Man of Steel

Zod It
or
The Never-Ending Battle (No, Really.  The Never-Ending Battle)

Marvel Comics' film division has so saturated the movie market that its Direct Competition, DC Comics looks like a 98-pound weakling by comparison.  Oh, they did well with Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" Batman series (very well), but the Warners film version of Green Lantern was a little dim.  So, if they put out any more product, they'd better do it right, or be seen as also-ran's.  And the one they HAVE to nail is the DC super-star and cornerstone, Superman. The Last Son of Krypton debuted in comics in 1938, has been on-screen since the Fleischer cartoon days of 1942, a radio series since 1940, on television since 1952, and the big screen since 1980 (ushering the current glut of superhero movies).  Superman has had several iterations since, especially on television, starting with George Reeves, then "Lois and Clark," then "Smallville."  Much tribute has been paid the last few years to the movie version starring Chris Reeve—he even appeared on "Smallville" a few times before his death—and Bryan Singer's attempted re-boot, Superman Returns, was a slavish recreation with better technology, that, in retrospect, was so slavish, it was a little creepy.

The rumor is Warner Brothers HAD to make a Superman movie or pay out a healthy sum to the family of Jerry Siegel, the characters' co-creator, and coincidentally, David Goyer gave Christopher Nolan a great idea for how to handle Superman while they were making The Dark Knight Rises.  Nolan wants to direct other things besides super-heroes, so he brought in Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) to do the film, and in some ways its a good choice.  Snyder knows how to bring comic books to the big screen, transposing the static images to a hyper-dramatic movement, even if he sometimes misses the point of what those stories are saying. The trick was making a GOOD Superman movie—even the Reeve ones corroded after a few years—out of an essentially "old-fashioned" character that challenges for worthy opponents.  What can you do with Superman that hasn't already been done?  How do you present it-him?  Is he Moses or Hercules?  Christ or Pro-Wrestler?  There have been lots of interpretations over the last 75 years, and Nolan-Goyer-Snyder have snatched quite a few of them to their purposes.

Lets talk about what's good about Man of Steel: they're no slavish interpretations: on Krypton, there are no gleaming towers, head-bands, or crystal palaces, but instead an interesting steel-chrome re-imagining, with no plastic in sight (even their view-screens are pointilated metal images), with no clean architectural lines but re-engineered as if by Frank Geary.  Superman's suit is more rococo than Ringling Brothers.  Casting is uniformly excellent: yes, Laurence Fishburne makes a great Perry White; Amy Adams a spunky, no-nonsense (for once) Lois Lane; and Henry Cavill is empathetic as the many identities of alien Kal-El, preternaturally handsome, almost beautiful, and alarmingly ripped, he never winks, acts cute, and plays it straight and unironically, with maybe a little too much furrow in his brow.  Russell Crowe's Jor-El is a bit more of an action-figure this time, which seems unnecessary, and Ayelet Zurer has much more to do as Lara than just cry and fret.  Kal-el's Earth foster parents, the Kents, are marvelous, both Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, but especially Costner, whose Jonathan Kent is a moral force to be reckoned with, fully aware that his son is not only a special-needs child, but a sociological game-changer, the answer to "we're not alone in the Universe" and all the potential for panic and fear that his very existence might produce. Costner's been waiting in the wings doing good, unsentimental character work in smaller movies, shucking his ego, for many years for the opportunity to do something this good and remind people that, yeah, he's a good, clever, disciplined actor capable of great things.

The other thing that gave me great hope for Man of Steel was its re-interpretation of the whole "growing up super" problem.  Kal-El/Clark Kent grows up with a gradually increasing set of powers—in class one day, he freaks out because he can see the skeletons of all his classmates, a cacophony of sounds from miles around threaten to split his skull, he runs to isolate himself in (as tradition) a broom-closet, and when teacher threatens to open the door, he zaps it with heat-vision.  He can't tell people what's going on—Dad's orders—but he has to learn to deal with being different, and suppress it, even to the disservice of others.  It's the "gift or curse" dlllemma, which has been touched on before in the mythos, but never to this extent.  And the other nifty thing is that more than any other "Super"-movie, this one is more science-fiction oriented, it's an alien invasion movie that "Superman" just happens to star in, and be the chief target for.  And there is a concerted effort to make this "THE moment" when Clark becomes Superman.  Here, Kent's been going from one job to another for years, hiding from society, and when super-opportunity rears its ugly head, he moves on, lest he be found out (it's also the impetus to introduce Lois Lane, who happens to stumble on this "mysterious stranger" and, reporter that she is, tracks him down).  But, that "alien threat" text is a great way to keep Superman under wraps,* dealing with the anonymity, and bringing Lane into it.  There's great potential there, as the one person who exposes to the people of Earth that there are "aliens among us," is the picture's chief villain, Krypton's General Zod.

One of the best things about Man of Steel is its cast, including Kevin Costner as Superman's Earth Dad.

And this is where the movie gets into trouble.  Not that Zod isn't a great character.  Genetically-engineered—the Kryptonian way—to be a soldier, he stages a coup in the last days of Krypton in a misguided attempt to keep Krypton "pure."  He finds the naturally-birthed Kal-El repellent, Jor-el a traitor, and is single-mindedly determined to return Krypton to its proper way.  And as spewed by Michael Shannon (who's terrific here, but then he's always terrific), he is a seriously deranged megalomaniac. And although his plans are simple, his means of doing it are so complex,** they tend to bog the movie down, leading to the worst problem with the film—it's ultimately dull and tedious.

We all remember Superman II—with Terence Stamp as General Zod—and the extended fight between Christopher Reeves' Superman and the three Kryptonian criminals which, while good for its time, seemed to be merely a bunch of fighting Cirque De Soleil wire-work.  This time, it's the way it's imagined in the comics, super-fast, punching, punching, punching, the combatants sending each other crashing through buildings and skidding across  pavement to screw themselves up and go at each other again...over and over and over again.  Comics-geeks (including me) have always wanted to see this, it's a dream come true, but like Hitchcock's retort to why his characters never go to the police ("because it's bo-oring" and then proved it in Psycho), it's too much of the same thing, no matter how much collateral damage is being inflicted, it becomes as dull as a "Transformers" movie. One shouldn't be looking "up in the sky" by rolling their eyes. Someone once expressed a dissatisfaction with "super-hero" movies because Hollywood has turned them from adventure stories to war stories, and the ante is being upped to the point of unsustainability and sameness. It's the familiar, in recent story-challenged movies, city-calving carnage, but just in different costumes, and if film-makers are going to keep trying to tap this dry well, they need to come up with unique stories besides battles royale, ones suited to the particular characters (and not particularly the villains').

And that's where Man of Steel ultimately fails—the screenwriters let the character down.  What sets Superman apart is he IS so pure, his intentions are the best, he's "the big blue boy scout," with a moral compass that's been set on both Krypton and Earth, the best of both worlds.  Here Superman makes choices for his adopted home-world that should scare the bejesus out of its citizens, and they're made about twenty minutes of destruction (and how many unseen lives) too late. Forget the considerable property damage sustained—whole city blocks are turned to scrap, buildings collapse, with I'm sure lots of people crushed in the rubble—his ultimate action and the timing of it, is just not what The Man of Tomorrow represents in any of its incarnations. The filmmakers negate what makes the character of Superman so special in that one act, making the character just another guy with too much power in a suit, and not a very good guy at that.*** 

Lots of good things here, but lots of bad things as well, and I argued back and forth with myself over what to rate this, but just because of the tedium factor I chose what I chose, so one could fast-forward—like a speeding bullet—through the never-ending battles.

Man of Steel is a Rental.

Direct dialogue grab from Grant Morrison's (and Frank Quitely's) "All-Star Superman"

* The TV-series "Smallville" did a similar thing, hiding "Supes'" as "The Blur," but Clark Kent stayed illogically stationary as a target.

** In fact, it's the same story-line of the recent story-arc "H'el on Earth" that spanned through the comics last year.

*** It's not like the filmmakers don't know it, they're preaching it throughout the entire movie.  In fact, at one point, Kal-el surrenders to the military as part of Zod's ultimatum to Earth.  He sits in an interview room, placidly, in hand-cuffs, the allowance of which is brought up by reporter Lane.  His explanation and one of the best lines in the movie:  "Well, it wouldn't be much of a surrender if I didn't..."

The Dark Knight Rises

The Bane of Our Existence
or
"Okay, What Joker Put Yeast in My Dark Knight?"


"All stories end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you"--Hemingway

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story"--Welles


So, Christopher Nolan's "Batman" trilogy ends in a nearly 3 hour film that neatly wraps up the story.  How does it end?  That would be telling.  The comics went through a phase where Bruce Wayne ruminated that he was working towards a world where he wasn't needed.  That's a nice little "buttoning up" of the "Dark Knight" story, but it's not complete.  What of Bruce Wayne?  Nolan has the opportunity in his version to really end it—he doesn't have to sell comic books next month—so, he can take it anywhere he wants to go.  And one realizes (if one really wanted to end the story) that the only real happy ending that could be achieved is if Bruce Wayne became the one thing he never knew as a child—a caring, present father.  Anything else makes the story a tragedy, and Bruce Wayne the last victim of the gunman's bullets that killed his parents.  Given this series' downbeat tone (that of the sacrificial martyr) and of the available previews for The Dark Knight Rises, such a scenario does not seem likely.  Given that, Nolan can take the tragedy of his hero in any number of directions.

Bane (Tom Hardy here) is the perfect villain to bring into the mix.  A hopped-up minor character, he is best known as the lead antagonist for the "Knightfall" storyline (that seemed to last a couple years).  In "Knightfall," the drug-pumped super-villain released every criminal in Gotham's prison system for The Bat to deal with, while he hung back, biding his time.  Then, when the Batman, weakened and exhausted, finally confronted him, Bane broke his back, leaving Wayne paralyzed and unable to fight on.  It fell to the rest of "The Batman Family" (including the once-and-future "Robin's") to take on the mantle and continue the fight.

Nolan's canvas is a bit broader, taking into consideration the events of the two previous films to create something a bit more apocalyptic, a rumination on the fractious quality of good vs. evil and the slippery slope to Hell that ideology and good intentions can be tilted towards.  Nobody's pure in this one, there's no whack-job with delusions of grandeur behind the assault on Gotham City, with avarice their sole motive.  Everybody, wearing white or black, thinks they're doing the right thing.  And everybody's wrong.

It's eight years since the events of The Dark Knight that resulted in the deaths of D.A. Harvey Dent, Rachel Dawes, and the subsequent disappearance of the man suspected in the killings, the Bat-man (Christian Bale).  Now, Bruce Wayne is an exile in his newly-rebuilt Wayne Manor, walking stiffly with a cane due to some unknown injury (part of me wants to think it was due to him being stabbed by one of The Penguin's umbrellas).  He sees no one, is a recluse, and there are rumors he's turned into a Howard Hughes-style eccentric, apparently due to a massive investment in a clean energy prototype that failed and cost Wayne Enterprises a fortune...or at least half of it.  The chief backer for the project, Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) tries to get past the constant guards of faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine, putting in the most emotional performance he's done in years) and Wayne exec Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who fill the functions of acting as Wayne's heart and brains (and conscience), if not as surrogate Mother and Father.  A rival exec, Daggett, is trying to take over W.E., by any means necessary, in this case, employing a terrorist named Bane, who has his own bones to pick (and break) with Gotham's golden boy.  At the beginning of the film, Gotham in morosely complacent (and obviously filled with exposition), having cleaned up crime by the draconian Dent Anti-Crime Act, which has incarcerated over a thousand criminals in Gotham's Blackgate Prison.

But things are percolating underground, disrupting Gotham's infrastructure.  Bane has an army of misfits and big plans that have outgrown the desires of his patron, and there's a lithe cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who is caught with her hands in the Wayne Manor safe by the man himself ("Oops," she says, not very convincingly).  Yes, she's pilfered Martha Wayne's pearl necklace, but more importantly, Bruce Wayne's fingerprints.  What does she want with those?

It's only one piece in an intricate puzzle of escalating consequences that Batman must unravel if he is, once again, to save Gotham City, and he must confront his past and overcome great injury, physical and emotional, if he is to prevent a catastrophe...one of his own devising.

That's the gist of it, but it is convoluted by elaborate set-pieces that are, frankly, jaw-dropping, and ends up with Gotham isolated from the rest of the nation, in the hands of criminals with big ideologies and little concern for how roughly they're applied.  The police are paralyzed—most of them trapped in the deep infrastructure of the city (a little too conveniently) while Bane initiates a countdown to total destruction.

A countdown of five months.

To quote The Riddler: "????"  Five months?  How suspenseful is that?  And you'd think that somebody, somewhere, would be able to unravel the plot or situation in such a time-frame.  But, it's basically a set-up for what Nolan depends on to generate suspense throughout the movie—the last minute "save," that is usually explosive and comes from nowhere, because the writer-director has made motivations ambiguous enough as to be unreadable.*  Everyone has got a secret that will be revealed at the most opportune moment of drama.  If the mystery was revealed in a drawing room, it would feel like cheating, and the revelations almost psychic.

Speaking of unreadable, Tom Hardy's Bane is hampered by a mask of a morphine dispenser (to keep him from feeling pain), as opposed to the enhancement-juice-pumping-apparatus from the comics (This leads one to ask: if the guy can be stopped by breaking the mask, why does Our Hero employ so many body-blows?  Face-shots, man!!).  He is perpetually muffled by this thing, which Hardy compensates for with an almost jolly Father Christmas speaking style, making a clever, unnerving ying-yang effect for the character.  Ultimately, though, he's something of a vapor-tiger, like Darth Vader, the big bloated bloviator who's merely a "blind," a distraction for the real danger.

But...five months??**

Another thing: Nolan has come out publicly saying that he wants to make a Bond movie (and the snowbound facility infiltration in Inception is a bowler-tip to them).  I would submit that he already has, this film being it.  So much of it is borrowed from Bond that all one needs is a casino scene to make it complete (a costume party has to suffice***).  The opening sequence, the-villain-that-feels-no-pain, the duplicitous females, obligatory "Q" scene, the tick-tock final set-piece and other aspects can be attributable to Bond films of the past.  At least someone is borrowing from the Bond series this time, instead of the other way around.

But, his world of comic-book fantasy is far more gritty and down-to-Earth than any other, and that's what makes "The Dark Knight Trilogy" good; it's relatable, it feels like it could happen, if someone had the will, the wherewithal and the wallet to do it.  It also feels of our time.  There's been a lot of gas about the politics in this film—uninformed, desperate gas—but the whole uprising scenario, the subjugation of the privileged with no benefit to the less fortunate, the breaking down of society and the cleaving of its people is the stuff of water-cooler vitriol and feels like the temper of the times.  The Tea Party AND the Occupy Wall Streeters can both find things to point at and go: "See?"  I'm not going to speculate which side is right, and Nolan is obtuse (and politically slippery) enough to play it right down the yellow stripe of the road.  But, this British director is saying something about the State of the Union with a full child-warbled rendition of The Star Spangled Banner (before a particularly horrific football game) and a shot of American flags in tatters on a city street, deep in the movie.  They're there for a reason, but not for anything specific enough other than "we're a fragile alliance and we're in trouble."

And that we need heroes—selfless ones, for whom profit is not a motive—and that, "anyone can be Batman."**** 

The Dark Knight Rises is a long-afternoon Matinee.

Bane's "big moment" in 1994.

* Case in point:  there's a scene where Catwoman uses a Wayne-supplied bat-bike to blow a hole in a tunnel to make an evacuation tunnel for the sealed-off city, a task initiated by the Caped Crusader.  Following it, Nolan sits on a pull-in shot of Hathaway with an enigmatic smile on her face that communicates...nothing.  Except an odd complacency.  It will only be resolved...if there's anything TO be resolved, later in the film. 

** There are neat touches, and a refresher of both The Dark Knight AND Batman Begins will help.  One nice thing—Nolan recalls a scene from BB when a young Bruce Wayne falls down a tunnel and is subsequently rescued by his father, by having a similar scenario played out here, with the Obi-Wan presence of a dark father figure from his past.  Nice touch.


*** A masked ball at which, like in Batman Returns, Bruce Wayne doesn't wear a mask.  Heh.

**** Just not Nicolas Cage, please...

Green Lantern

"In Dullest Day, the Weakest Light..."
or
"Oa, the Humanity!"

When the silver-age of comics began in the late 1950's, the '40's age of super-heroes were being replaced with westerns, horror and science-fiction tales.  So, those earlier mystery-men were re-incarnated with sciency origins that no longer depended on mystic powers and a sense of right-and-wrong.  Befitting the times, the original Green Lantern was a railroad engineer, who happened upon a mystic rune that gave him extraordinary powers.  The modern GL was a test-pilot, bequeathed a magic ring by a dying alien who'd crash-landed his spacecraft while on patrol.  As the story progressed, the pilot Hal Jordan, found he had been made a part of an intergalactic police corps (based in no small part on E.E. Smith's "Lensmen" series and its "Galactic Patrol") led by a clutch of identical blue-skinned big-headed "Guardians of the Universe," who supervised the Corps on a planet in the middle of the Universe, Oa, where was built the Corps central battery from where all green power originated.  There are a lot of Green Lanterns, patrolling every corner of the Galaxy.  And they had two weaknesses: you had to recharge the ring or it would run out of juice after 24 hours, and it didn't work on anything yellow.

That's a lot of back-story.  Probably too much for one movie, and it pushes the credibility envelope that science-fiction movies can push before leaving general audiences in an anti-matter cloud of skepticism, if not downright derision.*  And the movie version of Green Lantern, written by a bullpen of the comics' writers crams enough emerald exposition to make any viewer green around the gills.  I know there are a lot of fan-boys out there who will probably cry crocodile tears if their favorite Lantern isn't in the movie (where's Ch'p?  And G'nort?), but it's only a two hour flick—you can't put the whole Universe (and Mogo) in it, though this one tries (Me, I just wanted to see that staple of Hal Jordan tricks—he can create anything he wants, and the thing he uses the most is a boxing-glove—I was not disappointed).

It took the rest of the movie to do that.  TMI is the least of this movie's problems.  As much as it pains me to say it, Green Lantern just isn't very good.  Casting is fine: Ryan Reynolds makes a great Hal Jordan, Blake Lively is merely okay as over-dependent on-again/off-again g-f Carol Ferris, and Peter Sarsgaard has a fun time screwing around with arch-villain Hector Hammond, affecting a John Malkovich whine before he turns into an über-brained cross between Joseph Merrick and Truman Capote.  Mark Strong does nice work as the devilish looking "bad" Lantern Sinestro.  And with that, it's a kick to see some of these characters brought to life.

But...it needs a bit of a power battery charge.  The pace is a little sluggish**—with all the global and galactic goings-on, there's a little too much Carol Ferris interaction for the movie's own good—she's not as integral as, say, Lois Lane is to Superman, and she never really came into her own as a character until she became a super-hero, too (don't ask), and it's not as if Blake Lively was demanding that she had more to do.  Fact is, the scenes between Reynolds and Lively are the worst of the picture, as they're stuck with Screenwriter 101 dialog*** and little chemistry between them to make it in any way interesting.****  The tone is just a little too proud of itself—the Corps is taken VERY seriously, even though that's the part that should have been the most fun, and although Hal Jordan has the most wise-cracks with his "fish-out-of-water" learning curve, this is the latter-day mythos Jordan, suffering from "The Marvel Curse" of being angst-ridden over some lack in his life, in this case "absent-father" syndrome.

And The Guardians are even worse useless ideologues than they are in the comics, their pretentious dithering and superiority making their scenes sound like they were transcripts from the U.N.

But, there's something else about The Guardians that solved the riddle of what bothered me about the movie from the start.  It's one of the darkest movies I've ever seen, as if it was a 100 watt movie projected with a 20 watt bulb (I saw it flat, so I can't imagine what the 3-D version, which is always less bright, must be like).  There is just no "brightest day" in Green Lantern. It's when The Guardians show up on their too-high-seats (that should give you a clue about them) and you can barely make them out—they look plasticine and animatronic, less life-like than the Lincoln at Disneyland.  But that's not the worst of it, the sight of the entire Corps must surely be impressive, but you get the sense that the crowd scenes are merely composed of randomly moving blobs, and the design of the main bad-thing, Parallax—a Guardian possessed of the essence of fear—looks like a particularly gnarly piece of Brillo-pad that's been set on fire, with a blocky Mt. Rushmore face in the middle of it.  It all points to one thing—the FX shots are substandard enough that the film-makers—partcularly director Martin Campbell, who directed (and invigorated) the two best Bond movies of the past 20 years had so little confidence in so many of these shots that the entire film has been desaturated to keep the bad shots from standing out from the good.  It's not all bad.  The FX-wizards did impressive work with the GL costumes (completely CGI) and the couple of Lanterns that we see well—Tomar-Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) and D.I. Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan)—some of the flying works, but the landings are a little rocky.  But the ring-constructs are kinda dull (that's the scripters' fault)...lasso's and jets and guns and...Hot-Wheels tracks???  If we're doing product placement how about beating people over the head with a bottle of Coke (label out)?  "The only limits are what you can imagine."  Earth is in trouble.  But the retailers should do fine.

But, I think the worst thing about Green Lantern is that nothing resonates, nothing inspires, nothing evokes a sense of wonder or service.  Nothing even made me crack a smile—except that the green energy coming from the most powerful accessory in the world is apparently painful (as well it should be).  As a fan of the comics who wanted it to be good, watching the movie was painful for me.

Now, if you would, please repeat after me Yojimbo's empowering adaptation of the Green Lantern oath:


"In dullest day, the weakest light,
the SFX might look all right.
To cure the need to see the sight
of comic-flicks...
Green Lantern might."

Because it's just a Cable-Watcher.

"Green Lantern ponders the Universal Question: "why is there so much yellow paint in the world?"

* The secret is to couch your sci-fi in legend or familiar genres—so Star Wars gets a pass because it borrows liberally from westerns, samurai movies and old sci-fi, but A.I. Artificial Intelligence featuring robot-mother-love, melted ice-caps and "the mechas will inherit the Earth" provokes superior chortling.
** But then, so's Hal.  A couple of times during battle scenes I was thinking, "This guy can jet across the Galaxy.  Shouldn't he be showing up now, before anybody gets killed?"

*** "Nice." "Impressive, isn't it?"  "I was talking about your dress."  Really?  Is that a line they use at Comic-con's?

**** The only interesting aspect to her is that she sees GL is Jordan almost immediately: "I've seen you naked, you think I wouldn't recognize you by hiding your cheek-bones?"  Good point.  Although he DOES lower his voice as is par for the course in superhero movies.