampen up an origins story that has held up for 75 years, and why would Christopher Nolan be so enamored of doing so that he would spearhead a whole new franchise? Muddled, uncoordinated flashbacks lead a displaced Jor-El to Metropolis in time for General Zod's arrival on earth to destroy it withsecretly hoarded genetic codes? No trademark costume change, no dumbfounding earthlings with his superpowers and no rapport with Jimmy or Lois Lane. Here, the Daily Planet is as gloomy and underwritten as the obits.
The last hour is a thoroughly exhausting, wearyingly preposterous binge of super-colossal devastation that makes you want to escape the movie, for it to just be over so you can leave and go home and watch the original films, a range of equal portions humor, sentimentality and spectacle deftly measured through and contrasted by the grandeur of Krypton and its ultimate destruction, Clark Kent's Spielbergian growing pains and finally his saving of the world from one of its own. Superman is so winning and indelible because despite being invincible, he's trusting, awkward and virginal. And that crucial element makes even those movies' cheesiest moments credible.
Crucial to this re-imagining being the antithesis of those classics is Batman apostle Nolan. Whether he's to blame for the movie's overwhelming vainglory and conceit is hard to know but easy to assume. It's so somber, the humor can only ever be from our ironic detachment. One thing is for sure. It's no fun, whether Superman mopes and ponders or he's constantly finding himself in proximity to an unusual amount of disasters. Not only is it perpetually frowny-faced, it's monotonous, unthinking, smothering and so endlessly brimming with explosions that one can't help but flip the bird at the screen on cue.
As the obvious, laden and trite dialogue suffers under Snyder's pedestrian helming of quieter moments, the director---with the subtlety of a baboon---ignores pace and running time almost as much as he ignores character and audience appeal as the uncontrolled "climax" elongates into oblivion, literally, leaving Metropolis an irreparable pile of debris. It needs to be said that the visual effects are as authentic as anything you'll see at the current multiplex. But under Snyder's watch, it's like being constantly clubbed with a Mona Lisa.
Above all and more than anything, I so badly wish the movie would have suspended the inundating cavalcade and carved out more than a little wit.