Review: 'Man of Steel'

The movie plays like one long trailer. A two and a half hour long trailer at that, with introductions to great ideas and setups that rarely, if ever, get answered. There was so much potential and so many opportunities to create something that we've never seen in a superman movie before. It really grabs your attention, making you think it will do something of the kind. But just when you think something great is going to happen, and that there will be further character development, the action begins and the movie swoops off into conventional blockbuster territory.

A couple of things I was pondering through while the movie played were this: How would this movie have played if it weren't really about superman at all, and about Clark Kent instead? What if superman didn't even come in to the picture until the very last scene of the movie? For one thing, you would lose a lot of audience members if that happened. They want to see the man in the cape. Yet that's a real shame, because most of the best scenes from the movie were the scenes that involved Clark in his childhood, growing up in Kansas. I wanted to see more of those scenes. The flashback scenes were handled very well, giving us a perspective of how Clark sees and hears the world, which is a thousand times more advanced than all of humanity. He is terrified. The struggles he deals with by keeping his abilities a secret from the world, despite his will to protect it, is always a good conflict.

This is not trying to be like the 1978 'Superman', and that's admirable. It tries to be something different and new, and sometimes it succeeds. The planet of Krypton and its genesis is delved into more than ever before, and the look of the planet is different as well. That's one of the few differences with this movie. Unfortunately, almost everything else is the same, only with a severe face-lift of modern day action and special effects.

It might be just me, but it felt like 'superman' himself showed up in the movie a little sooner than expected. Let me explain: After the destruction of Krypton in the films long prologue, we are quite literally shot to present day earth and shown these rather poorly paced scenes of Clark Kent traveling the world, saving whomever he can, then radically changing scenes and time settings to years in the past. Then before you're finally settled into that scene, it switches back to the present time, beginning an even newer scene. This goes back and forth, progressing the convoluted plot points until suddenly... Clark Kent just walks out quite casually in the red-and-blue. The point I'm trying to make is that a lot of the pacing in here is really fast. Too fast, in fact, like it's trying to just get to the big action sequences, which last a little too long and clearly is where most of the time and effort was spent.

Another big problem is the technical side of the filmmaking. Remember in 'The Avengers' where nearly every action scene you could actually see and tell what was happening? That's because the camera work was still and smooth, creating a kind of 'controlled chaos' effect. Not the case in this movie. I swear to you, I can't remember a single shot or scene where the camera would stay still. Even small scenes of dialog, the camera is up in the actor's face shaking them all over the screen. Handheld camera techniques were fairly cool in it's prime, but that time has long gone. Keep the camera steady! That's why they invented the steadi-cam.

All in all, this movie is fifty-fifty. There are a lot of really good things about it that I enjoyed, and then there are things that are just plain old disappointing. This had so many chances to be a solid good movie, but with all its problems, it's only semi-good.

My Rating: 2 / 4