Bagpuss
Legend
It isn't forced onto Superman, the comparisons have been made well before this film, in both the comics and earlier movies.
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So, about those Man of Steel reviews...
It isn't forced onto Superman, the comparisons have been made well before this film, in both the comics and earlier movies.
Relique du Madde
Adventurer
I thought it was a good movie, but unfortunately the ending was hilarious when you draw comparisons with the Marvel movie universe.
Puente Antiguo get's attacked by th destroyer, Thor, Darcy, Dr. Selveg, Jane Forster, and the Warriors Three evacuate the town's 30 residents. SHIELD attacks the destroyer with megaphones and pistols. In Man ofSteel, Smallville is attacked, the town is NAPALMED with people hiding in buildings, a bunch of people die and no one knows or cares.
New York is attacked by the Chitari, buildings are destroyed, people die, the Avengers save the day. The result: half the world mourns, many become traumatized and/or paranoid about the existence of THE AVENGERS (those invading aliens are obviously the Avenger's fault) and many find themselves wondering "What did Ironman see and how did he survive?". Meanwhile, Metropolis is half destroyed by an alien mothership and a fight, and a quarter of the city is sucked into a black hole; yet people go back to work and act like nothing happened while the US Government sends drones to follow Superman. I know that the epilogue of MAn of Steel most likely takes place weeks later, but I'd imagine that office would have been closed off for a few months after Zod/Superman crashed through it, tore through half the floor and destroyed an entire side of the building.
Oh, let's forget the fact that Clark Kent spent the last few years wandering the world doing good, but somehow decided not to wander into Gothem City when he was 30 to save it from being Nuked (Yeah I saw that Wayne Industries satellite Superman and Zod body slammed each other onto) .
Puente Antiguo get's attacked by th destroyer, Thor, Darcy, Dr. Selveg, Jane Forster, and the Warriors Three evacuate the town's 30 residents. SHIELD attacks the destroyer with megaphones and pistols. In Man ofSteel, Smallville is attacked, the town is NAPALMED with people hiding in buildings, a bunch of people die and no one knows or cares.
New York is attacked by the Chitari, buildings are destroyed, people die, the Avengers save the day. The result: half the world mourns, many become traumatized and/or paranoid about the existence of THE AVENGERS (those invading aliens are obviously the Avenger's fault) and many find themselves wondering "What did Ironman see and how did he survive?". Meanwhile, Metropolis is half destroyed by an alien mothership and a fight, and a quarter of the city is sucked into a black hole; yet people go back to work and act like nothing happened while the US Government sends drones to follow Superman. I know that the epilogue of MAn of Steel most likely takes place weeks later, but I'd imagine that office would have been closed off for a few months after Zod/Superman crashed through it, tore through half the floor and destroyed an entire side of the building.
Oh, let's forget the fact that Clark Kent spent the last few years wandering the world doing good, but somehow decided not to wander into Gothem City when he was 30 to save it from being Nuked (Yeah I saw that Wayne Industries satellite Superman and Zod body slammed each other onto) .
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Yes, he's always had parallels with Moses and Jesus.
Plus, Superman is the All-American superhero. He's the God-fearing, apple-pie eatin', flag-waving, red, white, and blue blooded American role model.
Or, at least, he's supposed to be/was at one time.
ThatGrumpyScotsman
First Post
Really enjoyed it. It is closer to MY childhood Superman than the old movies were.
Yeah, Supes has always been part Space Moses, with a rocketship replacing the reed boat placed upon the Nile. And part American Savior, too. It's a natural fit. Kal-El's surname means "god", after all...
I recall back in college my friends and I back spent a beer-filled night brainstorming an Elseworlds DC world never, ever do - an alternate history where Kal-El *was* Jesus. It's almost too on-the-nose; the wise Men following his crashing spaceship, Kryptonite nails on the cross, etc.
My contribution that evening was the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luthor.
MarkB
Legend
I liked it but I didn't love it.
[sblock]The opening was awesome - Krypton actually feels alive and vivid for once, and it's a spectacular Russell Crowe action movie.
It's also nice to see a Superman movie that doesn't involve Kryptonite.
I was ambivalent about the flashbacks method used to tell Clark's origin story through the film - I felt that it worked in some instances, and broke the pacing in others.
I wasn't impressed with the characterisation at any point. Even with the main characters, we're given nothing more than the shallowest glimpse of who they are, and beyond Lois, Perry and the Kents I'd be hard pressed to put a name to any of the other human characters.
The action scenes are impressive, but they lack variety. 90% of the time it's just Kryptonians punching each other through buildings, interspersed with occasional utterly-ineffectual attacks by humans.
I liked the fact that some place was given to human forces during the final battle, in the form of bombing Zod's ship with Clark's, but it felt like a token addition. By the time they were making their attack run, Clark was already back from the other side of the world - he could've just as easily picked up his ship from the airbase and thrown it at Zod's, without needlessly sacrificing dozens of soldiers.
In the end, it felt like a war between two factions who were so far removed from humanity in terms of capability that the human race were mere bystanders, and I can't help thinking that most people would feel that the world would've been better off if Superman had never been there to bring his people's domestic disputes to the planet. I'm not sure I'd disagree.[/sblock]
[sblock]The opening was awesome - Krypton actually feels alive and vivid for once, and it's a spectacular Russell Crowe action movie.
It's also nice to see a Superman movie that doesn't involve Kryptonite.
I was ambivalent about the flashbacks method used to tell Clark's origin story through the film - I felt that it worked in some instances, and broke the pacing in others.
I wasn't impressed with the characterisation at any point. Even with the main characters, we're given nothing more than the shallowest glimpse of who they are, and beyond Lois, Perry and the Kents I'd be hard pressed to put a name to any of the other human characters.
The action scenes are impressive, but they lack variety. 90% of the time it's just Kryptonians punching each other through buildings, interspersed with occasional utterly-ineffectual attacks by humans.
I liked the fact that some place was given to human forces during the final battle, in the form of bombing Zod's ship with Clark's, but it felt like a token addition. By the time they were making their attack run, Clark was already back from the other side of the world - he could've just as easily picked up his ship from the airbase and thrown it at Zod's, without needlessly sacrificing dozens of soldiers.
In the end, it felt like a war between two factions who were so far removed from humanity in terms of capability that the human race were mere bystanders, and I can't help thinking that most people would feel that the world would've been better off if Superman had never been there to bring his people's domestic disputes to the planet. I'm not sure I'd disagree.[/sblock]
Super Pony
Studded Muffin
I'm sort of in ambivalent toward the movie now that I've seen it. I tried to stick to the mission, and enjoy the movie for what it was instead of what it wasn't (as I said more or less in my post back on page 2'ish). I really enjoyed the opening sequence and the extra attention given to Krypton. I liked the look of the movie (props, costumes, sets, cgi, etc). The actors went through the right paces imo, save Amy Adams (who didn't seem to really want to be in the movie...it was odd). There were other aspects of the movie that left me cold, but I'm not going to delve in because I'll get carried away with poopoo'ing it. All in all, I left the movie not wanting to call/text/tweet everyone I knew to go see it. But I'm also not on an anti-Man of Steel tirade. I'd say the current Tomato-meter 56% is pretty spot on, imo. It had peaks and valleys throughout, and the muddy end result wasn't quite to my tastes.
But hey, at least it wasn't Superman 4: The Quest For Peace
But hey, at least it wasn't Superman 4: The Quest For Peace
Having seen it once and read a great many of the negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I'd say that A) the movie is not *quite* as good as The Dark Knight, but if Dark Knight is your bar, there's no shame in missing that bar by a small margin...
and B) most of the negative reviews get incredibly didactic in their attempts to explain why the film "doesn't work" (the critic on rogerebert.com claimed that Zod's primary female lieutenant pathologically hated all men, something made up right out of thin air); most of them also seem to insist that Supes can't be taken seriously as a character and that all a Superman movie should aspire to is yet another revamp of the Christopher Reeve flicks, 35 years later. This isn't even worth dismissing, as they've obviously never picked up a comic book. Anyway...
I saw no inconsistencies vis-a-vis earth atmosphere/air/Kryptionian air and the granting of superpowers. To those who've argued the topic back and forth until they're bored with it, I'd suggest that you're overthinking it. Earth's "younger" atmosphere gives Kal-El superpowers; makes perfect sense. When Zod and his men take their masks off, they're overwhelmed in the same way that we see young Clark overwhelmed in the schoolroom scene. Outside of Earth's atmosphere, Kal-El becomes weaker; Jor-El adjusts the atmosphere and he's back in business. Of course the Kryptionians wouldn't suddenly gain superpowers when a hole is blown in the ship: they're still outside earth's atmosphere.
I loved the scenes of Clark first pushing his limits and learning to fly: have we ever seen Superman LEARN TO FLY before? Have we ever seen Superman thinking, "man, flying is COOL!"? Certainly all Brandon Routh ever did was adopt a mystically contented attitude as he toted Lois around in the air; if Christopher Reeve ever did anything more than the same, I certainly don't remember it.
I loved the new music. I loved Cavill's performance; I thought Diane Lane was pitch-perfect. Costner was predictably great. Amy Adams' Lois was light-years away from the silly goofiness that Margot Kidder portrayed, and that's just as it should be.
And I really never felt less than engaged during the fight scenes. Yes, there's mass amounts of destruction per minute in the final half hour, yes Superman doesn't save everyone, but please stop assuming that he's obliged to -- this is an origin story and if you can't allow room for growth and change in your own conception of the character, then yes, you're going to be bored.
And finally, I absolutely felt that the film took the right tack in emphasizing that Kal-El, his father, Zod and the others are ALIENS. The strength differential is indeed that between men and gods. This dichotomy was not forgotten even in the final action sequences, which moved back and forth between Kal-El's actions and Perry White on the ground, trying to get a reporter out of the wreckage with a crowbar.
I urge anyone who felt disappointed or annoyed by the film to read the review below.
http://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/man-steel-review/
and B) most of the negative reviews get incredibly didactic in their attempts to explain why the film "doesn't work" (the critic on rogerebert.com claimed that Zod's primary female lieutenant pathologically hated all men, something made up right out of thin air); most of them also seem to insist that Supes can't be taken seriously as a character and that all a Superman movie should aspire to is yet another revamp of the Christopher Reeve flicks, 35 years later. This isn't even worth dismissing, as they've obviously never picked up a comic book. Anyway...
I saw no inconsistencies vis-a-vis earth atmosphere/air/Kryptionian air and the granting of superpowers. To those who've argued the topic back and forth until they're bored with it, I'd suggest that you're overthinking it. Earth's "younger" atmosphere gives Kal-El superpowers; makes perfect sense. When Zod and his men take their masks off, they're overwhelmed in the same way that we see young Clark overwhelmed in the schoolroom scene. Outside of Earth's atmosphere, Kal-El becomes weaker; Jor-El adjusts the atmosphere and he's back in business. Of course the Kryptionians wouldn't suddenly gain superpowers when a hole is blown in the ship: they're still outside earth's atmosphere.
I loved the scenes of Clark first pushing his limits and learning to fly: have we ever seen Superman LEARN TO FLY before? Have we ever seen Superman thinking, "man, flying is COOL!"? Certainly all Brandon Routh ever did was adopt a mystically contented attitude as he toted Lois around in the air; if Christopher Reeve ever did anything more than the same, I certainly don't remember it.
I loved the new music. I loved Cavill's performance; I thought Diane Lane was pitch-perfect. Costner was predictably great. Amy Adams' Lois was light-years away from the silly goofiness that Margot Kidder portrayed, and that's just as it should be.
And I really never felt less than engaged during the fight scenes. Yes, there's mass amounts of destruction per minute in the final half hour, yes Superman doesn't save everyone, but please stop assuming that he's obliged to -- this is an origin story and if you can't allow room for growth and change in your own conception of the character, then yes, you're going to be bored.
And finally, I absolutely felt that the film took the right tack in emphasizing that Kal-El, his father, Zod and the others are ALIENS. The strength differential is indeed that between men and gods. This dichotomy was not forgotten even in the final action sequences, which moved back and forth between Kal-El's actions and Perry White on the ground, trying to get a reporter out of the wreckage with a crowbar.
I urge anyone who felt disappointed or annoyed by the film to read the review below.
http://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/man-steel-review/
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Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
It's not quite made up out of thin air, Everett: Faora in the comics does pathologically hate all men. She's also a serial killer and has psionic powers, so the movie version of the character is quite a bit different (at least as far as we can tell; who knows what Faora was doing off-camera).
