CRASH AND BURN By Fearless Young Orphan Man of Steel (2013) Directed by Zack Snyder There are maybe twenty minutes of an awesome Superman movie in this film. I mean epic, gorgeous, thrilling Superman moments that made my brain stutter: hang on, maybe this is a great movie after all? But, but . then the moment would end and we’d be back to SMASH SMASH EXPLODE and Russell Crowe’s Exposition Symposium. Those twenty minutes of awesome are hidden like Easter Eggs through 110 additional minutes of amazingly dull, bombastic, confusing, repetitive, poorly-edited mess. This was a chore to sit through. I was laughing at the wrong things. I was bored silly and badly annoyed. And I wanted to like it, I honestly did. By God I want someone to make a decent Superman movie. I think they had the potential here and it went wrong in a dozen different ways. A couple of notes before we get started. I’m not a Superman fangirl. I don’t read the comic books or the graphic novels and I don’t care about canon – well, not much—and I don’t have any unnatural devotion to one version or another of Superman’s tale. I do find Donner’s Superman and Superman II to be the best versions I have seen, but even these are imperfect films (but with great stars) and I don’t resent anyone trying to do it all one better. Oh, and don’t get me started on flippin’ Smallville. Maybe at the end of this, if we have time and if you all behave yourselves, I’ll repost an old Smallville drinking game I invented. Okay, here comes the bitching. Can I please just assume everybody knows the Superman story? Please don’t make me summarize; the Orphan is feeling tired and twitchy. 1. I don’t give a damn about Krypton, and I don’t need another damn reason for Kal- El to come to Earth. Here’s what I always understood: Krypton was destroyed, and Kal-El’s parents sent him to Earth to save his life, knowing he’d be pretty badass once he got there. That’s all I ever needed to know. It was all the reason I required. Thanks to an absolutely ENDLESS sequence on Krypton (it’s twenty minutes but I think it aged me seven years) in Man of Steel, we get a bunch more reasons. Krypton is a hotbed of genetic tinkering and poorly-planned intergalactic expansion and predestined lives. I think they may be a bunch of Commies! The planet Krypton is about to blow apart because the Commies have been futzing with the planetary core. Also, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is staging a coup with his sexy backup singers, which rudely interrupts Russell Crowe (that is, Jor-El) yelling at the Kryptonian Commie Counsel about how everybody’s gonna die. Also, turns out Kal-El is the first natural birth that’s happened on Krypton in a bazillion years. That means nothing much as far as I can see. Russell Crowe takes the genetic material of all the Kryptonians yet-to-be-born out of a skull (?) and puts it inside Kal-El and shoots the baby into space, meaning that not only is the poor little booger going to grow up to be Superman but also a highly valued piece of a genetic laboratory, which can be yet another reason for Zod to pursue him, as if wanting revenge for his own imprisonment at Jor-El’s hands wasn’t quite enough. Just a note here: rather than make Zod a megalomaniacal jerk who just wants to be the ruler of whatever, this movie infuses him with genetic predestination which has the double whammy of making him less fun to watch and less interesting as a character. His goals are not terribly dissimilar from Jor-El’s own, which is to repopulate a new planet with Kryptonians, except that Zod doesn’t want to share and Jor-El is all about being Mr. Share. Russell Crowe puts on his armor from Gladiator in this bit and he also establishes the first, second, and third of the many lectures he will conduct in the following Russell Crowe Exposition Symposium. He explains and explains and explains and explains . We get to see all of this play out, and much much more! My goodness, the birth of Kal- El, the counsel meetings, a robbery, a lot of spaceships flying around, a lengthy tearful goodbye combined with a silly medical procedure, a rather useless fistfight between Zod and Jor-El, and more fightin’, Zod’s trial and his angry threats afterward (I will find Kal- El, bitches!), his and his sexy backup singers’ expulsion to the Phantom Zone, and more planetary assplosions. And this all looks a lot like the opening scenes of The Chronicles of Riddick when the ships from the Underverse attack the colonies, only it’s not nearly as exciting because nothing that happens here matters. This planet is about to explode and we know exactly who gets out alive. While I was anxiously waiting for all this to be over with so the real movie could start, and on occasion wondering if I’d inserted the wrong film into the Blu-Ray player, I told myself, “It’s okay! This will get much better once Superman gets to Earth. They tried for an epic prologue and got a little too enthusiastic about it, that’s all.” 2. Clark Kent grows up in Smallville, Kansas, in a series of disjointed boring flashbacks that repeat themselves. Perhaps the idea was that showing us flashbacks of Smallville at various points throughout the movie would draw our attention away from this being a story we’ve already heard ad nauseum – although Pa Kent does die in a new and rather exciting way, very showy indeed – but guess what! Not only does it fail to do that, it also makes the movie seem disoriented and weird! 3. And Pa Kent is a psycho. For some reason it is necessary for us to get Pa Kent (Kevin Costner, a cool casting choice I admit) telling Clark at least three different times that Clark must hide his identity at all costs, even if that means letting people die. No, he seriously does say that. Clark’s school bus crashes into a lake and Clark, after rescuing everybody on board, is frowny-faced by Pa who says, “Probably would have been better to leave them there to die, rather than risk freaking anyone out.” In fact he lets Clark watch Pa get swept up by a tornado rather than allowing the boy to rescue him, because Clark has to LEARN, damn it, that his own secret is more important than lives. That’s a good lesson. Because see, the government could get Clark and force him to . oh, wait . yeah, it’s pretty much established later that there’s not a damn thing the government can do to him. So I’m not really sure . 4. Scenes of battling and destruction are far less interesting than Zack Snyder seems to think. The second half of this film is dominated by two, or maybe three, or possibly six, battles that smash and/or explode everything in Kansas and Metropolis. Anyway, these battles SMASH and EXPLODE and then SMASH! Then things BREAK AND EXPLODE AND SMASH AND CRASH AND SMASH! THEN EXPLODE! AND THEN CRASH AND SMASH! Wow, I bet the CG people had so much fun, making all that virtual debris SMASH AND EXPLODE until we couldn’t tell one SMASH from ANOTHER! People struggle with each other and MONOLOGUE about EVOLUTION and STUFF! There is no room for plot or character development when everything is BLOWING UP. 5. SMASHING EXPLOSIONS AND EXPLODING SMASHES! WOW! IT NEVER STOPS! SUPERMAN CAN’T TAKE OFF FROM THE GROUND WITHOUT SMASHING IT! IT’S SMASHING! THIS MOVIE IS GOING TO BE A SMASH! 6. SMASHING AND MONOLOGUING ABOUT KRYPTON AND DESTINY SMASH SMASH CRASH EXPLODE! AND DESTINY SMASH! ZOD SMASHES! EXPLODING RUSSELL CROWE EXPLAINS MORE STUFF! BOOM CRASH! AND WHAT’S BETTER – THE FIGHT(S) ARE MEANINGLESS BECAUSE THESE KRYPTONIANS CAN’T HURT EACH OTHER EXCEPT WHEN THEY CAN! 7. The movie is a two-hour-long prologue. I respect the idea: that this is how Superman introduces himself to the world and makes himself a known hero while still insisting that the government not, you know, pester him about stuff. We are living in a more cynical age, when powers such as his might be treated with fear and suspicion, although I tend to think that people appreciate being rescued more than they dislike the idea of space alien probes. I’m just not sure how well Superman proves his point, that he is the “friend” of mankind. Did you see what he and Zod did to Metropolis? Surely they’re not implying that there were no casualties from that massive disaster of a fistfight. All that aside, I did try to grasp the essence of the plot. We have to get Kal-El/Clark/Superman into a position where he can be a hero. However, at the end of the film, Kal-El goes to get a SMASH CRASH BOOM SMASH 8. Excuse me, I’m talking here. At the end of the film, Clark Kent goes to get a job at The Daily BOOM CRASH MONOLOGUE EXPLAIN SMASH 9. Damn it! STOP THAT. Superman doesn’t get a job at The Daily Planet until the end of the film because that’s what he decides to do with his alter-ego Clark Kent.