Man of Steel

The latest Superman reboot, unlike 2006’s glossy Superman Returns, got in line with the last decade’s fashion for making superhero films darker and grittier. And I must say, I ended up liking it considerably more than I expected to.

The trailer was misleading, making it look like the film would largely be Smallville the Motion Picture, which I don’t think I would have enjoyed much, so I was quite pleased that what I got was largely a high-octane sci-fi melodrama. In the grand scheme of comic book adaptations, it’s in the lower half and is in large part just another Thor – with an uncannily similar overall story – but it was still spectacular, enjoyable and less frustrating than most Superman stories.

This Supes is not the all-American hero who quick-changes in the phone booths, wears his underpants outside his trousers and turns back time by flying around the Earth really fast. He’s a lot more Wolverine here, drifting on his own in scruffy stolen clothes and a wild beard, silently saving lives and disappearing before anyone asks too many questions. After a great cheesy prologue with Russell Crowe as Jor-El whuppin’ some ass before sending baby Kal off to Earth shortly before Krypton goes the way of Thundera, we largely follow this wildman, with some flashbacks to his father Kevin Costner impressing on the young Clarke Kent that keeping his powers secret until the time is right is important. When a scouting ship from Krypton is found, Clarke makes his way there and inadvertently starts up a beacon. Of course, this summons General Zod to Earth with his cronies, they promptly out Kal-El as one of them, and some good ole super-scraps can start up.

This was really what Man of Steel had that other versions of the same story don’t. Terrence Stamp is pretty awesome, but Superman II just didn’t have the technology we have for ridiculous fights where single punches send steel bodies ripping through buildings or into exploding trains. Apart from when Zod scales a building there’s a real weight and momentum to these fights that felt missing from most recent superhero films aside from the silly but refreshing Hancock and the latest Iron Man, and the scale of Snyder’s action sequences has no regard for buildings, military hardware or human lives (unless of course there’s a character shield in place, as with Laurence Fishburne’s doing-much-with-little newspaper boss (Perry White?).

The reason I was pleasantly surprised was that the trouble with Superman is that he’s so overpowered that any threat other than an equal just doesn’t work. Constant use of Kryptonite gets tiresome – and it’s thankfully absent here – and Lex Luthor being so easily squashable unless he has some absurd robot suit on makes him so unsatisfying as a nemesis (he’s here only in an oblique ‘Lexcorp’ nod). But this is a straight-ahead action film about a friendly superpowered alien who gets into a huge fight with other aliens with equal powers – a familiar but very different sort of film – and that works very well without the need for silly alien rocks or unlikely indistinguishable-from-magic tech.

There were some very distracting quibbles – the worst-placed Wilhelm scream ever and prison capsules for Zod and co that looked uncomfortably like squat dildoes (and I just Googled that to make sure I wasn’t alone – which I wasn’t’!) – but overall the lack of things I dislike about Superman in general, the likeable if cliché-gritty new version of Clarke in newly-awesome costume, the absurd but highly enjoyable action and for once heavy things really felt like heavy things. Only a few shades above mediocre, but that made it a pleasant surprise.