Watched the new Man Of Steel today. Not bad, not bad at all. But holy collateral damage Batman!
I just went and saw it.
......ugh.
All right, I went in expecting good things. Not like World War Z, where I will gladly admit to being biased against it from the start (any movie that takes a thoughtful horror book that discusses human nature and turns it into a CGI action film with jump scares is never going to turn out well). I legit thought Man of Steel would be a good film, and a fair treatment of Superman.
Not so.
I can understand the changes they made. It's a more realistic Superman film, and is much darker (probably TOO dark: there's maybe half a dozen moments of humor, mostly mild, within the entire 2 hours). The "darkness" thing is literal, since the movie is heavily desaturated and loves cloudy skies. Superman's costume remains faithful while making it closer to the more serious version of Krypton we saw. It mostly stayed true to how Clark grew up.
But it didn't feel right. Things felt rushed, especially the early portion of the film where it seemed like they wasted too much time on big all-CGI action sequences on Krypton and had to scramble to get to the not-Fortress of Solitude.
Superman's personality felt a bit....odd.
When Zod begs him to reconsider and help him rebuild Krypton, Superman responds with "Krypton had its chance!" and begins slicing the ship apart with his eye beams. That does NOT sound like something Superman would say. It was also extremely hypocritical, the point of almost seeming like a continuity error, how he had a massive emotional breakdown over snapping Zod's neck but showed no remorse (even making out with Lois in the middle of the ruins of Metropolis) over the dozens or hundreds of innocent deaths that he personally witnessed, to say nothing of the untold thousands that were likely killed offscreen. "Who cares about all those innocent lives that are now scattered across a mile's radius? I just cleanly killed a genocidal dictator trying to destroy the world! Feel my anguish!"
Superman also seemed pretty dumb at one point. When Zod is suddenly overwhelmed by the new powers given to him by the yellow sun, Clark's reaction is to smugly explain to him how his mother taught him to focus and overcome those problems. It can't be an effective scene when the villain uses sheer willpower to match Superman's abilities if Superman told him how to do it.
The violence and collateral damage were obscene. Like, you get the idea that the creators were masturbating to every scene of destruction. Literally every single move in every fight involving Kryptonians resulted in untold millions of dollars in damage. They can't have a sequel because there's no Metropolis or Smallville left! The few hundred extras we see on screen after the big battle were probably the only people left in the entire city when he was done. Smallville really is nothing by the end of the film; the one fight between three Kryptonians (plus a fourth for about a minute) reduced the entire main street to rubble, to say nothing of the military's decision to send in A-10s and just strafe the buildings that civilians were hiding in with 30mm Gatling guns because "LOOK OUT! ALIENS IN THE STREET!" They even include another gratuitous explosion after the big battle is over, just 'cause.
The PG-13 rating was also likely the only thing that kept Zack Snyder from demanding a recreation of
300 for half the film. I'm not even close to exaggerating when I said that this movie has a higher body count than Saving Private Ryan. Dozens upon dozens of people, from civilians to soldiers, are killed in extremely painful looking ways repeatedly. They even insisted on showing deaths when it wasn't necessary, like multiple shots of the World Engine's gravity beam lifting screaming (obviously CGI) people into the air and slamming them down into the dust cloud that conveniently obscures them being sprayed across a wide area as a fine pink mist. Or an F-35's missile going haywire, which is accompanied by an almost purposeful shot of it blowing up a crowd of fleeing civilians on the street below. It came off as gratuitous.
Speaking of obvious CGI, it seems like half of the movie was done with the latest advances in film technology and the other half was done with what they use to make FMVs for video games. A shot of a pickup getting thrown into the Kent farmhouse looked like it was made for a Bollywood film. Faora throwing soldiers around in Smallville resembled a video game like Bayonetta, which isn't a good thing when everything otherwise looks like it's at least trying to LOOK realistic; bodies don't flop to a stiff halt like that.
Also, I know they had to work in Superman having the Clark Kent alter ego and being a Daily Planet reporter somehow, which they didn't do until the ending. But it doesn't work. It barely worked in the comics, but at least then he was Clark Kent before Superman became public. Here, the entire world has seen Kal-El's face and heard his voice. Some of them are fully aware that he's Clark Kent. Does he really expect to put on a pair of glasses (that's literally the only change he makes; even his voice and demeanor are Superman) and wander into the city that he just "saved" and expect nobody to notice?
Maybe he was hoping that all the citizens who recognized him were dead.