MAN OF STEEL -- A (not so) Pygmy Review:

In anticipation of screening "Man of Steel," I rewatched Richard Donner's 1978 "Superman" with Christopher Reeve. I did this not because I thought "Man of Steel" should pick up where that film left off (it shouldn't), and not even because Christopher Reeve's Superman was a boyhood hero for a boy who didn't spend a whole lot of time with superheroes (this grown man shed real tears the day of Reeve's paralyzing accident), but because I was curious to revisit the film's consciously anachronistic tone. As splendid as the original is and as iconic as Reeve's portrayal will remain throughout the cinematic ages, "Superman" often plays just plain silly. The protagonist's aw-shucks, Boy Scout, US of A-centric, impregnable morality comes off as soggy behind the ears at the dawn of the last quarter of the last century, let alone in a 21st century that has witnessed religious fanatics pulling skyscrapers full of people to the ground.

Clearly, in our post-9/11 world, the lack of irony which is an unrepentant part of the early film's DNA, simply will not work, but in shying away from one extreme, "Man of Steel" embraces the other, forgetting the very essence of what this hero is about--what sets him apart from, say, the Dark Knight, so familiar to writer Goyer and producer Nolan. While a certain malleability is to be expected and, in my opinion, heartily encouraged, the filmmakers took the pendulum swing too far to the other side. "Man of Steel" is utterly joyless. Whatever their naive faults, the Reeve films--indeed, the entire Superman universe--have whimsy, a lightness and humor that allowed the audience to see beyond the peril and soar beside our hero on a flight through the clouds. It is an optimism and warmth "Man of Steel" lacks almost completely. This film is all grey and darkness. It sits on your chest like a heavy crushing weight. The violence--unremitting and pervasive--ceases to be engaging because it so rarely comes up for air. Like Hans Zimmer's tonally identical score, it is an exercise in cinematic assault and battery. Because the savagery is so non-stop and preposterously over-the-top, I found the film to be tremendously monotonous and even boring--not because nothing happened, but because the same thing happened again and again and again and again. Despite all of its soaring and overwrought religious allegory (a heavenly father and a son sent to Earth for the purpose of saving humankind in his 33rd year), the film never follows through on its promise, preferring instead to ditch the high road and take up the discarded pages of a "Transformers" script. Oh, so "Dark of the Moon" knocked down a building or two, huh? That's nice. We're going to literally obliterate half a city. Top that! Tens of thousands of people are butchered in this film, pawns of the picture's imbalanced need to promote spectacle over substance, squandering promise and potential on turgid fisticuffs and visual bluster (a surprising amount of which was not all that good). "Man of Steel" confuses the shock of peeling back the scrim to glimpse another world with the shock of watching the 154th building in a row collapse in a manner desperate to invoke the imagery of that horrible September morning more than ten years ago. There is so little awe here, so few moments of wonder. We are so embedded in the middle of the maelstrom that we never have a chance to lean back and drink in the spectacle of it all. When one is out of breath, one never has a chance to have one's breath taken away.

The film has moments of epic greatness to be sure, but these moments are rarely ever when Superman is suited up and fighting evildoers. In fact, for me, the finest scenes of the film were the flashbacks to Clark's childhood in Smallville, where he is a freak and an outsider, desperate to fit into a world that his father is terrified will hate him if they learn the truth of his origins. Every time Kevin Costner is on screen, the film is elevated into places of quiet greatness, and even though the manner of Pa Kent's death is altered in this film from past versions (like every reconceived moment, it was turned into something of unnecessary grandiloquence) it is no less moving--more so, perhaps. Clark's angst, largely unexplored in previous films, is a fascinating component of the mythology. Clark is, after all, an alien among humans; a true fish out of water. This the film gets right. It doesn't forget that this origins story is also a first contact story (though it spends far too little time with the implications of that event, preferring instead to jump right to the point where the little green men take out their ray guns and start blowing up the Earth). "Man of Steel" is a better first-contact-with-extraterrestrial-life film than it is a Superman film. And while we spend time getting to know pre-Superman Clark Kent, we've almost no time with the man after he puts on the cape. Once the costume is donned, he essentially becomes a flying battering ram. As such, though his origin story feels well explored, the character remains an enigma, and the impossibly good looking Henry Cavill never has a chance to win us over, to charm us. He is certainly a character of empathy but never an endearing one. We feel sorry for him and we may even be enraged on his behalf, but he never is or does anything to make us want to "race behind [him] and…join [him] in the sun," as his father suggests. Not only does this doom our acceptance of him as our supernatural savior, we cannot, in more practical terms, buy his relationship with a miscast Amy Adams as Lois Lane, much less the speed with which it develops.

The "Man of Steel" marketing machine was the best I've seen in years, each trailer whetting my appetite more and more. The penultimate theatrical trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DJcgm3wNY) portrayed the film as a thing of wonder and majesty, with Jor-El's voice explaining how his son has it within him to be a guiding light to the human race, an aspirational beacon we can follow out of the morass of hatred and ignorance into into a future of hope and peace. It was a glimpse into the inception of myth-making. By contrast, the exceptional final trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKNbnJuEhw) was one of brutal beauty, full of crashing thunder and bombast. The movie I wanted to see was the one represented in the former trailer, but what we got was the latter. "Man of Steel" feels as it it should have come later in the series, once we'd already established the tone, rather than using pervasive gloom as the foundation on which to now build the legend we all love and know is coming--mild-mannered and bumbling reporter Clark Kent, scheming nemesis Lex Luthor, etc. While some films are better than the sum of their parts, "Man of Steel" is a collection of phenomenal components that, when fused, never quite find a way to work well together.

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