Is it safe to come out yet? Phew, that was a bit touch and go there for a while, wasn’t it? Yes, the release of Man of Steel was not the event that we all expected to be it. Not in the real world, of course, where it grossed in excesses of $500 million and was received quite well by reviewers and critics. But, on the Internet, things are different. There, you can have more money than God and it won’t matter a bit if you’ve changed the source material. People were, therefore, very mad. However, considering that the storm surrounding the film seems to have just about died down, it seems as good a time as any to talk about Man of Steel. Was it really all as bad as great swathes of the Internet claimed? Or was it actually a good film?
Um…. well, let’s say some nice things first. The cast was well chosen – they acted well and they all looked the part. Admittedly, General Zod’s face was quite distracting at first but you got used to it by the end (no excuses for that hair-thing on his face, though). Overall, you never felt like you were watching actors reading from a script. You did, however, notice that some of the supposed main cast – Lois Lane, in particular – didn’t have very much to do other than try to intimidate military officers in the snow. There was no accounting for General Zod’s whole persona either, but if he hadn’t regularly frothed at the mouth in a hammy rage it would have been a lesser film.
The plot of the film diverted a little from the origin story – Clark met Lois differently and she knew that he was Superman from the beginning. The film approached Superman differently from other media as it focused as much on Clark Kent’s origins as Superman’s. The story in the film didn’t need to be concentrated on very much as it focused very heavily on action scenes. This was a relief as the less said about Jonathan Kent’s death - i.e. the laziest, nonsensical death scene ever committed to paper and then film – the better.
There was some parts of the film that was very easy to criticise, though. Man of Steel seemed to rip off a lot of the visuals and music from other blockbusters. The big-scale fight scenes looked like they’d been taken from Transformers (after removing naked John Tuturo, thankfully). There was the music from Inception, the flying-beast riding from Avatar and the alien fight scene from Independence Day to name a few. It all made the film look like a cheap summer blockbuster copy with a Superman veneer.
Overall, then, the film was enjoyable to watch and had a relatively faithful retelling of the Superman story. It would’ve been nice if this film had focused on Superman as an adult as so much time was spent on his origins. People would probably have rushed out into the streets in confusion asking random passer-by’s “What was I watching!? What was going on?!” if they hadn’t included it, though. The film was instantly forgettable, though, and you find yourself having to check up facts on Wikipedia just to remind you what happened. That isn’t a good thing for any film other than Memento and, maybe, Primer.
Featured Image: Warner Bros.
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