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Man of Steel (minor spoilers)
12 years ago
General
Not going to spoil a whole lot, but if anyone was curious about it... It's pretty good. Not great, but by Superman film standards, probably the best, and the only real "serious" one.
pre-emptive, spoiler-free tl;dr - If you like action flicks with a lot of whizbang special effects, this one's great. If you like more cerebral or character-development based fare, it's not as good - but still way better then Superman Returns.
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The battle scenes are fantastic, and the effects actually give a good "feel" for how brutal combat between a bunch of nigh-immortal superhumans would be. The action sequences are great, with plenty of eye candy. It's a typical Snyder movie with a ton of very pretty special effects, as well as some rather imaginative aesthetics for the Kryptonian gear, and one ship in particular has probably the coolest effects since War of the Worlds. It is, however, very much a Snyder flick - there's a surprising amount of violence and cringe-inducing deaths that are just barely censored or happen too quickly to register just what happened.
That said, there's only two major fights in a movie that runs close to two and a half hours, and they're excellently paced. I would've gladly traded off some of the downtime to fit in another fight scene.
Actually, a lot of the downtime probably could have been used better - it was paced well, but there's hardly any character development at all. Superman already starts out as a... well, superhero. There's no question as to what he'll do or how he'll act, and there's never any real tension and he's utterly predictable. A good hour and a half of the movie is eaten up just driving that fact in. He's also, bluntly, a bit of an idiot.
The movie goes to some length to try and portray Zod in a conflicted, anti-hero light, but it's all undone not even halfway through the movie, and this version of Zod ends up being a really shallow caricature with only a few token 'face' moments where his good intentions come through - to little effect. It's difficult to sympathize with him, even though it's obviously what they were going for in order to give the climax a bit more heft. He gets a brief, 5 minute scene to state his intentions and explain himself, but he spends most of it emphasizing the evil side of his plot, and aside from that, he has little to no development for the rest of the movie.
This is made even worse by the fact his henchmen are just full on generic sociopathic villains with no depth whatsoever - there's the sadistic woman, the sadistic giant brute, and a sadistic torturer, with the other henchmen only getting a second or two of facetime. What little facetime the three get is dedicated to showing how evil they are - the first even goes on a long spiel to Superman about how their utter lack of morals makes them superior to humans, as if brutally pounding a human to a pulp and throwing him into a jet turbine didn't emphasize how she was pure genetically refined evil. It makes it more difficult to sympathize with Zod when he surrounds himself with henchmen who are the embodiment of TVTropes characters. I'd go so far as to say a ton of the potential to make a great character out of him was wasted based purely on how shallow his lackeys are, and how much screentime is given to emphasize Superman as an unchanging beacon of goodness.
So my feeling? It's a good movie, but one that should really be watched in a theatre if at all possible. The best parts of it by far are the special effect-laden action and combat scenes.
pre-emptive, spoiler-free tl;dr - If you like action flicks with a lot of whizbang special effects, this one's great. If you like more cerebral or character-development based fare, it's not as good - but still way better then Superman Returns.
---
The battle scenes are fantastic, and the effects actually give a good "feel" for how brutal combat between a bunch of nigh-immortal superhumans would be. The action sequences are great, with plenty of eye candy. It's a typical Snyder movie with a ton of very pretty special effects, as well as some rather imaginative aesthetics for the Kryptonian gear, and one ship in particular has probably the coolest effects since War of the Worlds. It is, however, very much a Snyder flick - there's a surprising amount of violence and cringe-inducing deaths that are just barely censored or happen too quickly to register just what happened.
That said, there's only two major fights in a movie that runs close to two and a half hours, and they're excellently paced. I would've gladly traded off some of the downtime to fit in another fight scene.
Actually, a lot of the downtime probably could have been used better - it was paced well, but there's hardly any character development at all. Superman already starts out as a... well, superhero. There's no question as to what he'll do or how he'll act, and there's never any real tension and he's utterly predictable. A good hour and a half of the movie is eaten up just driving that fact in. He's also, bluntly, a bit of an idiot.
The movie goes to some length to try and portray Zod in a conflicted, anti-hero light, but it's all undone not even halfway through the movie, and this version of Zod ends up being a really shallow caricature with only a few token 'face' moments where his good intentions come through - to little effect. It's difficult to sympathize with him, even though it's obviously what they were going for in order to give the climax a bit more heft. He gets a brief, 5 minute scene to state his intentions and explain himself, but he spends most of it emphasizing the evil side of his plot, and aside from that, he has little to no development for the rest of the movie.
This is made even worse by the fact his henchmen are just full on generic sociopathic villains with no depth whatsoever - there's the sadistic woman, the sadistic giant brute, and a sadistic torturer, with the other henchmen only getting a second or two of facetime. What little facetime the three get is dedicated to showing how evil they are - the first even goes on a long spiel to Superman about how their utter lack of morals makes them superior to humans, as if brutally pounding a human to a pulp and throwing him into a jet turbine didn't emphasize how she was pure genetically refined evil. It makes it more difficult to sympathize with Zod when he surrounds himself with henchmen who are the embodiment of TVTropes characters. I'd go so far as to say a ton of the potential to make a great character out of him was wasted based purely on how shallow his lackeys are, and how much screentime is given to emphasize Superman as an unchanging beacon of goodness.
So my feeling? It's a good movie, but one that should really be watched in a theatre if at all possible. The best parts of it by far are the special effect-laden action and combat scenes.
