Did It Work: MAN OF STEEL

The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Wolverine, Pacific Rim, and many more can all be summed up with just one word by a vast amount of audiences and critics: disappointing.

For some reason, the last half of 2012 and the majority of 2013 have been filled to the brim with these types of high-profile, big budget, hyped-up blockbusters that have ended up dividing audiences and starting endless arguments about whether these movies have actually been good or not.

Perhaps the reason studios have been churning out these types of unsatisfying movies can be traced back to a single root cause (which I won't get into here...maybe in a future editorial), but it's undeniable that divisive, mediocre movies have become the rule, rather than the exception.

But where does Man of Steel fall in this recent, worrisome trend?

I have to admit, I've had a complicated relationship with this film since before it even came out. Even with a neutral position in the pointless Marvel vs DC/Warner Bros. war, I really wanted Man of Steel to win that infamous 'movie of the year' award. When the trailers were released, my expectations became even higher and I figured there was no way this movie could fail.

When I finally saw it at the midnight premiere showing, I initially liked it a lot...but something just felt "off." While I couldn't exactly pinpoint it, there were a few major issues that were nagging at me. When I went online, the immediate backlash I saw against the movie was overwhelming, although an equally significant number of people seemed convinced that not only was it the movie of the year, but the best comic book movie ever.

So yeah, obviously Man of Steel is pretty divisive. But what does that reaction say about the movie itself? Did half the intended audience just simply not 'get it,' or does the fact that it caused a large rift between fans indicate that it failed? Or is it something else entirely?

I've been trying to formulate my final opinion of the film ever since it first came out, and watching it for a 2nd and even a 3rd time has really helped solidify my position on this blockbuster. So what is the final verdict on the Superman reboot? Did it work, or didn't it? Let's find out...

What Man of Steel did wrong:

1) Kal-el's character.

Forget the destruction of Metropolis. Forget the controversial ending with Zod. This is probably the biggest problem with the movie. With the quintessential Superman character so ingrained in our minds from countless movies, comics, and popular culture as a whole, it's almost unbelievable that the writers (or director, or producers, or whoever you want to blame) could be so clueless about their own main character.

What do I mean? Well to really make my point about how flawed Kal-el is in this movie, first try to 'forget' about what Superman is really about, as we all know from the comics and the Donner movies. Seriously, try to pretend we know next to nothing about this character and that Man of Steel is our only indication of who Kal-el is, what he stands for, and what defines him. This is the best way to realize that, not only did this movie misrepresent what the Superman character from pop culture is about, but they couldn't even keep their own title character from Man of Steel consistent, realistic, or even interesting.

Okay, follow me on this.

The one question to ask ourselves is, 'What was Kal-el's character arc in the movie?' It's generally accepted that great movies have main characters that go through some kind of growth and change, and so this may seem easy to answer at first: 'He obviously goes from a troubled kid with no idea where he fits in, to a young adult who roams around and anonymously saves whichever humans he can, to finally showing the world the true extent of his powers and becoming the Superman all of humanity needs.'

Simple enough, right? Except all of that only describes changes in the events and circumstances that happens to the character, not necessarily changes to the character himself.

See the difference? Another way to ask this question is, 'How did Kal-el change as a character from the beginning of the movie to the end?'

Shockingly enough, the answer is that he doesn't really, despite how much the movie tries to make us think he does. Clark going from a kid that saves school buses to a wandering vagrant that saves burning oil rigs to a superhero that saves Metropolis and mankind doesn't describe any growth at all. The only thing that changes is the level and degree of the circumstances and situations that he happens to find himself in, and that is not a character arc.

Think about it.

From the beginning of Clark's life on Earth, Pa Kent is constantly telling his son to be careful about only using his powers for good and for helping people (even though he keeps changing his mind about whether or not Clark should actually help people at all...I'll get to that)...but when do we ever see Clark conflicted and faced with a pivotal choice? Based on what we see in the movie, does he actually ever give the slightest indication that he's going to do something different than what he keeps doing - using his powers to save people? He keeps saying that he's conflicted and his outward appearance definitely seems like he's conflicted, but when do we ever see that?

And no, this has nothing to do with wanting a movie to spoon-feed the audience every little detail instead of leaving us to think for ourselves. It's about "dramatizing the character," as the Film Crit Hulk says**. In order to actually feel like we're experiencing the same journey as the hero is, we need to actually see him when he's faced with decisions, chooses the right (or wrong) path, and follows that to the end despite the consequences. The problem is that we're never shown any of this; it's only told to us. This "tell, don't show" mentality is a strong indication of lazy, ineffective writing. And that's where the emotional disconnect occurs between the audience and the character.

I may regret using this example of another movie, but I feel it's justified since Man of Steel definitely tries to follow the lead of this movie as well. Look at Bruce Wayne's journey in Batman Begins for the sake of comparison. He doesn't start out this way, but we eventually get to see why his core values and beliefs are all centered around justice - he's influenced heavily by witnessing the murders of his parents as a corrupted Gotham falls apart around him.

Later on, he's then faced with many decisions and choices about whether to devote his life to justice (as opposed to revenge, when he seeks to murder Joe Chill), and more importantly, how he's going to go about doing so. Is he going to work perfectly within the letter of the law, or become a raging homicidal maniac that only happens to butcher deserving criminals? The precise moment of conflict comes up when we see Ra's al Ghul demand that Bruce kill the common criminal, and he refuses to do so in spite of the very dire consequences. That is the character development which we rarely get to see in Man of Steel.

So to get back to the original question, you may have guessed that my answer is no: Clark/Kal-el never actually grows or changes over the course of the movie. He simply keeps saving people just like with the bus as a kid, just like with the burning oil rig as a young adult, just like with the helpless family that Zod is about to kill at the end. The circumstances keep changing around him, but he himself never actually changes.

And we can discard the notion that he's Superman, so that's exactly how he's supposed to be. Maybe you argue that that's how he is in pop culture, but as this movie keeps trying to scream at us, this Superman is different, this Superman is conflicted. So following the movie's lead, conflict should lead to change. Change should be intrinsically linked with a character arc. But does he actually ever have a functional character arc? Nope, and that's exactly why Clark/Kal-el's character just does not work.

2) The flashbacks.

Wow, if those of you reading this managed to make it this far after a fairly long-winded 1st point, I applaud you! Let's reward you with another lengthy look at why the flashbacks in Man of Steel don't work.

The decision to go with flashbacks rather than a traditional, linear origin story was made precisely because of that: the filmmakers didn't want to make a traditional origin story. But that stubbornness ultimately results in flashbacks that are very haphazard and have no meaning for the events going on during the present.

In order to get around using traditional methods of storytelling, the movie decides to show us the 'greatest hits' of Clark's early life...but in no particular order at all. They are inserted into random parts of the present-day story, whether or not they have anything to do with whatever situation is happening at the moment, and the movie suffers for this.

It seems like director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer completely miss the point of having flashbacks in a movie in the 1st place. The purpose of having flashbacks isn't just to make this reboot different from somewhat boring, played-out, recent origin stories like some say about The Amazing Spider-Man or Green Lantern. The purpose is to take a break from the ongoing story in the present and focus on an event in the past. It's usually not just some random, well-known event (as they are in the movie), but a particular experience that has real importance and gravity in the context of what is going on in the present. Not so in Man of Steel, however.

Think about the scenes in the movie. There are 3 or 4 main flashbacks, covering the most generally well-known events and aspects of the Clark Kent character. Most of these flashbacks have a physical connection between present and past, such as adult Clark seeing a bus that reminds him of saving the school bus as a kid, but all that does is make for neat camera shots. Otherwise, it's meaningless. There's no plot or thematic connection whatsoever.

In the first flashback, it goes from Clark lying unconscious in the water after saving the men on the oil rig, to young Clark in school having difficulty controlling and focusing his powers. It's a great scene with great character development and interaction, don't get me wrong. His mother comes to help when he freaks out and locks himself in a closet, and only her soothing words help him focus.

But...what was the point of having that scene at that particular moment?

Sure, it sets the stage for another plot thread much further down the line when Zod and the Kryptonians have trouble acclimating to Earth's atmosphere, but that's it. It's one very short scene that ultimately doesn't have any more repercussions. What new insight do we learn about Clark that has an effect on what he's going through right now? Does learning to tune out the extra noise that comes with his super hearing have anything to do with waking up underwater after a traumatic explosion and then finding some clothes?

The only point to this scene is to obligatorily cover ground from Clark's early life so select parts of it can come up again later in a convenient, unimportant plot thread. Otherwise, there's no purpose or meaning to the scene at that particular moment. All it does is take the audience out of the movie, make them question why they're being shown this scene at this point of the movie, and wastes their time. And unfortunately, most of the other flashbacks are exactly the same way.

For example, look at the flashback of young Clark being bullied. In present day, the world is being threatened by Zod, Lois Lane is taken into custody, Kal-el is apparently grappling with what to do...and this is the moment where we take a pause to see Clark almost getting beat up as a kid? In a flashback that makes absolutely no chronological sense at all, seeing how in a previous flashback, Jonathan Kent is tragically killed, but in this later flashback that takes place before the other, he's alive and well?

Again, since I used this example before, look at Batman Begins and its use of flashbacks (or even a television show like Lost. The flashbacks always inform us of crucial details of the character's past while still remaining relevant to the present-day situations taking place during the episode). During the early parts of Batman Begins, questions that are brought up during Bruce's present day life are then convincingly and meaningfully answered during the flashbacks.

Without getting too much into it, Batman Begins starts off with a flashback of Bruce as a child falling into the well at Wayne Manor. It ends with him being attacked by bats, thus introducing us to his one major fear, and then smoothly transitions to adult Bruce waking up in a Bhutanese jail, suggesting that the entire flashback was Bruce remembering it in a nightmare. Later on, Bruce meets Ducard and travels to the monastery in the mountains. He begins his training by sparring with Ducard, who beats him handily. Before passing out, Ducard softly asks Bruce what he really fears, since clearly he doesn't fear him. The scene swiftly cuts to a flashback of bats and young Bruce lying at the bottom of the well.

These are the types of flashbacks that really serve to strengthen a movie without feeling played-out, tiring, or wasteful. As we learn more about the character, proper flashbacks help inform us of the underlying issues and core beliefs of the character while still staying relevant to the scenes going on in present day. They are perfectly timed, have seamless transitions, and allow us to find out more about the character just when that information becomes important to know in the present. Alas, Man of Steel seems to have no interest in doing that.


3) Overcompensating for Superman Returns.

It's no secret that movies are always affected by what came before, one way or another. After years and years of campy, silly Batman movies, Batman Begins came out and did the exact opposite, drastically changing the way we view the character. Some can make the point that The Avengers was a direct response to these new serious comic book movies and proved that light-hearted fun still has a place in modern comic book movies. In 2006, Superman Returns was largely criticized for playing it safe, staying too close to Donner's 'boy-scout' Superman movies, and having a noticeable lack of action. Which brings us to Man of Steel.

It's safe to say 'lack of action' was not a weakness in this movie by any means. From Krypton to Smallville to Metropolis, there are several large-scale action sequences that are pretty amazing to watch. But it is definitely arguable that Man of Steel took this to a misguided extreme by overcompensating and overreacting. It ended up sacrificing clear character motivation and development simply for some CGI-filled fight scenes that had very little emotional payoff.

No question about it, these scenes were very well done and really wowed audiences everywhere. It was pretty realistic as well, because how else would super-powered beings fight if they didn't cause massive amounts of death and collateral damage? But by the time we'd gone through so many of these fight scenes and reached the final climactic battle between Superman and Zod...it was just exhausting and even a little boring.

After a while, it's obvious that all these punches aren't actually doing anything to these characters. While thrilling at first, there's no real consequences for anyone except the surrounding environment and the anonymous, hapless humans caught in the wake. And even when the movie tried to make it dramatic by showing the Daily Planet workers in dire peril, it still didn't resonate at all because they spent so little time developing these characters.

Perry White acts like a jerk in the 4 or 5 scenes he's in, he doesn't do anything to affect the plot since Lois Lane does everything he tells her not to do anyway, and do they ever even call Jenny's character by name? Does she or the coworker who tries asking her out later even have more than 5 lines? Yet despite our obvious lack of investment in these characters, the movie keeps on cutting away from the action during the Metropolis battle to show the plight of these random people that the audience barely knows.

We're supposed to feel traumatized when they are in incredible danger at the end? So what if those characters died? Would it have changed anything? Kal-el didn't know them, the audience barely knows them. The movie tries to get us invested in them simply because we recognize the name of the beloved Perry White character from Superman lore in the comics, not because they establish him as his own character in the movie. So lazy.

Point is, the filmmakers were so conscious of answering a huge complaint from the previous Superman movie that they filled this blockbuster to the brim with action scenes that ultimately had no payoff. They could've had us get to know and even love the supporting characters and then put them in danger in order to raise the stakes, but they decided to raise the scale of destruction instead so scores upon scores of anonymous, random humans could die. And even when they tried getting us to care about the well-being of Perry or Jenny, it fell flat on its face.

So maybe it's not the amount of destruction that doesn't work. Maybe it's the filmmakers' attitude that somehow, this movie functions better because there's more punching, more explosions, and more death, despite the fact that audiences couldn't care less about the outcome. They took lazy shortcuts to try to justify making this into a disaster movie in the same vein as 2012. In fact, it's almost like Zack Snyder simply wanted to make a disaster movie that also happened to include Superman in it.

The best way to sum up this extremely odd mentality is: had the movie's good guy never existed, thousands upon thousands of people would have never been hurt or died. If that's not misguided, then I don't know what is.


4) Lois Lane and Jonathan Kent.

In the interests of making this article somewhat shorter, I combined this last category and I'm going to skip making a big list of the things this movie did right (at least, in this article. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty this movie got right. But I gotta make this article shorter somehow!). Let's start with a brief look at Lois Lane's character.

She's actually a pretty strong character on her own. Independent, headstrong, and she is finally shown doing actual investigative, journalist-type work when she tracks down Clark. But why is she so important in this movie?

Take a second to think about it, it's a very fair question. What did she do that couldn't have been done by any other random sidekick? She's only important because the other characters inexplicably act like she is and treat her that way. For some reason, Zod specifically invites her onto his ship along with Kal-el during the scene in which he surrenders, simply so that the two can share another scene together (as if that helps justify their completely unearned kiss later on) and so that Jor-el can conveniently fill her in on how to defeat Zod...rather than just cutting out the unnecessary middleman and telling Kal-el himself when he had plenty of opportunities to do so.

Conveniently, her knowledge of that information gives her an excuse to join the effort to send the Kryptonians to the Phantom Zone, however illogical her role would be in a military operation. And the cherry on top is when she shows up out of nowhere at the very end when Kal-el kills Zod, and she's suddenly there for Kal-el to cry on her shoulder.

There's no character or relationship development between the two. She's just thrown in to everything that Kal-el does, starting with the scout ship found in Canada. She just immediately and intimately knows and understands him, immediately falls in love with him, and all that makes their final kiss so jarring and unearned. She was shoehorned into every major scene because the filmmakers couldn't figure out how to make her necessary to the story.

But enough with Lois, let's move on to Pa Kent's character.

One of the most noticeable changes to the traditional Superman mythology is Pa Kent and his tragic death scene. But let's focus on his actual character first.

It's established that Clark's father is protective of him and wants to shield Clark from the outside world, who he's convinced won't accept him. But he also wants young Clark to become a good person and use his powers for helping people (although nothing is presented to us to show that Clark would ever actually go down the wrong path. He's obsessed with saving people right from the get-go, so Pa Kent's concerns are a bit head-scratching).

It's an interesting dilemma that is poorly thought-out and fails in its execution.

There's nothing loving, convincing, or even realistic about Pa Kent chastising Clark for saving the kids on that bus and exposing his powers to their community. He actually presents the possibility that young Clark should have willingly let all his schoolmates drown. So it would've been more convenient and less messy if Clark had let those kids die rather than force his parents to answer some uncomfortable questions? Forget the logical fact that having Clark be the sole survivor would probably raise some questions by itself, but what father would ever say this to their son?

And yet despite this bombshell, in the very next scene Pa Kent waxes poetic about how Clark is actually an alien, about how he has a destiny, and that he'll eventually have to, at the right time, choose to show himself to all of humanity and use his powers for good, or not. Pa Kent's conflicted ideas all sound very complicated, deep, and 3-dimensional, but all it ends up being is contradictory and jumbled.

But this is the crazy conversation that influences Clark for the rest of his life. This is when he is apparently convinced that he can't show people his true colors, which should make him hesitant to save any more people until the time is right. Sure, Clark keeps telling us that this is what he thinks, but his actions consistently tell a different story. He never chooses not to save a human being...except when he's faced with saving the most important person in the world to him.

The weird thing about Jonathan Kent's death scene is that it's rooted in the idea that Clark has to wait for the right time before showing himself to the world, which prevents him from saving his dad when there definitely was many ways he could have done so. And even this wouldn't be so bad, if his father's death actually had an impact on him. It doesn't.

The whole point of Pa Kent tragically sacrificing himself is so that Clark can continue to live in anonymity without exposing himself. But Clark continues to use his powers to save people, despite the time not being right, and it eventually leads to him exposing himself to Lois Lane. The only thing that changes when Pa Kent dies is the fact that no one is there to tell Clark not to use his powers anymore, and that paints Pa Kent in a very bad light. So he was the evil, good for nothing father that was holding Clark back all this time? That's definitely not what the filmmakers were aiming for, but that's the logical way to characterize Pa Kent. It's a mess.

Conclusion:

So after all this, you can probably guess my final conclusion of Man of Steel. At the beginning, I used the word 'disappointing' to describe these types of controversial blockbusters. I think 'lazy' would be more apt. It was a very lazily-made movie that doesn't do much heavy-lifting at all in order to earn the moments that we see.

This rather negative opinion isn't solely influenced by the fact that this movie simply has all these flaws, because what movie doesn't? In fact, none of what I've said negates any of the strengths of this film, and maybe I will fully spell out all the great parts in a future editorial.

No, the determining factor is that these strengths only exist on the surface, on the most superficial level of the film. It doesn't really go any deeper than that. The flaws were simply hiding right underneath the amazing visuals, the stirring soundtrack, the great acting, and the adrenaline-pumping action.

And that leads to the thing that really sets this movie apart from movies such as The Avengers or The Dark Knight. The one common theme rooted in all of the flaws is the fact that it keeps coming back to one singular factor: characters. Not the action, not the controversial neck-snapping scene, not the destruction...it all comes down to the characters.

Directors can work with the biggest budget, make the most visually appealing movies, stuff them with intense scenes of things we've never seen before, but all of it ultimately is a waste if they don't get the characters right.

Man of Steel is unfortunately the most recent offender of having a fundamental misunderstanding of characters, and that's exactly why this movie just does not work very well. It's a failure that originated from before this movie was ever filmed, when the filmmakers first got together to try to piece the story and the characters together. It can almost seem like it was doomed from the start.

But is all hope lost? Is all of DC's plans on building up to a Justice League movie ruined because of this? Not even close, because this movie isn't even a total failure at all. Even if it's not the masterpiece many of us were expecting it to be, it's definitely an entertaining summer popcorn movie. And we can all at least hope that Zack Snyder and Company will learn from their mistakes and put together a truly amazing sequel with Batman vs. Superman.

Completely agree, or convinced I'm way off base? Have at it and sound off in the comments below!


** I've mentioned this movie analyst in a few of my previous articles, but I'd be remiss if I didn't credit the incredible film critiques of the Film Crit Hulk. His article on "The Importance of Dramatizing Character" was a huge influence on my own editorial here, and really worth a read!
http://badassdigest.com/2013/07/03/film-crit-hulk-man-of-steel/