Thanks, I Hate It: Man of Steel

You know, I’m seldom impressed by Zack Snyder, but I couldn’t say I hate him. 300, for all that it’s a jingoistic, morally repulsive screed about how totally heterosexual and democratic the Spartans were, is a great action movie. The opening ten or fifteen minutes of his Dawn of the Dead remake are legitimately fantastic, the rest of the movie notwithstanding. He has his own style, which counts for something in the age of Disney’s ruthlessly bland stranglehold on blockbuster cinema. I mean, it’s a bad style, sure, but it’s recognizable.

This is all to say that I don’t think I’m biased against the man’s movies. I can give him a fair shake when he does something interesting. But Man of Steel? Man of Steel is like a car crash happening in slow motion because all the vehicles are mired axle-deep in mayonnaise. It’s not just that it’s bad, which it is, but that it’s boring. There is so little in this film with any kind of heart, any emotional resonance, any believable human interaction. There is no clear or intelligible action. With the exception of some Lynch’s Dune-esque stuff from the space opera opening on Superman’s (Henry Cavill) home planet of Krypton, there is nothing particularly exciting to look at in the film’s 143-minute runtime. There is a lot of IHOP product placement. Russell Crowe is there.

The cast is a serious issue, mostly in that the level of talent present is so grossly disparate that it feels like each person is acting in a separate movie. Amy Adams—whose turn as Peggy Dodd in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master was one of the great performance of the 2000s—has a genuine, hard-nosed thoughtfulness to her as Lois Lane that Cavill cannot even begin to engage with. He’s a blank. A zero. I don’t buy him as Henry Cavill in interviews, who is the person he is in real life. I think, personally, that Michael Shannon is a good choice to play General Zod. He’s excellent at looking and sounding like a broken and highly aggressive robot trying to make sense of a world he doesn’t understand. The problem is that Snyder’s film expects us to take a man named “General Zod” very seriously. 

Snyder’s Man of Steel is trivial, but it thinks of itself as something of substance. It has the ponderous weight of melodrama without the emotional fireworks that make it run. That disconnect makes it much harder to stomach than, say, the earnestly gonzo failure of Batman vs. Superman, which sucks just as hard but reaches so ambitiously for grandeur with its visions of Superman ripping out hearts and shrieking, naked monsters exploding out of Batman’s (Ben Affleck) mom’s coffin that you can’t help but laugh. Man of Steel is insulting. It’s a movie telling you you’re soaring high above the clouds while it drags you face-down through a trough of tasteless protein paste.