The Stone, The Spear, and The Superman, Part 2: Man of Steel
Look there's the WB horrorshow and all that - at least My Adventures With Superman is spared for now - but you've already heard a million hot takes on that, the big news I somehow forgot to mention last time is that my first ever comic has been drawn and is now public on Twitter and Tumblr courtesy of the talents of David Lee Ingersoll. Sometime soon I'll send out a special edition of Technicolor horizons going a bit into its creation.
We can put it off no further: we've examined the roots, and now stand in the shade of the mighty oak that is the madness and majesty of the director of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole himself, Zack Snyder. Helming WB's post-Returns Superman reboot over the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Robert Zemeckis, Darren Aronofsky, Ben Affleck, and Matt Reeves, he worked from a script by screenwriter and occasional comic book writer David Goyer, who with the backing of Christopher Nolan got the chance over comics peers such as Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, Brad Meltzer, and an infamous Mark Millar/Matthew Vaughan pitch that was intended to star Charlie Cox (who came to fame via Vaughan's adaptation of Stardust, with a rival played by none other than Henry Cavill) in the cape. With a healthy box office haul but permanently splitting DC film fandom, Man of Steel would go on to serve as the still-extant template for WB's shared-universe film efforts to try and contend with the MCU juggernaut.
And to this day, the debate rages: Zack Snyder. A towering generational visionary whose intricate designs were laid low by small minds and weak stomachs? A genuine hater of his source material for its resistance to his demented attempts at bending it to his unapologetic crypto-fascist Randian ideology? Kind of a big fun dope who liked putting superheroes in a blender with all his other pet interests and seeing what popped out? A man who can't differentiate between the awe and horror of cinematic violence, or one who sees such a difference as arbitrary if it exists at all? A regular boring hack in way over his head? The last man standing, qualified or not, against the endless beige onslaught of the Disney machine?
I dunno, I've never talked with the guy. I went through the gamut myself from loving this as the only midnight-premiere movie I've ever gone to, to hating these as irrevocably throwing several of my favorite characters disastrously off-course, to vacillating between admiration for the big swings and contempt for the failings, before finally landing on 'we're still talking about these? Really?' Let's perpetuate the problem and see what we thought of his Superman movie.
David: I get the impression from our brief pre-game chat we’ve come away from our rewatches - my first in 9 years - with pretty different takes from one another, though I think I lean closer to Sean. As a piece of cinematic spectacle, as a realization of that dream ‘what would it look like FOR REAL?’, this is still arguably the greatest superhero movie of all time. As a reintroduction to or radical re-envisioning of Superman…well, I’m more sympathetic to what it’s trying to do than I used to be at least.
Sean: I think the main issue with its approach that the later Zack Snyder DCEU films don’t suffer from is that Snyder is doing a cover album with this one. It’s very much a film that was pitched as “Do to Superman what Batman Begins did to Batman.” So you have all these touchstones that feel at home in a Nolan movie, but alien to Snyder. You have big things like achronological storytelling and portentous cinematography as well as smaller things like the lack of an opening credits sequence or a diminished presence of the grotesque. As a result, it feels like Snyder is trying to come across as more respectable than he should.
Ritesh: An imperfect but fascinating modern revamp of Superman that swings big. That’s how this feels to me. I don’t love it like I do BvS, but I am remarkably entertained and thrilled by it. More than any other superhero filmmaker, Snyder’s DC Trilogy centers the idea that With Great Power, there must also come Great Consequences. His films hinge on powerful people making big, sweeping, powerful choices, and the consequences unfolding on a grand canvas because of that. It rules. I think folks will see what Snyder brought more and more as time passes, especially as we head into the upcoming Zaslav/Discovery era of MCU-chasing DC flicks. Snyder was trying to make something that felt like a real person made it, and that person made it to please only one person: himself. Not a bajillion fanboys or investors or shareholders. It’s personal to him. And he made it with no fear of judgment, without aspiring to be loved across the board for doing so by nerdom.
David: The moment in the movie that best coalesces that idea of consequence you mentioned for me is when Clark meets Lois for the first time, and has to cauterize a wound with his heat vision (caused by Kryptonian technology, notably), asking “Hold my hand, this is gonna hurt”. He’s a being whose very presence and actions cause harm to those around him, to the point of the movie’s threat appearing directly because of him, and he’s just trying to make the best of a really terrible situation. I wish it had committed more to that ethos and the hard sci-fi bent this wants to gesture towards rather than kind of succumbing in the end to ‘and now he’s Superman, like in the movies!’, because that’s not where the heart of this is and there are the bones of something really special here that never gets to quite grow the way it might’ve deserved.
Sean: For all that it’s a very radical take on the character of Superman, it’s still keeping Superman as what we traditionally think the character as behaving. This isn’t Kiss Me Deadly where the approach is contemptible towards its lead character or Elliot S! Maggin and Quentin Tarantino’s performative take on the character. This isn’t quite Superman as Raised by Romney Voters, though it’s close. He still does what he does because he can’t help but be himself. He has to help other people, no matter how much risk it places himself in. It’s just a Superman who's in a world, well, made of cardboard with cardboard people in it. Where smashing into a building can cause high degrees of damage and destruction. When Superman fails to fly, he destroys mountains.
David: Yeah, the cardinal sin of this movie is that as heavily as it reconceptualizes everything around him? Aside from his relationship with his heritage which is largely cleared in the first hour, this version of Superman is as vanilla and vaguely dull as so many other ‘traditional’ takes on him most would see this as spurning, even as Henry Cavill is really doing some heavy lifting with his facial acting to put us in his shoes. The only real ‘here’s the core of his morality, here’s why he’s being Superman’ scenes are the back-to-back last major flashback to his childhood where he’s being bullied, and his moment in church convincing him to put his faith in humanity before he has any real reason to believe it’ll be paid off. They’re good moments, but with a whole movie structured around presenting why it’d be so hard for him to become Superman in a remotely realistic setting, it doesn’t have much to offer for why he takes the plunge beyond ‘well, because he’s Superman’, which is damning as hell next to the Nolan movies that inspired this getting so intensely granular with Bruce Wayne’s motivations.
Ritesh: I’d actually say the template here being viewed as Bruce from the Nolan era is an incomplete picture. Certainly, Goyer penned both of them in their first outings, and it shows. But I think with Snyder in the directorial chair, the real template and model to look at Superman here is Arthur in Excalibur. And Excalibur also takes for granted the nature of Arthur as…well, Arthur.
David: Excalibur is obviously HUGE and we’ll ultimately discuss it at length, but I think it isn’t really until BvS that I have a lot to say in that department. This does do interesting stuff with Clark early on, but it’s separate from him as a heroic figure…and in that regard yes, there’s a fair comparison to be made with Excalibur in Arthur’s early scenes of discovering his legacy. The big grappling with heroism stuff that codifies his ideals is later in his battle with Lancelot, which Clark doesn’t really get here - once he’s settled the question of his identity, all his decisions are a straight shot.
Sean: That said, there is a lot of Merlin in Russel Crowe’s Jor-El. Especially when he becomes a hologram, Jor-El is this trickster character who uses his wits and cleverness to get out of jams. He imparts wisdom to Superman as well as warnings to Zod. (Who, himself, is very Uther Pendragon.) Even the scene where he’s guiding Lois out of the ship feels very Merlin, with him always shutting the doors on Zod’s Soldiers just moments before they can do anything.
Ritesh: Yes! That’s key! Jor-El is Uther Pendragon. But he is not just the unloving, cold warrior like Uther. He is not a rapist monster like Uther. He’s a scientist and a loving husband. The opening scene of the entire film is the birth of Kal-El. It is Jor-El helping Lara give birth, and we learn it is the first natural birth on Krypton in centuries. It is an act of life, of love, of warm and care. It is a moment of awe and wonder and joy. It is the exact and precise opposite of Excalibur’s scene of Arthur’s arrival, which feels poisonous, horrifying, and bound to death. Jor-El is all that Uther wasn't, and that makes a difference to Snyder’s vision here.
David: People made fun of Jor-El kicking ass, but he had armor ready so maybe he was more a paladin warrior-scholar type; heck, maybe Zod trained him. If anything Zod I think is the Uther in here, the marauding shortsighted wild king of a lost age whose actions incite everything. And while I still wasn’t wild about it, I did click more with the Krypton opening than I did in the theater (which I hated so much at the time it’s the closest I’ve ever come to walking out of a movie…and I went on to love the rest of the movie at the time!). Alien Lord of the Rings with some Matrix thrown in; the aesthetic does a lot more for me now, especially the genuinely unearthly briefly-glimpsed take on the Phantom Zone portal, and while I’ve never been fond of Henry Cavill’s Superman suit it works better here alongside a bunch of other stuff reinforcing that visual. And of course I get now why this is the version of Krypton that is Never, Ever Horny (instead being sublimated into the dildo rockets) that’s saved by Jor-El and Lara boning, not to mention opening on Kal’s birth and his dad having a big adventure. And Jor even has a ‘horse’!
Sean: I love the dragon dog Jor-El flies at the beginning of the film. It’s a weird touch that most Superman adaptations wouldn’t have included. But it’s a delightful one nevertheless for how it differentiates Krypton both from prior takes on the material as well as the Earth we are about to fall down to. That said, a part of me would have loved the sheer oddness of Comet the Superhorse or even Krypto the Superdirewolf.
David: We may have lacked those, but we still got Kellex, Krypton’s broken moon, and ‘somatic reconditioning,’ which was around in the Silver Age as what Krypton did before inventing the Phantom Zone; there are some deep cuts here (The Ace ‘O Clubs, the Sullivans and Fordhams, Blaze Comics, even Superman being weak to pollution lines up with Klan-Ken T5477), for all the complaints of how this distorts the ‘mythology’ this was made by people who know their stuff when it comes to the source material.
Ritesh: I think more than that, and this is why I once again note Excalibur, what’s done here that you will never get or see in any other big notable Super-iteration is the binding idea central to it. It’s an idea that echoes in Excalibur as well.
The Land and The King, they are one.
The Land, the people, are LITERALLY encoded into Superman’s fucking DNA. He IS his land, he IS his people. And that doubles, especially later on, when Earth is being terraformed and he’s dying and in pain because of it, and cannot endure Kryptonian atmosphere. He is also Earth, he is also humanity. He is the land. He is an elemental figure, an avatar of dual forces and peoples. He is both Super AND Man. He is something strange and primal in framing here. I think a lot about the words of Arthur in Excalibur with him here "I was not born to live a man’s life, but to be the stuff of future memory."
David: Yeah, I recall once seeing him described by Sévérine Cox as an ‘Earth elemental’ in these movies and that checks out big time, hence why along with the traditional empowerment by Earth’s sun and lower gravity, he also gains strength from our “more nourishing” atmosphere, whereas Kryptonian technology belches out massive gouts of smoke and grit; his first act in the film being dealing with an oil spill isn’t subtle. He is also placed in a weird position in regards to all that where he has to choose directly between Earth and Krypton, but I’d rather get into that later.
Ritesh: Superman The Urban Legend is absolutely something Snyder goes all in on, which is quite fun.
Sean: In many regards, he comes across like the old tv version of The Incredible Hulk where David Banner is basically roaming America doing odd jobs and helping people (notably, the truck bit was riffed on by Al Ewing in The Immortal Hulk). He can’t help himself. He has to do something, and when he does he has to leave before someone figures him out.
Ritesh: Another reason why our underrated king Greg Pak, definitive Hulk writer, was so fucking good with Superman.
David: Clark as God’s Loneliest Man is probably my favorite part of the movie, Cavill gets to flex his chops and cinematographer Amir Mokri gets to go all in on the Terrence Malik of it all; this whole chunk feels so real and lived-in. Everything in the present between the oil rig and the first flight, and that first flashback to Clark being overwhelmed in his classroom, are the peak of the whole endeavor to me.
Sean: I honestly would’ve loved to see a whole movie (or, more likely, TV series) just focusing on Clark going into small towns and helping people. There’s a degree of Western logic to this that doesn’t often get acknowledged in superhero fiction. Often, the Western is used in the context of superhero cinema as a means to excuse the overabundance of the field or to make it seem as if it’s more than it actually is. But here, four years before Logan, Snyder just casually has Clark take on the role of the nameless drifter, one of the most important archetypes of Western fiction.
God, now I want a movie where Clark just wanders into a run down town years before he’s Superman and has to deal with corruption and monstrosity.
David: Well, we got a show about him going into a run down town years AFTER he became Superman to deal with corruption and monstrosity, but unfortunately it was Superman & Lois.
Sean: The CW: Just barely worth Riverdale.
David: We also get Clark in the bar here, and maaaaaaaaan people flipped out over this scene back in the day with him wrecking the one asshole’s truck. It’s honestly a bit that would rule in a different Superman movie (though it sorta puts an unnecessary hat-on-a-hat with Clark holding back when that’s reinforced so many times elsewhere), but the actual wrecking of the truck is way too cartoony for this. I respect what it was going for though in Superman absolutely ruining a creepy dudebro’s day, broadly speaking thumbs up. Without it though Cavill’s first line would’ve I think been “Hello?” to Jor-El, so I kinda wish just for that it was gone.
Ritesh: I do genuinely love the rage in this Superman. I know that pissed off and still pisses off a lot of people who want Superman to be their loving dad and all. But I love the idea of this super-restrained dude having just a fuck ton of anger buried in there. He is angry as shit. And clearly Greg Pak loved this too and got it, which is why he nailed it so nicely with Clark like he did with Hulk.
David: This totally walked so Pak’s Action with Kuder could run in that regard. Later when he’s telling Zod “It hurts, doesn’t it?!” with some vindictive triumph it’s a moment I’m shocked the anti-Snyder wave didn’t latch onto, even though it could’ve been convincingly delivered by Christopher Reeve in the exact same way.
Sean: A detail that I love that relates to Superman’s anger is the way his heat vision is portrayed. While most Superman material simply has his eyes turn red as he powers up. But for Snyder, he opts to have Superman’s skin begin to peel away around the eyes whenever he tries to use it. Furthermore, it always hurts to strain his eyes like that. The way the heat vision looks only enhances the raw fury at the heart of this take.
David: The heat vision hurting RULES, and is I think from Tom De Haven’s novel It’s Superman! It reinforces that Clark only sort of has control over what his body has become growing up on Earth - notably he doesn’t have the same issue in BvS, where he’s been operating as Superman for a couple years and would be much more used to it - and the powers in general as this out-of-control biological side-effect. The fights being as catastrophic as they are later on makes perfect sense, because none of them really know what they’re doing beyond letting lose this power inside them in the general direction of who they want knocked down. Presentationally they ended up a bridge too far with what audiences wanted from a Superman movie, especially when this still dips its toes so deep into ‘traditional’ territory, but it justifies itself internally.
Ritesh: Yeah. And for the most part, like noted earlier, this is a vanilla Superman. As in, he is fundamentally and deeply driven by helping and caring for people. His entire life has been wandering around helping people, even as he knows it might expose him, the last thing he’d want. A thing he committed to so hard he LET his father die, due to the belief in what he instilled in him. He keeps relentlessly saving people consistently throughout the film. Even the death of his father did not stop him from doing that. He just cannot help himself. Even his first actual ‘outburst’ is when a bunch of super-goons show up and hurt, threaten and throw around his mum, and then wreck her car and their home. And I feel like it’s a pretty damn justified response. Even after that, one of the first things he does is save a pilot after the military has ordered fire on him, because they don’t care about him. Dude’s not meant to be a perfect role model. Just a tryhard mess of a dude.
David: Him doing what he does and people seeing him do it even after letting his dad die to keep the secret verges on interesting but for me really just points to the Pa stuff everyone flipped out about being a handful of interesting slices from a very different movie. The ‘maybe’ is legitimate in a movie that takes the First Contact aspect a lot more seriously relative to the superhero standards than this ultimately does; Pa’s last act being one of doomed heroism could have reflected Clark’s own moral core in interesting ways, but doesn’t especially. It’s all in service of building up a theme and a Superman we don’t especially get. Still, as slight as I find him, the idea of this Superman as a cold alien overseer is nonsense, he’s just a well-meaning guy blasting his way through an impossible situation.
Sean: Another issue with the film I have (though more on an ethical level than an aesthetic one) is that this is propaganda for the US military. Certainly this is not the first high profile film to act as military propaganda, let alone the first Superhero movie. But the (for want of a better term) realism utilized by the film is poignant in its militarism. Note the usage of the military as a stand in for the public. How their arc is going from mistrusting Superman to aligning with Superman against the alien invaders. Indeed, Snyder himself directed literal military propaganda as a tie-in to Man of Steel.
But perhaps the most damning part of this is how the military’s role in the climax is presented. To contrast this with another Superhero film (and, indeed, the best Superman movie), Shin Ultraman [REDACTED DUE TO SPOILERS].
Equally, it's worth looking at its spiritual predecessor film, Shin Godzilla. There, the rescue heroes are a mixture of military and science figures working in tandem to defeat Godzilla. Indeed, a large portion of the film is spent using military solutions to slow down, if not defeat the kaiju. But all those attempts fail. They likewise fail in Man of Steel, but it’s worth looking at the ultimate solution. In Shin Godzilla, the giant monster is defeated through using a cooling agent to freeze it to slumber so as the Atomic Bomb wouldn’t be dropped on Japan for a third time. Whereas the solution in Man of Steel lies in… dropping a bomb on the baddies. They are a core component to saving the day as opposed to one cog in the complex machinery that saves the day.
Ritesh: I’m glad you brought up the US Military stuff. That was my biggest note in terms of what doesn’t work for me. Certainly, from Top Gun to the MCU, military propaganda is everywhere and they’re just everywhere in American blockbuster filmmaking. So it’s not new and wholly expected in most films of this type, which are at best liberal.
But that said, what it got me thinking about is the failure of genre storytelling when it gets into this territory. Because the real fear and terror that end up overtaking this film, the big meaningful threat as it is relentlessly framed, is The Fall Of America and the danger to American Empire. Let’s consider for a second the pulp basics of the Superman idea here. Superman is an ‘alien’ sent away on a rocket from a dying world onto ‘Earth’. In the 1930s, this metaphoric construction’s meaning is evident, given he’s a creation of Jewish immigrants. ‘Alien’ is effectively ‘immigrant’, and ‘Earth’ = America. That’s the essential meaning. He’s a modern Moses update for a 20th century America.
How it maps now, wherein Superman’s largely been stripped from those Jewish hands and specificity and turned into a blank slate ‘white’ hero in gentile hands, for a modern Post-9/11 21st century America? That’s worth considering. And so when the film, largely set around and about America is doing this whole ‘invasion’ story and evoking 9/11 imagery whilst doing it too, it all feels very much like playing to the common American idea and fear of ‘Well what if someone else did to US what we do to others? What if WE were the ones being colonized and genocided??’ and it’s the fear of The Fall Of Empire, or terrorist threat. And so when you do a ‘realistic’ Superman in the framework like this, and you do the ‘alien’ and ‘alien invasion’ with ‘humanity/Earth’ largely represented by America, and just especially a number of US Military folks who represent the hard arc of people learning to side with Superman? I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t do it. But I am saying I don’t really buy into it. It feels laughable and silly to me. The moment wherein the Colonel says ‘This man is not our enemy’ and it’s this big beat is genuinely hilarious to me in an unintentional way.
Sean: Indeed, it’s worth comparing this with Zod’s coup. In many regards, there’s a sense that we’re, on some level, supposed to sympathize with Zod’s actions. Certainly not exterminating humanity and continuing its colonialist legacy or his comments about “degeneracy.” (Note how Jor-El proper says that they should have done more colonialism to save Krypton while Holo-Jor-El says that he and Lara-El are both part of that toxic history Clark is able to escape.) But rather, his argument against the council is regarding bureaucracy. How its systems allowed Krypton to fall. So Zod, being the big military man, overthrows the government.
Even at the end, right before the final fight, Zod has a speech about how all he did, all the horror and evil, was for his people and now Superman has taken that from him. A cause that many stories about 'sad soldiers' have rooted themselves behind. Truthfully, the portrayal of the US Military isn’t that different from the Kryptonian military. Yes, they’re framed as the US being superior to the Kryptonian one on the basis that they’re the goodies, but they have a very similar dynamic of unquestioning loyalty to one another.
Ritesh: But also, on the other side of things, the film really works in a moment like wherein Perry and Lombard are faced with absolute certain death and apocalypse, and they’re still just trying to be there for Jenny and save her regardless. It’s a moment wherein you see the Watchmen influence bleed through. It’s the common people, the real people and humanity. It’s that on-the-ground perspective and experience. It’s powerful. I wish they were our principal cast instead of all the military guys in order to serve the plot.
There’s strong points like the above when it goes full Disaster Movie in the last act, but mostly, I’m not sure it should have given how hard it leans on the plot/US Military/disaster action without as much of the Perry/press crew as central. The movie works best as a sci-fi thriller about this mystery man and his powerful choices and his outing and all the dramatics around that. The disaster spectacle and action, while fun, I think are from a wholly other and less interesting film. The film, while exceedingly awe-inspiring at being a superhero film, is usually a lesser film when trying to be a superhero film serving the needs of superhero shit, as opposed to a more sci-fi take on this elemental urban stranger and his ethos.
David: It’s a politically confused movie at best; it’s an antifascist (the Phantom Zoners are NAZI-Nazis, all about bloodlines and foundations of land built on bone and the comedically evil German-accented mad scientist; you could say something about Krypton’s conservative leadership giving way to full-on fascism, but eh) pro-military epic about saving the environment where also Superman, who is a gift to us all when we accept him, earns that acceptance by killing the last traces of his hopelessly diseased homeland - whose final doom was, as Sean notes, not embracing colonialism - at which point he can declare himself “as American as it gets.” Even his family crest’s repurposing through an American lens is a triumph. It wants to do a bunch of stuff that doesn’t click together neatly by the standards of most viewer’s likely politics.
Ritesh: What is striking to me is how Krypton very clearly and evidently has a strong and rigid Caste System. That’s really what is central to the whole story here. Zod is a Casteist monster and a bleeding nationalist who does all he does in the name of ‘Krypton,’ except in pulp frameworks the ‘nation’ is extended out to ‘planet.’ (Consider how realistic all of one planet just being One Thing is. It’s really not. If one actually tried to take scientific realism to Krypton, it’d be complicated like our own Earth, with a million nations, languages, cultures, and divided viewpoints. But we’re not dealing in that here. We’re dealing in sweeping pulp frameworks).
Everybody’s role, purpose and fate is determined prior to their very birth. Their birth dooms them to their set caste and role. They cannot escape its fate. They have no free will. They live in an oppressed hierarchy. And that’s the central conflict here. Zod is a Casteist who believes Casteism and the systems that forged him are inherent to Krypton and Kryptonian culture and life and legacy. It’s why he says ‘heresy’ at learning of Clark’s natural birth and the idea of a child being ‘free’ from this system. It’s just not right to him and his eyes. Jor-El meanwhile is saying that given the Casteist hellworld and culture they’ve created is too doomed and too fucked on a systemic level to unfuck, and they’re facing an apocalypse. So there truly is no saving them or their people or ‘culture’ without also reproducing and retaining their worst bullshit that led them all here to this doom to begin with.
It’s why he must send Clark out on his own, and let him be free of all this. To let it all start anew, somewhere else, free of this system. So when Clark screams ‘Krypton had its chance!’ and lasers the Genesis Chamber, he’s not saying ‘fuck the last traces of my homeland and people’ for me. Because HE is the last traces of his homeland and people. They live within him and the dream of his people persists within him, not some cold science chamber. What he’s really saying is ‘Fuck your Casteist Krypton, bro. It’s already gone! I’m not letting you recreate it here.’ Superman is a chance for something new beyond all that fucked past.
Sean: Notably, it’s also a eugenecist’s paradise with everyone literally designed to be in their roles. Where the system has been in place for so long that the mere thought of rejecting it has been all but rejected. In his final act of stealing the birthing matrix and giving it to his son, indeed in creating Kal-El outside of the system, Jor-El destroys the system’s ethos and functionality. Superman, then, is the final nail on the coffin.
David: Jor-El’s comments on ‘bridging two worlds’ are very interesting in this framework; his notion of ‘hope’ as meaning the capacity for people to better themselves is fundamentally incompatible with Kryptonian society down to a genetically-manipulated level. His desire for Kal-El to join them together is, if anything, in the form of eventually literally rebirthing Krypton via the Genesis Chamber and Codex so that those kids can grow up free of dogma (which I had assumed when I first watched this in the theater was going to be this series’ equivalent to Kandor and the endgame of Superman's mission, as this seemed in 2013 more a Batman Begins setting up a standalone story with an ending than an Iron Man), but somewhere between Superman doing a Jesus as he’s told he can save everyone and the start of the last showdown, Clark rejects that possibility if only out of necessity; it’s to me an unearned moment that feels like there was something meant to be in-between to further contextualize what’s happening. Haha Superman saved the world with abortion though, amazing.
Sean: Further damning the system is the fate of all the other colonies once Krypton proper died: starvation. Even when confronted time and time again with the failure of his world, Zod clings to the possibility that they could do it right this time with the “degenerate bloodlines” cut out. He can’t imagine doing something completely different. Something better. And so there was really only one way he could go out.
David: At this point I feel like we’re dancing around it, so let’s really go all in on this film’s absolute shining MVP: Michael Shannon as General Zod. All-time great superhero movie villain.
Ritesh: I WILL FIND HIM!!! alone has more staying power than 99% of entire villain performances in these movies. And the best part is, he knocks out numerous bangers like that throughout the movie each time he’s on screen.
Sean: Shannon is an absolute treat here, playing off both the cool confidence of an ascending fascist and the petty cruelty of spitefully putting Superman into a trolley problem. Nearly every scene he has in this film is a highlight. But I think the showstopper is his final conversation with Holo-Jor-El. There’s a pathos and implication to this moment where two ghosts confront the nature of their haunting. It’s so good!
David: “My soul…THAT is what YOU have TAKEN from me!” and then punching Superman halfway across a ravaged cityscape wasteland is the most anime shit that has ever happened in a live-action film and I love it to death. His definitive scene to me is his introduction to Earth, where he’s trying to be by his standards diplomatic and reassuring, but he can’t help tossing in a threat to destroy the world by the end. He just…doesn’t get the idea of the carrot vs. the stick. People ask why he’d terraform Earth rather than another planet, or use the field of human skulls to try and convince Clark to join up with him. The answer is he has no idea why he wouldn’t and doesn’t care to learn. He is, as Jor-El said, just as much a ghost as any Kryptonian hologram. He just is what he is and does what he does, at maximum possible intensity. And him and Superman’s very last fight ending in a history museum? Finally got that with this viewing. Wish he’d kept the cape for the final battle though.
Sean: And now it’s time to enter the discourse. Hh. Should Superman kill?
Ritesh: In this film and its specific context? Yes. Look, I’m always pro Nazi-killing. Dude’s a casteist eugenicist genocidal monster. I have no issue with Superman, a young Superman especially, being in a situation wherein he feels he needs to kill him in order to save innocent lives. It fits in the context of what the film is, which is about the great magnitude and haunting consequences of great power.
Sean: There’s a sense that the scene itself is somewhat contrived in how it forces Superman to snap Zod’s neck. But at the same time, there’s a sense of inevitability to it. There was never going to be a clean ending of 'Oh look, there’s a space prison I can chuck Zod into' or 'What ho, Zod’s good now.' Zod was consumed by the system he served, worshiped, and wished to conquer. In many regards, this is akin to the end of many Superhero films prior to Man of Steel, where the baddies' compulsions ultimately destroy them. From Batman to Spider-Man to Iron Man, these films end with the villains dead. The difference is that here, Superman directly kills Zod. So the questionable nature of the moment within the context of the discourse is less 'Should the baddies die?' and more 'Should the goodies get their hands dirty?'
For this, there’s a sense that the film (and indeed Snyder’s larger project with Superman) isn’t interested in the ethics of killing. In BvS, Snyder has Superman kill Zod once again, only this time he’s a big stupid monster as opposed to a person, so no one cares. The importance of the moment is that Superman is changed by it. It was a necessary action that horrified Superman, but the merits of the moment are ultimately positive. He did what he had to do. And what he had to do was kill a Space Nazi. There are worse reasons for a superhero to kill.
David: Okay I MUST point out he snaps his neck in the direction of the family so they’re all definitely dead. I also even more so MUST point out that this is definitely Goyer - since it was his idea initially - taking a genre-reshaping shot at Action Comics #805, where Superman almost breaks Zod’s neck but doesn’t in order to prove a moral point. That’s a level of petty spite I respect.
Anyway: it’s a morally bulletproof action, and like I’ve said before, there’s a version of this movie that commits more devoutly to the hard sci-fi edge where that choice works for me, even if yet again it feels a bit hat-on-a-hat as paired with the destruction of the Genesis Chamber. As is though? I’m not affronted by it the way I was years ago, but it opens up a kind of Pandora’s Box for the iconography I personally tend to consider more trouble than it’s worth as applied to Superman himself on an ongoing basis, which is magnified tenfold by the absurd whiplash of the last 5 minutes of the film with the satellite and hiring at the Daily Planet going ‘okay you paid your money, now we’re gonna show him becoming classic Superman’. Not My Superman as they say, but I feel like there’s a version of Superman this almost is where it could’ve worked a lot better. I realize I’m saying a lot what I WISH this movie had been, the ultimate sin of criticism, but it’s at least sparking those thoughts in me rather than either purely loathing it or passively absorbing it.
The whole thing and the near-decade of discourse that came out of it probably would have been a lot more endurable though if Snyder had responded with something like ‘Well, we all make changes in adaptations based on what we prize in the source material, and for our adaptation that wasn’t an element that clicked with what we were personally trying to do’, rather than ‘We’ll deal with it later and also you’re a bunch of babies’. Not to say many weren’t indeed babies about it, but as I said, might’ve gone over better.
Ritesh: I just would like to say, thank you to Zack Snyder for making himself the target for legions of Hopepunk clowns and manchildren who have meltdowns. The guy broke off so many ‘taboos’ and ‘NO YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!’ shit that he paved the way for so much shit that would follow after. Zack Snyder is the guy who, when DC and WB execs scream NOOO BATMAN DOES NOT EAT PUSSY!! will go out and get art made of Batman eating pussy and tweet it out to millions of people in the mainstream. And y’know what? I gotta respect that. Good on you, Zack Snyder. Good on you. These are fake paper-people. They can do whatever. So yeah, why not, let a mfer kill a nazi. Let Batman eat pussy. We don’t need to insist on some Wertham-ass Hero Purity code and have baby tantrums like Dan Slott on twitter dot com.
David: Snyder suffered on the cinematic cross so Batman could hang dong and say fuck. Whatever you think about his work itself, that deserves praise. Maybe it’s a good thing after all that he told everybody who didn’t like his stuff to eat shit instead of even remotely trying to justify himself beyond talking about how this is what the world REALLY is MAN, we wouldn’t be where we are otherwise. Granted the internet might also be down at least one weird cult, so who’s to say? We have the world we have, and whether he’s still making these himself or not it’s Zack fuckin’ Snyder’s baby.
Sean: One can certainly see a shift in the way in which this pushed the field of superhero fiction forward. While many were in the reactive 'SUPERMAN DOESN’T KILL! ALSO HE’S NOT A COP! HE’S A GOOD BOY!' mold, works like Eric Kripke’s The Boys and Adi Shankar’s The Guardians of Justice highlight alternative approaches to superhero material that wouldn’t be considered in a landscape of just Iron Man quipping about eating out after a superhero battle. And tellingly, both take influence from Snyder. Because he’s one of the few actual filmmakers working with Superhero fiction. So he knows you can’t act like you’re five years old with the material. (That he’s a horny edgy teen about it is beside the point.) Superhero cinema has been around long enough that we need to be willing to shake things up.
Ritesh: That Chloe Zhao digs Snyder’s Man Of Steel and his ‘Terrence Malick Superman’ should be telling. And it shows in Eternals. Snyder, love him or hate him, undeniably made a mark in his very clear style. And that imprint reverberates. Hell, David, didn’t you mention how even stuff like the DCW shows pull from Snyder’s visual language and work?
David: Hilariously yes, even though Superman & Lois has happily accepted the fandom framing of it as being an ‘antidote’ to Snyder’s vision of the character it owes WAY more to him, tonally and visually, than any other onscreen take, especially in its first few episodes by Lee Toland Krieger who openly copped to the influence. Even Tyler Hoechlin’s failures in the show relative to his endlessly charming previous guest-appearances on Supergirl are because all involved are clearly trying to shove him into a Cavill-shaped box. Unfortunately it’s the drab version of that post-Snyder vision of superherodom without a bold bone in its body, working within all those limits you were just talking about without anything vital or imaginative to make up for it in spite of the seeming promise of its ‘sons of Superman’ premise. It’s some undeniable chef kiss hypocrisy.
Ritesh: Beautiful.
Sean: The CW: You Know You Want It.
Perhaps the most drab response to Man of Steel was the way in which Superhero cinema forced itself to be at a remove from any collateral damage. Most notably the climactic sequence of Avengers: Age of Ultron has a massive focus on saving the civilians. But there’s never an actual sense that they’re in danger or even that they matter. Unlike the Jenny rescue scene, there’s no tension in the scenes where they’re in danger, even in the one where an Avenger dies. It’s flat and lifeless because they’re not people being saved so much as objects. And the direction sucks!
Ritesh: Hollow posturing is, afterall, what Joss Whedon does best. On brand.
David: I’d be all about an increased focus on creative superhero rescues and attention paid to squishy mortals on the ground. Instead every damn superhero fight now has to have a mention about the area being evacuated and the capes marshaling crowds away as they all but turn to the camera and go 'Because THAT’S how you DO IT, MR. SNYDER.' Compared to that, yeah, let Zod throw Superman through a few skyscrapers, at least it gets us that moment of cross-cutting between doomed, fruitless human self-sacrifice for the sake of kindness and Superman finding the strength to save the world. THAT’S that good Superman shit.
Ritesh: So many people often talk about this film as some joyless bleak tragedy or something, but listen, rewatching it, it’s so much fun. The scene wherein Superman first flies? Pure fucking joy. It radiates joy and wonder and awe and is such a goddamn thrill. It’s hard NOT to grin, as you see Cavill’s lovely smile, and the terrific Han Zimmer score kicks in. It’s full of so much life. Or even the moment wherein he flies after Lois from the ship and saves her from the ship and they land together? Beautiful, lovely moment that hits. It’s got a lot of great Capital S Superman shit down.
Sean: Even smaller stuff like Lois’ noir narration while investigating Superman or the bit where Superman gets hit with a locomotive and proves to be more powerful than it or the way in which Henry Cavill differentiates Clark from Superman in the one shot we see him in that persona is a true marvel to behold.
Ritesh: The entire film is leading up to the construction of the ‘Clark Kent’ persona, and it is a persona. And that feels very Maggin/Waid/Morrison/Millar school as opposed to the more John Byrne type shit, I do think? Clark here is very clearly The Other who passes and the ‘performance’ aspect of Clark Kent is evident here. It is a performance. It is a construction. The ‘real’ guy is much more complicated.
David: I’ll have a lot more to say about it in BvS where we get much more of him as Clark, but while I can grouse all I want about the last few minutes in the context of this movie, in a vacuum it’s transcendently perfect Superman stuff. “Welcome to the Planet.” “Happy to be here, Lois”? Ugh. Make a grown man cry. And there’s so much of that 'holy moly, it’s SUPERMAN!' stuff throughout the movie it’s hard to try and be cynical about regardless of how much it may or may not click with other aspects of this interpretation.
Ritesh: Snyder’s reputation as a Superman and silliness hating edgelord is extremely funny given that last scene is just a loud display of how much he loves this dopey, silly shit. Like, if he were actually all that people purport, he’d chuck the goofy glasses/secret identity thing. But he never even dares. He clearly loves it and is enamored with all this. It’s why he even worked on that amazing anniversary Superman short with Bruce Timm celebrating his wild, rich history.
David (I’m obligated to note that short is kinda funny in that it has Silver Age Superman physically wrecking all his villains the way he never did in those comics and that it switches from Williams to Zimmer once we get to, like, Electric Red/Blue, Smallville, and the New 52, which isn’t the most ringing of endorsements. That’s my Superman nitpicker brain talking though, that short is a hell of a lot of fun and a ringing testament against any idea that he’s inherently predisposed against this stuff.)
Sean: If he were actually joyless, he wouldn’t have the dragon dog. And the world is richer for it. He’s the kind of filmmaker who will take the piss while also being extremely sincere. He’s neither Paul Veerhoeven nor Michael Haneke. For good and for ill, he’s his own man.
David: A bunch of final throwaway bullet-points from me, since I took so many notes while watching this thing:
Stealing Lara’s big Birthright character beat for Jor-El? Not cool. She’s definitely given more prominence and stately dignity than Igraine though if we’re continuing the Excalibur comparison.
Having seen a LOT of baby Kal-El getting loaded into his pod, this was one of the better versions of that for sure.
Lot of funny bits in this movie; people warning Clark about physical injury, the ‘days without accident’ sign, etc.
Probably telling we haven’t had much to say about Lois; Amy Adams plays her well but she just plain doesn’t get that much compared to most of the other big players here. I do like her going to ‘Woodburn’ though. Y’know, because WOODward and BERNstein? Ha-ha.
Smallville’s Professor Hamilton actor gets a cameo in a scene with movie Professor Hamilton! He’s the guy talking about the ice around the craft being 20,000 years old.
The change to the big Morrison speech yoinked from All-Star at the end is telling; the promise of a future to a hero beginning his journey, rather than a consolation to one at the end.
He makes a bunch of ⅛ of a mile leaps! And then I swear the wind sound effect during Superman’s first flight is from The Adventures of Superman. Beautiful.
lol Swanwick is supposed to have been Martian Manhunter all along.
The interrogation scene is maybe my favorite in the movie, the big moment where all the film’s disparate aspirations for Superman and his world meet and synthesize into something workable.
Personally? Don’t like that bullets work on Kryptonians in here except for the one bit with Faora. Those things famous for not working on Superman! Bugged me.
Metropolis feels somewhat out of place to me here, silly as it may be; I can accept Smallville existing, but this aims so hard for realism that a major extra east coast city existing struck me as a stretch.
I know people complained about Superman going after the World Engine over the Indian ocean, but it makes complete logistical sense if you actually pay attention to what the plan is.
Not one but TWO Wilhelm screams in this movie. In quick succession!
Superman vs. a big ‘ol robot, A+.
Superman looking back at the damage his dodging the fuel truck caused is really good, and in retrospect probably should’ve been zoomed in on to emphasize his realization and how that steers where the fight goes. Also worth noting the only times he causes any damage himself in that fight are when he shoves Zod’s head into the edge of a building where he probably didn’t hit anyone, and slamming Zod into the museum when momentum from a big hit by Zod was what was already hurtling them in that direction. The only ‘oh Superman definitely just killed people’ moment is when he and Zod go through the gas station in Smallville, and given that’s the first punch Clark ever threw in his life it’s arguably forgivable. So if you want that scorecard, there it is.
Superman being named Superman as a gag isn’t as bad as I remembered, but it’s still not great. Especially since we see the good version of that kind of beat at the very end, when Jonathan sees young Clark in the cape, deflating the moment but with a massive poignancy still behind it.
My final question for you two. Zack Snyder once put his thoughts and ambitions thusly:
“The single point at which everything we know & everything we question exist in one place; the ultimate crossroads in the journey of discovering the true meaning of ‘self’; the collision point of science & religion, tangible & ethereal, physical & philosophical; the place where a question that may never truly have an answer can be embodied in a singular character; in many ways, that is the why of Superman.”
Would you say 2013’s Man of Steel lives up to this modest mission statement?
Ritesh: No, but I respect that it tries and is by an artist with a vision, personality and actual recognizably distinct style. It’s a person making art rather than a soulless Content Creator standing at the IP Content Factory purely to churn out a thing off a successful form.
Sean: No, but then… What could live up to that?
Shin Ultraman.
Ritesh: I completely believe this.
David: The rest of us will get to see it eventually, you bastard.
As a take on Superman, this is to me an exquisitely-prepared, passionately labored-over meal that still somehow goes down as empty calories for all the individual elements I deeply enjoyed. This is just plain not what I want out of the material, and I think has plenty of issues all its own, some of which I know I missed even over the course of this discussion. But there is regardless simply a vitality and conviction and vision here that puts its ‘classier’ peers deeply to shame.