Steel yourself, boredom ahead

Man of Steel
DIRECTED BY: Zack Snyder
STARRING: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon
CERT: 12A

Did the world really need a new Superman? Probably not, but Warner Brothers clearly felt they needed a new cash cow. With Batman on leave of absence and since there’s really only one other megastar in the DC Comics’ universe, Krypton’s favourite son is dragged out again, whether the rest of us want him or not.

Well that’s fair enough, we all know it’s about the money. For those of us who go out and buy the tickets, all that really matters is if they manage to throw together a decent film while they’re at it. We wouldn’t be asking for a Citizen Kane here or a Lawrence of Arabia, just an enjoyable summer blockbuster, an entertaining time at the movies. A bit of fun, really.

Sadly for those of us who like the bit of fun, Superman’s latest rebirth is overseen by Christopher Nolan, the boyo who succeeded in sucking all the life and fun out of our old friend Batman. A man whose mission in life is to make sure that nobody has fun at the cinema ever again.

Nolan is a co-story writer and producer on Man of Steel and he’s brought his Dark Knight collaborator David S Goyer on board as screenwriter, with Zack Snyder (Watchmen) filling the director’s chair. To summarise that sentence: Welcome to Boringville – where fun goes to die.

Man of Steel is an origins story, of course. If you’ve seen the original Superman: The Movie, you will already be familiar with these origins but they must be retold because, even though Marlon Brando and many of his fellow Kryptonians died along with their planet in 1978, to a fellow like Christopher Nolan, that probably looked like too much of a good time.

This time around, nobody is enjoying themselves. Krypton is on its last legs and baby Kal-El has just been born to his parents, Jor-El (Crowe) and Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer), the first natural birth on the planet for centuries.

That’s not the done thing anymore, with Kryptonians being bred genetically for a specific role in society. Mammy and Daddy wanted the child to be able to choose his own destiny, which doesn’t go down well at all with General Zod (Shannon), whose job is to preserve the purity of his race.

As we know, the baby is put in a pod and blasted into space, right before Krypton bites the dust. Many years later, we catch up with him on Earth, where he goes by the name of Clark Kent (Cavill) and lives the life of a wanderer, a mystery man who occasionally helps others out of an impossible scrape, before disappearing and moving on.

Through flashbacks, Nolan’s old Batman trick but twice as irritating, Clark’s backstory is filled in. After crash-landing on Earth, he was raised on a Kansas farm by Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). His new dad is all for the boy finding his purpose but has always warned that the world just might not be ready for him. At all costs and it ends up costing a lot, he should keep his identity secret.

Of course, Daddy Kent didn’t count on the reporter Lois Lane (Adams) turning up to uncover the enigma, and he wouldn’t exactly have imagined that General Zod himself would eventually hunt the boy down, for the sake of a brand new civilization.

When he does clash with old Zod sparks, vehicles, buildings and many innocent people fly for sure. And it’s fun for, oh, about a minute. Then they repeat the moves, again and again and again, on into eternity, until the landscape is in tatters and you’re teetering on the verge of a coma. It’s like The Avengers vs Transformers, minus the variety.

In the middle of all that, Snyder and his cohorts make no bones about presenting their superhero as a Jesus figure, albeit one less interested in helping the poor than he is in brazen mass product placement. It’s a bit pathetic, really.

However, the movie is not a total dead loss. The early scenes on Krypton are impressive, the formative years are nicely done and Costner and Lane are very good as the adoptive parents. Amy Adams makes a fine Lois Lane and as the main man himself, Cavill at least looks the part.

He doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it all that much, though, which probably has less to do with Cavill’s charisma than it does with Goyer’s dull, joyless script, a turgid thing that lumps the hero with a bundle of issues and hardly ever lets him have a bit of craic. Do you remember all that great, goofy chemistry between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder? Well you can forget it. That was way too much fun. For that matter, so was Terence Stamp as the original Zod and clearly Michael Shannon was told there can’t be any of that.

Do you remember when Superman was called Superman? Well you can forget that, too. That big S on his chest, it doesn’t mean Superman. On Krypton, it’s the symbol for hope. As in, ‘I hope to God Christopher Nolan lets me tell a few funny jokes next time. Lois might like a bit of a laugh’.

Keep dreaming, Sad Flying Alien Man.