Zack Snyder's Superman, Part 1 - "Man of Steel (2013)"

2025 has been the Year of Superman for me.  In anticipation of James Gunn's Superman (2025) I read all of the Superman comics I have (which is a non-trivial amount) and am working on a character dive essay, similar to what I did for Wonder Woman.   Superman is my favorite superhero, maybe even my favorite fictional character, and to be honest his unwavering goodness, hope, and kindness brought me some comfort in a dreadful siege of a year.

As part of my Year of Superman, I'm also going to look at some of his movie incarnations, starting with Man of Steel (2013) from what is colloquially known as the Snyderverse, the vision of an interconnected movie universe by director Zack Snyder.

Originally I was going to do both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) in one piece, but then i had way more to say about the former than I was expecting, so I'm going to save Batman v Superman for another time.  (Speaking of dreadful sieges.  Spoiler, I guess).  So without further preamble:

Background

Man of Steel is a 2013 film directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Dawn of the Dead) and written by David S. Goyer (Dark City, the Blade Trilogy, and the Dark Knight Trilogy) and Christopher Nolan (come on, you know Nolan).

It did ok commercially, grossing $670 million against a $250 million or so budget but i suspect Warner Brothers was a little sad it didn't cross the billion dollar mark as a couple of Marvel films and their final two Dark Knight movies had.  That's not a reasonable expectation but Warner's higher ups in that era didn't have a great reputation for reading the room.  Maybe still don't, but 2025 has been a crazy good year for them with Minecraft, Sinners, F1, Superman, and Weapons all doing well commercially and mostly well critically. (Minecraft was disliked by critics, but made almost a billion dollars.)

Man of Steel's critical reception was pretty mixed, both among critics and comic book people, but general audiences seemed to mostly like it.

Initial Thoughts

I do like this movie, albeit with reservations.  I liked it in the theater and I enjoyed it just fine on a rewatch.  Do I think it's "good" though?  Hmm...

No?

I think it's almost good and my general stance is if you take scenes in isolation there's a lot going for it and there's some parts of it that I really like.  But viewing as a whole text I don't think it is a well told story.  It's definitely less than the sum of its parts and I actually think it's a really weird Superman movie.

This is neither a criticism nor a point of praise, but it's interesting how much of this film seems to take inspiration from the Superman: Earth One comic by J. Michael Straczynski (writer) and Shane Davis (artist).   The basic plot is similar to Volume 1 (a largely directionless Clark tries to find his place and then an alien invader from his home system arrives looking for him) and even Man of Steel's portrayal of Clark is similar to what we get in Earth One, though quite a bit shallower in my opinion.

Plot Speedrun Attempt

Man of Steel opens on Krypton with Jor-El (Russel Crowe) trying to convince the ruling council that the planet is about to explode.  General Zod (Michael Shannon) interrupts and stages a coup.  Some Avatar shenanigans happen and Jor-El takes the Kryptonian genesis codex and sends it with the infant Kal-El in a rocket to Earth.  Zod kills Jor-El, but is captured by the loyalist forces and sentenced to the Phantom Zone with his co-conspirators.  He vows to find Kal-El and retrieve the codex.   Krypton explodes.

The movie then transitions to Earth and follows an adult Clark (Henry Cavill) as he drifts through the world.  In his first scene he's working on a fishing boat but vanishes to help some people escape a burning oil rig.  He drifts some more and has flashbacks to his childhood.  Eventually he finds himself in the arctic where the military has found a Kryptonian scout ship.  He meets Lois Lane (Amy Adams), who is there investigating the story, and saves her from the ship's security droids.  After she leaves the ship, it takes off with Clark on board.   

He activates a semi-sentient hologram of Jor-El, who tells him his origins and tells him he

will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards.  They'll race behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. But in time they will join you in the sun, Kal.  In time you will help them accomplish wonders.

Clark puts on the Superman suit Jor-El provides and flies for the first time.  He returns to Smallville and Lois tracks him down.  He tells her he let his father die in a tornado, at his fathers' request, rather than reveal his powers.

Then Zod, freed from the Phantom Zone when Krypton exploded, arrives in a large spaceship, having been alerted by Clark's activation of the scout ship in the Arctic.  Zod sends a message that he is looking for the hidden Kal-El and threatens to attack Earth if Kal-El does not surrender.

Clark dons the suit and surrenders to the US Military prior to surrendering to Zod.   Zod's second in command collects Clark, but says that Zod also wants Lois.  For some reason.   Zod finds the codex in Clark's blood and Lois activates Jor-El's hologram which helps her free Clark and get back to Earth.

Zod begins to terraform Earth, intending to kill Clark and use the codex and baby trees (aka the genesis chamber) from the scout ship to reconstitute Krypton.  Apocalyptic destruction happens in metropolis until Clark destroys the world engine on the other side of the world.  In Metropolis Clark confronts Zod on the scout ship and destroys the baby trees.   The military uses the phantom drive on the ship Clark arrived in to send Zod's ship and all the other Kryptonians back to the Phantom Zone.

Zod, the only one not sent to the Zone, fights Clark, causing more devastation to metropolis.  Clark eventually breaks Zod's neck to prevent him from using his heat vision on bystanders.  Clark drops to his knees and screams.

In the epilogue, Clark goes to work at the Daily Planet.  Lois welcomes him with a smirk and a "Welcome to the planet."   The End.    

The Filmmaking

The Look of It

I think this movie looks fine.  The color palette is a little muted but it isn’t slathered in the CGI nowhere that later movies in the series (and often superhero movies in general) fall victim to.  It mostly looks like it happens in real places and it also doesn't have most of Snyder's cinematographic ticks.

As Patrick Willems says in his "The Zack Snyder Video:"

"Man of Steel, from first glance, does not look like a Zack Snyder film at all.  There is zero slow motion in this movie and relatively minimal use of green screens.  The filmmaker who had been best known for hyper-stylized ultra-slick fetishized imagery dropped all of that and instead focused on naturalism using a loose handheld sort of cinema verite quasi documentary style."

I do think, though, while the real locations help with grounded realism, weirdly they don't really feel all that real.

In the final fight in Metropolis, whenever we pause inside a building that Clark or Zod smashes through the place is weirdly empty. Considering it's a huge city in the middle of the day only about 10 minutes into a crisis, it feels off.  Even Smallville doesn't feel all that real, which is weird because it looks fine.  This is Clark's hometown but he doesn't seem like he knows the place at all and he doesn't talk to anyone.  The only person he saves in Smallville is the soldier who falls out of the Army helicopter.  He does, thankfully, ask him if he's ok, but that's the only person he speaks to.

The only Smallville resident whose face we even see is Pete Ross when Clark and Faora smash into the IHOP, and that interaction is pretty inscrutable.  "Interaction" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence; they, for the second time in the film no less, just mutely stare at each other.   (For my money a simple "Hey, Pete" "Clark?" could have helped a lot here.)

Smallville feels like a facsimile of a real place like it's the main street of a theme park.  It's a set the character walks through because the plot needs him to.  He doesn't feel of it.  (And "but that's the point, he doesn't feel accepted" doesn't really land because we haven't seen enough of that to make it work.)

Superpowers Rule

The superpowers look awesome, here. To quote Willems, again:

[Snyder is] better at visualizing superpowers than almost any other filmmaker.  In Man of Steel in particular Snyder found a way to show what super speed and super strength might look like in a real world context and made them more believable on screen than I had seen before or since.  The choice to use all loose handheld camerawork has the camera always trying to keep up with the action and Snyder pays really close attention to the physics so the environment around the characters is always impacted whether its asphalt being crushed under their feet or the just wind from the movements blowing things back.

Adjacent to this superpower stuff, I've heard the fight scenes get a lot of praise but, for me, I didn't find them all that interesting, especially the fights with Zod as they are just two people slamming into each other and not even seeming to hurt each other very much.  Especially on a rewatch they're kind of interminable, and it doesn't really even feel all that high stakes for Superman because at no point does it seem like he's in much danger.  I think the Smallville one is better because there's some nice character stuff, the encounter is much more varied, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

The Acting

I think the acting is good, especially Michael Shannon as General Zod and Kevin Costner as Pa Kent.  Henry Cavill gets some shit from people about this movie, but the script gives him so little to do it’s hard to fault him as an actor.  Diane Lane as Ma Kent, in very limited screen time, delivers some really nice moments.  Really, there's good actors all over this film, even though some are in roles without much to do.  cough cough Amy Adams cough cough

Pop Criticisms

Pop criticisms of this movie tend to point at four aspects.

1. The apocalyptic destruction of the fights and Superman's lack of concern with collateral damage in general.

2. Pa Kent's response of "Maybe" when a young Clark asks "What was I supposed to do? Let them die?" regarding the school bus accident.

3. The fucking tornado scene.

4. Clark breaking Zod's neck.

I basically completely agree with number 1.  It's kind of a big problem, especially given how the movie frames it.  To quote Willems again:

The issue here is not the script or the fact that he is fighting the villains.  It is the way Snyder chooses to visualize it.  Because, yeah, it does look cool when Superman throws this dude into a train yard which then explodes.  But what this image tells us is that Superman doesn't really care that much about humanity at all.

(Also, this comes shortly after Jor-El saying "You can save them all" which, um, Mr. El....[citation needed])

Pa Kent's "Maybe" doesn't bother me at all.  It never did and I think people make too much of it.  Pa's clearly conflicted and he doesn't know what the hell to do about this objectively weird scenario he's neck deep in.  I think it's easy to fall into the trap of not allowing an iconic character to exist in the story being told and just comparing them to either another version of the character or some idealized half remembered version.

Many of the comics I've read have young Clark, or even adult pre-Superman Clark, worried about upsetting his father by revealing his powers, even in life or death situations.  In Birthright Clark says "Pa, forgive me" before stopping a massacre.

Superman (1978) looms large over all Superman media and its saintly portrayed of both of Clark's fathers has really lodged into pop consciousness as the definitive versions, but even in that film, an older Jonathan says this to his son:

When you first came to us, we thought people would come take you away because when they found out you know, the things you could do, and that worried us a lot. Then a man gets older, and he thinks very differently and things get very clear.

The Jonathan of the "Maybe" scene in Man of Steel is younger and still definitively in the "worried a lot" phase of being Clark's dad.

As for the tornado scene....sigh.  This is the dumbest scene in the film.  Put a pin in this, I'll get back to it.

The scene where Superman kills Zod bothers me, but not because he kills Zod.  Like a lot off missteps in Man of a Steel it's the framing and Clark's reaction that make it kind of bad.  I'll get back to this later, too.

And, really, that scene is kind of a microcosm of an overall thing I think is really weird about this film, and that is its nature as....

A Deconstructive Origin Story…but Not Really

Man of Steel sits in this strange middle ground where it's trying to be an origin story and maybe a deconstructive or subversive take on the character but it also doesn't really make sense if you don't already know the character beats.  It doesn't seem interested in revealing anything about who Clark is or how he makes his decisions, or even what his childhood or adult life even really look like.  By about 45 minutes into the movie Clark has only spoken about 8 lines and none of them show anything about his thoughts or his inner world.  The flashbacks that take up a lot of the front half of the movie are mostly triggered by him seeing an object, not by him thinking about a situation that is parallel to what he's currently experiencing.

Dan Olson in his video essay "A Lukewarm Defense of 50 Shades of Grey" says this about fictional characters

At a certain point characters cease to require their context to be whole and in effect become their own context.  And subsequently the fun comes from taking them and moving them around and playing with them in a variety of different styles and scenarios.

But Man of Steel is not that.  Telling an in medias res superhero story where you skip the origin is perfectly fine, and some of my favorite superhero films are in this category,  (e.g. The Dark Knight, Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Batman, Superman (2025))  But Man of Steel is trying to be, or at least is coding itself as, an origin story and it doesn't reveal anything about Clark.

And the movie doesn't go far enough to be a re-imagining; "Batman chasing Jack the Ripper" in Gotham by Gaslight this is not.  It's too conventional a take to be a subversion and has too much shorthand to be an actual origin story.

We don’t even see him decide to put the suit on the first time.  After a movie obsessed with him waiting because he doest know when or if he should “become” a superhero, he’s suddenly just wearing the suit with no revelation of why he decided it was time to put it on.  It's just because daddy Jor-El said so and the plot needs him to.  But then the next scene he’s in hiding again.  So …. Eh?

Clark just doesn't have much agency and is mostly reacting to events rather than actively driving them.  He feels like an Oliver Twist, passively blown around by the plot in a collection of episodic scenes from the Adventures of That Time Something Happened to Superman.

As Olson points out in his "Man of Steel Redux" video essay (well worth watching), a lot of Clark's scenes in the front half of the film seem out of order. or even kind of random which makes an underwritten character even harder to track emotionally.  Olson, characteristically, sums it up elegantly:

The flashbacks don't fit in thematically with the scenes around them and they don't do a good job of following Clark's adult arc.

Speaking of which...

Plot vs Theme

I know the events of this film but am hard pressed to say what this story is about, something that wouldn't even be much of an issue if the it didn't keep raising really interesting questions and conflicts that either go unresolved or are undercut by the movie's structure.

To quote Olson's "Man of Steel Redux" again:

What are the themes of Man of Steel? ...  Whatever you came up with you're probably right because the movie has a ton of themes it's trying to juggle at the same time and it turns into kind of a mess.

The film asks questions like “What kind of man am I going to be?” and “Should I reveal myself to the world?” but there's no real tension to any of them because of how the movie is put together.  In the case of the former, we already know his choice because the first thing we saw him do, before we even know he's grappling with the question, is save people and reveal himself.  And the question of revealing himself to the world is completely hamstrung because Zod forces his hand.  Zod is going to wreck Earth, knows Clark is there, and is actively looking for him so there is no choice here.

An aspect I theoretically really like is laid out by Jonathan early on:

When the world finds out what you can do it's gonna change everything. Our beliefs, our notions of what it means to be human. ... You're the answer, son.  You're the answer to "Are we alone in the universe?"

I really like that he's very aware about the titanic, world altering implications of Clark's existence.  Except, in this story, for humanity, Clark is not the answer to that question.  Zod is.

And I really like the idea of Zod as a first villain for a Superman; it's a vision of what Superman's power without Superman's morality would be. I love cracked mirror versions of characters.  But Zod doesn't really work as a "but for the grace of God go I" Superman, because we don't know Superman in this movie and Zod isn't a cautionary tale because Clark is never tempted to impose his will on people weaker than him.

i like the idea of Clark having to choose between the paths laid out by a fearful Pa Kent and a hopeful Jor-El.  But that conflict doesn't really matter because of the nature of Zod's world ending threat.

Again, Superman can be his own context, and the Superman of Man of Steel needs that external context since the film not interested in showing anything about Clark that might change it.  But that causes conflicts between how the character should react in this particular story and how the character does react.

With that idea in mind, I think the "Clark kills Zod" scene is revealing.  As I alluded to earlier, this scene is kind of a mess.  Firstly and least importantly, It's blocked and contrived really awkwardly.  The randos in the train station seem to patiently wait on their marks so they can be trapped by Zod's heat vision.  Everyone else has run and even when the blast comes, Clark is restraining Zod's head.  They absolutely have space to run forward and get out of there.  I guess panic makes you do dumb shit, but I think if this were edited a little differently or if Zod and Clark didn't have a brief chat before the heat vision while the randos just stared at them it wouldn't feel so awkward.

Far more importantly, Clark's reaction was not earned by this film.  Why is Clark so broken up about killing this man that, as Olson points out, he was just trying very hard to kill in Smallville and Metropolis?  That Clark values all life and thinks you should never kill has not been established, not from his own inclinations, not from Jonathan's lessons, Jor-El doesn't mention it and Superman has only made direct effort to save like two people thus far.  He's been pretty unaffected by the doubtless thousands and thousands of people that have just died in Metropolis, and even just had a sweet kiss of tonal dissonance with Lois (and I'll get to that.)  If the train station randos really were under mortal peril, then killing the guy you were just trying to kill anyway to save them doesn't seem like that upsetting of a choice.

I do not care that Superman killed Zod, except that nothing came of it.  This could have worked but it needed to be framed as the event that birthed his no kill rule rather than a moment that violated a strict moral code this origin story text didn't bother with.  If rather than falling to his knees and screaming, if he just had a moment of "Shit...i thought I needed to do that, but I should have found another way.  Never again," I think it would been better.

This is a more subtle one, but when Clark destroys the baby trees in the scout ship and says "Krypton had its chance" it feels like its a culmination of something but it isn't really.  He doesn't particularly have a connection to that plot line.  It's the final destruction of Jor-El's  hopes to restart Krypton, but Clark doesn't even really know about that, and so cannot know that he's epically rejecting Jor-El.  Jor-El tells Zod that "our people can coexist" and he injected Clark with the codex in the first place, so it's safe to assume restarting Krypton on earth was always the plan.  But he very obviously did not tell Clark this when they first met and when Clark asks him "Is it true what Zod said about the Codex?" Jor-El responds with some vague "You could be the bridge between two people" which almost sounds metaphorical.  Clark never wrestles with this revelation either and it all happens so quickly that it doesn't feel all that significant, like its just a MacGuffin to make the plot happen.

So Clark destroying the genesis chamber doesn't really hold the emotional weight  to justify the immense visual weight it gets.  And in a film where father figures loom large over the main character, it's weird that there's no reflection on this destruction of Jor-El's dream.

The reason this example doesn't stand out a lot is that we the audience have spent (too much) time on Krypton and we know this is a big deal for Jor-El.  But what is it to our protagonist?  Not a lot.  Again, for Clark there is not much of a choice to be made here.

(Also, I think it's funny that Jor-El, while telling Clark about the folly of Krypton's rigid caste society, says "What if a child dreamed to be something else?" and then basically immediately   follows it up with "Anyway go put on this suit now and fulfill my plan for you.")

To quote Olson again:

There's all these interesting things [Man of Steel] was trying to do, but they just don't come together.

Tell Not Show

This movie is pretty "tell not show."  Characters endlessly reiterate questions or bluntly state ideas without the film showing what they mean.  It's stuff that sounds deep and would be interesting to explore but then isn't, really.

For example, Jonathan and Clark talk a lot about Clark being rejected by humanity because of fear.  It's phrased so vaguely that it's hard to know what they actually mean by "rejection" and we don’t actually ever see this happening.

The closest we get is after young Clark's bus rescue but even that is weird, because Pete Ross's mother says what Pete saw was "an act of God" and "Providence," which is hard to square with Jonathan's fearful “You see how she reacted?”  Also, her line read is really accusatory which just doesn't really match the words the she said.

And we don’t see anything like that at all for adult Clark and this could have been so easy to show.  The Birthright comic has Clark telling his mother, over some quick flashbacks, how

Each time I think I've made a connection with someone once they find out what I can do, whether it's hours or day later, everything changes.  Invariably, they freak.

This is easier to latch onto as it's more personal and you understand that his powers make him feel cut off and isolate him from others.   The Clark of Superman: Earth One, on the other  hand, isolates himself because he's terrified he's going to accidentally hurt someone.

Man of Steel's rejection is theoretical because we have no insight into what Clark fears will happen if he's amorphously "rejected' by the world at large.  And we don't see him meaningfully interact with anyone as an adult prior to becoming Superman* so why is he so isolated?  You can head cannon a whole lot of reasons, but this is an origin story.  And they left out something that seems like it's pretty important to this version of the character.

(*Or arguably after, too)

Superfreak

This film is very committed to calling Superman a freak.  A few minutes into the film his mother Lara says that on Earth Kal-El will "be an outcast. A freak."  Which, what?  How can she possibly know that and what does that even mean?  It just rings so false for the character and situation.  Like, it's now or never, he will die here soon with everyone else.  Also, soon after that line she says "What if the ship doesn't make it. He'll die out there alone" which is a much more salient objection than "what if the Earthlings are mean to him?"

Then his high school bullies call him a freak because.... eh?   Again, I can head cannon a lot of reasons, but considering in the opening minutes of the film a character basically turns to the camera and says that this is a thematic crux of the character conflict, I think maybe the film should have, you know, showed it.

I'm not sure why Man of Steel is so committed to making Clark's pretty good pull at the slot look like it completely sucks.  Zod replies to Jor-El's 'Our people can co-exist" with "So we can suffer through years of pain trying to adapt like your son has?"  Which, again... what?  You know you'll be a god right and why do you assume it'll take years?  That line's kind of funny when we know Clark at ten years old figured it out in like 20 minutes.  (I know Zod doesn't know this, but still.)

Weird Shorthand and Weird Lines

Man of Steel uses a lot of shorthand.  Clark's dilemma about "whether to stand proud in front of the human race" I guess is resolved by him presenting himself to the US military which serves as synecdoche for the people of Earth.  Which...ok?

And his fear of rejection is I guess resolved by Jenny of the Daily Planet, serving as proxy for the whole human race, saying "He saved us!"  I actually laughed out loud at this on my rewatch because it's pretty ridiculous on a couple of levels.  On just a plot level, how the fuck does Jenny have any idea what just happened.  She didn't know Clark destroyed the world engine in the Indian Ocean, so from her perspective, a spaceship showed up, started wrecking shit, then stopped, and then the US military somehow obliterated the spaceship and then a flying man caught Lois.  Did...did she read the script?

Using Jenny as a proxy for acceptance from humanity maybe shows some awareness of the problem that Superman doesn't save or interact with anyone substantively except Lois, but it is kind of laughable in context.  It just doesn't make all that much sense that she would say that, especially given that Perry and Steve are the ones who actually just saved her from being pinned under rubble.

I can't help but think that that would have been way more effective if Superman himself had actually rescued them; it would show he actually cared about the destruction and would make Jenny a better stand-in for global acceptance.  The Daily Planet trio get a weird amount of screen time and the film really puts weight on them, so I'm kind of flabbergasted that Superman was entirely uninvolved with their little mini-arc, especially if they're going to crown him their savior.

Oh and it doesn't really resolve his rejection angst because he doesn't even hear Jenny say it.

Also, it's extra funny that Jenny says this while looking over the smoking crater of downtown Metropolis.   Speaking of which, right after Jenny's line Superman and Lois have their kiss.  To quote Willems again:

... it is totally cool to have a scene where Superman rescues Lois Lane and then they kiss and make a joke.  But it becomes really weird when you frame this nice lighthearted moment with them standing in the rubble of like a hundred 9/11s.  ... Snyder's visual choice is clashing with what the script is doing and creating this wild tonal dissonance.

(For other examples of this, see also Snyder's Watchmen (2009). Like, all of it)

There's also a lot of lines in the movie that sound kind of cool, but in retrospect: what?  A few examples i thought were funny:

From Clark:

Zod can't be trusted.  The problem is I'm not sure the people of Earth can be either.

Um, [citation needed]

From Faora:

You are weak son of El. Unsure of yourself.  The fact that you possess a sense of morality and we do not gives us an evolutionary advantage. And if history has proven anything it is that evolution always wins.

How do you know he has a sense of morality?  Again, did you read the script?  Also "evolution always wins" is pretty rich coming from the person whose planet exploded.

From General Swanwick and Clark

"Why are you surrendering to Zod?"

"I'm surrendering to mankind. There's a difference."

... Is there?  Tell me more... At no point is it a real surrender and Clark almost immediately breaks his handcuffs and scares the shit out of them.  And would he not have gone over to Zod if they had said "Nah, I reckon we won't tell him you're here"?

There's also one really hilariously clunky line from Lois:

Perry, it's me we're talking about. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

This one stuck out because it's really an outlier; the earlier lines I quoted maybe don't hold up to rigorous scrutiny, but they do sound like something a human would say.   This could have been fixed super easily, too.  "You don't trust my instincts?  Do i need to show you my Pulitzers again?"  Same info, less weird, and shows some personality.

Some Thoughts on Characters

Clark

It is almost unsettling how little Clark speaks to anyone.  He probably interacts with Jor-El the most, though he's mostly talked at, and then Lois, who he doesn't have much rapport with.  They like each other because….they’re Clark Kent and Lois Lane.  (They also look like Henry Cavill and Amy Adams which probably helps.)

I keep hammering on this, but especially for an origin story, I feel like the film does a really poor job of communicating the inner life of the protagonist and this makes some of his actions feel kind of random.  I think the scene where Clark confronts Ludlow the trucker who is harassing Chrissy the waitress in the bar where he works encapsulates this.

After Clark puts his hand on Ludlow's shoulder and asks him to leave Chrissy alone, Ludlow rises to his full height, about 6 inches shorter than Clark, and pours a pitcher of beer on his head.  Then he goes to shove Clark and almost knocks himself over while Clark doesn't budge.  (I really like that moment by the way.)  Clark then just looks at Ludlow and says nothing until Chrissy says "It's not worth it, sweetie" and he proceeds to take off his apron and leave without a word.  Ludlow throws a beer can at his head on the way out.

This scene is extremely strange.  Leaving aside that Ludlow, who is not armed and does not appear to be drunk, probably wouldn't immediately escalate to beer pouring on a guy Clark's size, Clark's reaction is absolutely inscrutable.  Is he having trouble controlling his temper?  Is he worried he's going to hurt someone?  Scare someone?  Is he embarrassed?  Is he worried  about revealing himself?

That last one could work if we hadn't already seen adult Clark reveal his powers to a bunch of people in his first scene and also when Lois looks into him later, she finds out about many times Clark, using fake names, has helped people.  So why not here? Especially when he's leaving Chrissy with a complete asshole who's already grabbed her ass once and ignored her objections.

This is an interesting situation for pre-Superman Clark to be in and it's a great opportunity to teach the audience about our hero.  Instead we learn....eh?

I don't know if this is a scripting problem or an editing problem; this might have worked if it was paired with the much later flashback to Clark's high school bullies, where he says he wanted to hurt them and Jonathan says "And then what? Make you feel any better?"  Even so, it's not quite a parallel situation because in the bar he's ostensibly trying to help a third party, so I think for that to really work he would have had to actually hurt the bullies in the flashback. Then his reticence to risk hurting the guy in the bar would have tracked better, helped establish that he doesn't like to hurt people, and given him plenty of incentive to walk away.

(As it stands, the bully flashback is paired with his conversation with the priest while he's trying to decide whether to reveal himself to Zod, which is a very confusing choice.  No part of the bully scene is particularly applicable to the Zod problem.)

Also Clark destroying Ludlow's truck is a dog shit move for this character, especially since we have to assume his moral code is Superman Standard because it doesn't show us another one.  If this was supposed to be a subversive scene, Clark would need to be a bigger piece of shit in general, and then the film probably should have him learn something and change his ways.  As shot, the moment is just cathartic wish fulfillment that makes Clark a petty dick.   

Lois Lane

...   She doesn't really do anything.  It's too bad. I really like Amy Adams.  (Did you see Arrival?  That movie is so good.)

She saves Clark on Zod's ship by doing what Jor-El tells her, but overall she's really superfluous and doesn't even have an interesting or character revealing dynamic with Clark.  Their first two interactions are are really brief and they mostly just talk about the how she's bleeding from the scout ship security droids or reiterating what has already been stated multiple times.   

Their third interaction has a bit more charm to it, but it's too brief to make much of an impression.   Like with a lot of the Superman lore, the movie requires you to fill in Lois with what you already know about her and her relationship with Superman.  We all know they get together so why bother establishing any chemistry or understanding between them?  And the answer to why they should both is, once again, because Man of Steel is cosplaying as an origin story.

Jor-El

I think Russel Crowe was really good as Jor-El, but i must say, I hate the "I sent them you, my only son, to be a force for good" type of Jor-El as a story choice.  I think it originated with Marlon Brando's Jor-El in Superman (1978) but it has trickled into the comics to greater or lesser degree.

This is a personal taste thing, and it can be done fairly well (the Superman: Space Age comic comes to mind) but I think it weakens the character because it makes Superman's motivation for doing good be because his space dad told him to.  It reduces the weight of his choice to help people when it's a mandate from the heavens (literally in this case) .

This isn't always a plot point in Superman, or even in Superman origins.  John Byrne's Jor-El is kind of a dick.   Birthright's Jor-El doesn't have a plan for Clark to make Earth better.  Why would Jor-El even care?   This Jor-El could have a reason, because he doesn't want Earth to end up like Krypton.  But he also does want to colonize it, so maybe that's a moral wash?

It always bugs me though that Jor-El is sure that "You will give them an ideal to strive for." Like.... How the fuck does he know Kal-El is worthy of that?  What if he's a selfish dickhead?  What if he's completely feral? What if he's a fucking moron?  Or a Nazi?

Is power the ideal to strive towards?  Does the possession of power make you the ideal and does having great power retroactively make you worthy in a kind of superhero prosperity gospel?  God, I hope that's not the message.  And in this very film, Zod certainly proves that power itself doesn't necessarily lead to nobility.  (Though maybe real world media illiterates do think the pure power fantasy is the appeal and have made Zod a folk hero.)

Even if Jor-El had said something like "Be worthy of this power Kal" it could have helped a lot. In addition to Jor-El assuming facts not in evidence, meta-textually we the audience don't know Clark either.  So that "You will give them an example to strive for" really doesn't land.

Missed Opportunities

I'd say there's a really good movie in here, but I actually think there's at least two, one focused on Clark grappling with his great power and deciding whether to reveal himself, and one where he has to fight the cracked mirror version of himself in Zod.  I'm not sure they play well together.

This section is going to be me working through a couple of changes that I think would have tightened the story up a bit and given Clark more depth.

The Tornado

I dislike this scene immensely and I've heard a few people who really love this movie still criticize the tornado incident where Jonathan dies.  I think there's two ways this scene maybe could at least sort of work.

The first is if it was paired with a parallel situation later, like a moment he chooses to unambiguously reveal himself by saving one person dramatically.  With a bit of  "I'm sorry, Pa. I was wrong, and so were you."  I guess it could have been paired with the oil rig rescue, which would also have the benefit of not showing that he's already made his choice to use his powers for good.  (Probably have to cut the part where Lois finds out he's been helping people the entire time, too, as it blunts the conflict and shows that he's already decided offscreen his dad's way wasn't right.)

The second way I think this could have worked, and the one I prefer, is if Clark were still a boy.  He'd be more likely to defer to his father and Jonathan's motive could be more "The government will find out and take Clark away and do god knows what to him."  The film really leans away from the "the government might take you away" angle that's present in a bunch of the source material because it seems kind of allergic to criticizing the government or the military specifically.  This is likely at least in part because the military subsidy it received and the script approval the Department of Defense's gets in exchange for the money.

The Bar

The scene with Ludlow the asshole could be an opportunity for some nice Superman-ing and some nice character stuff.  I would have really liked it if Clark, after getting beer dumped on him and ineffectually pushed, had taken a moment, then smiled and de-escalated the situation and talked Ludlow into contrition and an apology.  We know Clark could paste this guy, he knows he can, and the audience so desperately wants him to.  But Clark resisting and appealing to better natures, showing the bar patrons, and the audience, that letting anger go is the way forward would make him...I dunno, some sort of ideal for the people of Earth to strive towards.  It would show us, what Jor-El will tell us about Clark later.  This solution also doesn't necessitate that he leaves the bar immediately, giving him more time to contemplate what the soldiers are saying about the "anomalous object" filling in a slight issue with the plotting.

Or, alternatively, you have him do something vaguely incredible and maybe scary and have everyone, including Chrissy the waitress, react in fear.  Which would show us a version of rejection that the movie keeps vaguely telling us about.  It would also explain why he just immediately quits his job and vanishes.

Clark, himself

Clark is mostly a mopey starer in first half of the movie, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I wish some effort was made to show us why.  A possible template for this could be how he is handled in Superman: Earth One.  Clark is equally morose and taciturn in that story but about halfway through the story he tells his mother:

I’ve always been afraid of accidentally hurting someone I care about.  … That’s the thing, mom. I could.  I try not to. I fight not to.  But what if i make a mistake someday?  That fear is why I’ve always kept people at arm’s length. I stick to the big problems, not individual situations …But there are times now when I think, can I really afford to keep doing that?

So here, Clark's isolation is psychologically justified and revealed to be self-imposed.  And most importantly, it's the starting point for a character arc that sees him begin to overcome his fears, engage with individual people, and become more of the hero he wants to be.

I think something like this would make Man of Steel's Clark a lot more compelling and actually give Cavill something to do.

Zod Stuff

I would have liked it if Clark spent some time before and during the final fight trying to talk Zod down and doing his best to subdue him.  As it stands, Zod's death doesn't feel like a last resort and I kind of don't like that Zod's statement "There's only one way this ends, Kal. Either you die or I do" is proven right.  I suppose with the phantom drive gone there was no way to get Zod back to the Phantom Zone and no real way to imprison him, but it feels like another defeat for our hero.  Even at the end Zod, not Clark, is dictating the terms.

I talked earlier about how I didn't think the Zod fights were all that interesting and there wasn't much sense of actual damage or danger but there would be a pretty easy way to up the stakes and heighten the tension.

Again, Earth One provides a possible angle.  Clark asks his ship's computer what he can do to defeat Zod.  It replies:

Nothing. Your only recourse is to flee Earth and hope  that he leaves this world in peace. You cannot fight him and win.  Your power levels are identical, but [Zod] is a soldier, a general, a trained killer.  And you...are not.

Even on first watch I always thought Clark did better against the trained soldiers than he probably should have.  Maybe if Zod's threat were more explicit it would have made the fighting more interesting.

Gallimaufry Consisting Mostly of Stuff I Liked

• I think the prologue on Krypton is really well done as a self contained story.  There's some good visual and economical (in a good way) storytelling.  (The fucking crash zooms get old REAL fast though; sometimes there's more than one in the same shot).  It really effectively shows the calcification of a once ambitious society now in complete retreat and denial, even if some of the action beats overstay their welcome a bit.  But at 20 minutes it's way too long for this movie.  I thought it was too long in the theater and definitely thought so on rewatch.  Especially since I initially (and still) think the pacing of Clark's flashbacks in the beginning is way too fast and they needed some breathing room they didn't have time to get because the prologue was so long.

The time would have been better spent getting to know Clark and Jor-El gives a giant exposition dump in the scout ship later anyway.   The film could have started on a black screen with their lines

"They'll kill him."

"How? He will be a god to them"

"What if the ship doesn't make it?  He'll die out there alone."

"Krypton is doomed. It's his only chance now. It's our people's only hope.  "

Then show the rocket taking off.  Then cut to adult Clark.

• I really like Ma Kent's "Make the world smaller" speech to young Clark when his senses are causing him pain.  I wish it had come up again later, like when facing overwhelming destruction in Metropolis, he could say it to himself and then save one person.  And then another. Then another etc.

• I love how nervous Clark looks in Smallville as he walks towards Non and Faora. He's never done this before.  You can practically see him gulp.  Cavill doesn't get much to work with in this film, but he really sold this part.

• Man of Steel occasionally feels like it was reverse engineered from the set pieces.  Why did Zod want Lois?   Because the plot needed her to be there.  And sometimes stuff feels missing.  Why did Clark go to the Arctic?  A soldier in the bar says

Somebody found something strange on Ellesmere. Aircom's making runs out there all week. ... The Americans are there too, lots of them. They're calling it an anomalous object.

Clark hears it and perhaps looks interested but it's not clear why that would mean anything to him and he has no time to process it before Chrissy gets harassed by the jerk-off at the bar.

• The needle drop of Chris Cornell's song "Seasons" was a little weird because it's the only one in the film and the only non-diegetic music with lyrics.  It's a fantastic song, though.  (Chris Cornell is one of my favorite artists.)  Also if you have the subtitles on the lyrics are kind of on the nose:

Summer nights and long warm days are stolen as the old moon falls

And my mirror shows another face, another place to hide it all

And I'm lost, behind the words I'll never find

And I'm left behind as seasons roll on by

(Though the most hilariously on the nose lyrics on a soundtrack I've ever seen was at the end of Punisher Season 2, where it seemed like the first line of every song used was literally what was happening on the screen.)

• There's two Battlestar Galactica (2004) alums in this movie,  Tahmoh Penikett (Helo) and Alessandro Juliani (Geta), in very small roles.  I wonder if that's just a coincidence.

• I hate Clark's line re: the S on his suit:  "On my world it means hope"   Earth is your world, you ungrateful prick.  Couldn't he have said "Where I'm from, it means hope"?

• Clark is 33 years old.  Add another one to the bucket of Jesus parallels.

• Clark to the military: "You're scared of me because you can't control me."   Also, because you have super powers.

• I really like how Zod has motivations besides just being evil and they are a product of the rigidity of Krypton's caste system that was shown in the prologue.  Zod says to Clark:

I exist only to protect Krypton.  That is the sole purpose for which I was born. And every action I take no matter how violent or how cruel is for the greater good of my people

This inability to adapt or change is what also doomed Krypton.  And the film showed us though Zod's actions and words what Jor-El told us earlier, that Zod "was a product of the failures of our world."  Really deftly handled, I think.  Good stuff.

Conclusion

Despite me pretty much just shit talking this film for the past [redacted] words, I do enjoy it and I think its alright.  But my contrarian streak kicks in when I hear some of "the discourse" regarding this film.  And I'm about to say some harsh things, so buckle up.

I've heard "This is Superman if it were the real world!" which it most assuredly isn't.  No one really feels like a fully realized person here, except for Zod and arguably the hologram of Jor-El.   And the insane destruction of Smallville and Metropolis and Clark's angst over killing Zod is completely forgotten and unaddressed by the very next scene.  There's basically no real world consequences.  (I know the next movie addresses some of this a bit, but no one knew that was going to happen when this film came out  and I think that was the filmmakers retroactively addressing criticism.)

I've also seen this described as an "deeply introspective" and "morally complex" which is mind bogglingly not true.  A character sadly staring at things with no indication of their internal weather is not introspection.  It's blankness.  And there is no moral complexity here; Clark doesn't even make any real choices.  I think it's really shallow and dare I say juvenile take on all of this.   

That isn't necessarily a criticism, lots of movies don't pose character questions or provide complex dives into the human psyche, but the pop discourse is that this is a deep story driven movie for adults.  I think the morality of these movies (I'm including the next one too) is way more like the moral questions posed by a 13 year old trying to look deep.

People frowning, saying faux-philosophical catchphrases, and a muted colors palette do not, on their own, a mature movie make and part of me resents the reductionist shorthand.

As for whether this is a good take on the character....in this movie?  It's whatever.  First days on the job after all.  The wheels might have a little wobble here, but they don't completely come off until the next film in the series.  Like what I said about Azzarello's New 52 Wonder Woman, the "problem" with Man of Steel's Clark is "more an issue of non-characterization rather than a characterization that is inconsistent with [the] other portrayals."  (Other than Clark destroying Ludlow's truck, making no almost no effort to save people during the Metropolis fight, and arguably, leaving Chrissy in a potentially dangerous situation.)

I think the filmmakers didn't actively misunderstand Superman so much as they didn't really care about him as a character.  I think some of the implications of his actions or non-actions just wasn't thought through besides the iconography and "wouldn't this look awesome?"  I know some of the crappier corners of the fandom see Superman as an ubermensch power fantasy (they really want Superman to be Homelander) but i wouldn't go so far as to say that was the filmmakers' intent.

Having said that all of that, I'd like to end with another quote from Dan Olson's "A Lukewarm Defense of 50 Shades of Grey"

I do want to take a moment to talk about what resonated with audiences.  The books aren't good but it's disingenuous to insist that no one could engage with them authentically.  It has clearly struck a chord with its core audience and developed a loyal fanbase that likes it for what it is, in whole or in part.

While I've been in effect arguing that I think someone would be hard pressed to make a good faith case that this story is well told (and don't misunderstand, I am not remotely equating this film's quality with the critical dumpster fire that is the 50 Shades novels), I am not saying that people who enjoy it are stupid edgelords or something.  I'm one of those people.  I can think a movie is kind of juvenile without meaning the people who like it are therefore juvenile.  I think the John Wick movies are great and, save for the very beginning of the first one, they're a kid smashing toys together.

In general, like what you like.  But I wish people were more ok with liking something for what it is and not using the fact that they like it to post hoc rationalize the case that, actually, it's something it isn't.

This movie didn't do well critically, and I hope I've explained some reasons why i think that's the case.  Personally, I'll give a superhero a pretty wide latitude on their first week on the job.  Most of my initial misgivings about consequence and characterization could all have been assuaged by how Superman and his world were handled in the sequel.

...

Sigh.

See you soon Batman  v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  :: sad trombone ::

-m