I just got back from seeing Man Of Steel, a movie many of you know that I had low expectations of. I can honestly say that it has been over ten years since I came THAT close to walking out on a movie. I WAS surprised at how much I liked the handling of Jor-El (until *after* his final confrontation with Zod on Krypton), and I positively *loved* both Lara and Martha Kent. I felt that during the first third of the movie, they were laying the Jor-El-as-Father, Kal-as-Son, and Jonathan Kent-as-Holy Spirit thing on a little thick, but that *is* an accepted and established interpretation of the mythos. I also didn’t have much of a problem with . . . I’ll just say how Clark did and/or didn’t use his powers as a youth in Smallville, since both of the big incidents hearken straight back to the Eliot S! Maggin novels. But then came two things. Once the backstory was done, and the “now” conflict was engaged, things escalated beyond ridiculous. When Superman II came out, lo those many years ago, I praised it because it delivered something new in comic book movies/TV, something ubiquitous in the superhero comics themselves: PROPERTY DAMAGE due to fighting SUPER villains. For MOS, they took this and ran. And, like Forrest Gump, they didn’t stop running. The Sound and Fury escalated to the point where I was comparing it to the Lensman novels (if you haven’t read them, at one point an attack is launched on a planet . . . by moving two planets moving in opposite directions to positions on either side of the planet under attack, and letting them smash into it from both sides, destroying all three). But later, I found an even better comparison. The brilliant Scott McCloud once did a one-shot comic called DESTROY!!! It was billed as “The Loudest Comic Book In The Universe!” It was huge–two feet tall, a foot and a half wide, and inside, with a deliberately thin-as-possible plot, two super guys commenced to smashing the living hell out of each other and wrecking every building in New York (and waking up a little old lady in New Jersey). By the end of the story, all of Manhattan was rubble. Scott McCloud *intended* DESTROY!!! to be a parody and a joke, for cryin’ out loud. These guys intended us to take that kind of destruction *seriously,* judging by the tone of the rest of the movie. I’m sitting there thinking that there wouldn’t be a human on Earth who could watch what was going on and *not* want any and every alien the hell off our planet; I don’t give a flying damn WHAT his core principles are. If THAT is the kind of thing we can expect from Superman being on Earth, then I’m with G. Gordon Godfrey–get the Kryptonian the frell away from Earth. And speaking of those core principles, there was the second thing. Many of you know that when I watch Spider-man 2, there’s a fifteen-second sequence where I close my eyes and censor what is on my screen. Like Georgiana’s Birthmark, that part ruins an otherwise-perfect movie because it is the most egregious character violation possible for that character. But one “Mary-had-a-little-lamb” later, it can be ignored. What they do in this movie, however, CAN’T. I’ve praised the Kingdom Come storyline, some of you know that. A response to the escalating violence and de-escalating moral compass in superhero comics, it posits a point in time when the ordinary people can’t really tell the heroes from the villains because both of them are throwing cars, buildings, bridges, and landmasses at each other without regard to where the debris falls. Into this situation, a retired Superman returns to the fold to give these reckless youths some old-time religion. With the heroes of his generation (most of them, anyway) at his side, he intends to show the youngsters what being a hero means, and restore some boundaries and the attendant order. Basically, everything we’re seeing Superman do onscreen in this movie is what the Superman of Kingdom Come came out of retirement to stop. But that’s not the character violation. Besides the irony mentioned above, I bring up Kingdom Come for one reason: In one conversation, Superman himself enucleates his most fundamental defining characteristic. Events in this movie make it clear that the filmmakers have no respect or appreciation for that characteristic. Heath Ledger’s Joker said to the Batman that his One Rule is the one he’d have to break–but in the end, the Batman never broke that rule. In Kingdom Come, Superman was sorely tempted at one point to violate that characteristic–but he didn’t. The Superman in Man of Steel is a disappointment, not because of his acts, but because the writers wrote those acts for him.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 06:54:12 +0000
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