You Want Superman Revamp? [Also the Man of Steel (2013) thread]

The Invisibles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RG0nWG8FSs

forgot to mention nolte in pantheon of superhero movie perfs

This was fine but amy adams is not the right choice for Lois. It felt like a different character.

nolte in the hulk is awesome in his OTTness

The Hulk is classic. Infinitely better than that boring hulk movie from several years ago.

thoughts:

-Liked Snyder's depiction of a crumbling Krypton.
-For a while, the film's jumps in time between Clark's adulthood and youth manage to paint a decent picture of a child who doesn't understand his origin. Problem is, Zach treats this trope like an essay and delivers example after example of this alienation until you want to scream "WE GET IT! H DOESN'T FIT IN!".
-A good drinking game might be taking a shot every time there's a scene with Clark crying.
-The "Fortress of Solitude" reimagining in some ways works, but is also the beginning of the film's undoing. "Batman Begins" worked because it examined something the earlier films hadn't done in great length - Batman's origin story. However, the initial Richard Donner entry did exactly this, and at good length. Having to see Superman's origin again, and then hearing it re-explained to him by Jor-El just feels like overkill.
-By the time Superman puts on his cape for the first time, the film had felt exhausting...Zach could have easily accomplished in 30 minutes what he spent over an hour trying to do.
-Amy Adam's Lois Lane feels like a pale imitation of the character.
-The talented Laurence Fishburne barely makes an impression as Perry White. In one scene, he attempts to rescue a co-worker from death, and one might wonder why the audience is supposed to care, as the film has spent so little time with either of them.
-Zod. Ugh. Although some scenery chewing is to be expected with Zod, Shannon makes he unfortunate choice of gnawing straight through the upholstery, delivering half of his lines with clenched teeth, and the other half with pained, exerted yells. Shannon's Zod is devoid of all of the calculated menace that Terrence Stamp brought to the role.
-My problems with the ending have already been beaten to death. Thousands of people had to have died, yet they sweep that under the rug. NBD, back to life as usual in the ruins of Metropolis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTfkdPzi8Mw

a bunch of friends who posted what were practically blogs about the 'plot holes' and flaws in Iron Man 3 are going to bat for this stinkfest. It boggles my mind.

terence stamp was such a great choice for zod, he not only oozes menace but this kind of above-it-all decadence that makes him both fun and a worthy adversary for the super-sincere superman

in other words he doesn't really play zod as crazy

Ursa and non were good too

effete willowy sadist far more memorable and effective than bellowing batshit meathead

the whole phantom zone crew from the original were gender bent now that i think about it. Supes fighting for the american way against the real 70's threats

Supes was fighting gentrification?

Lol Zod was a proto-yuppie

Superman IV: The Quest For Fuel-Efficient Automobiles

effete willowy sadist far more memorable and effective than bellowing batshit meathead

― i didn't even give much of a fuck that you were mod (forksclovetofu), Monday, June 17, 2013 12:44 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

See: montalban as khan

picturing a teorema/superman mashup where general zod seduces ma and clark kent

btw i'm rewatching supes: the movie right now and it holds up pretty well. the stuff with clark and lois is just great (I can even handle the sort-of-rhyming voice over during the flying sequence). kidder is just great in this, as is reeve. they really make this film.

so weird that the last dialogue in the movie should be superman bonding with a prison warden

I love the first three reeves superman movies, too, and DEF agree that - at that particular moment in time - Margot Kidder was a near-perfect Lois Lane - visually and emotionally true to the character in the comics (Amy Adams simply doesn't look like any drawing of Lois i've ever seen) but also appropriately 'modern' (you could believe that Kidder's Lois had at the very least heard of feminism).

BUT - one of the pleasures of corporately owned comic characters is the fact that they're open to different interpretations, and mutate over time - they're not fixed in the same way as characters owned and written by only one author. So, I don't have a problem with Synder, or whoever, giving us a different Superman; it's just that this particular iteration of the character is horribly self-conscious, tho perhaps that's impossible to avoid, these days (I love All Star Superman by Morrison, but in its way it's equally conscious of the legacy/history looming over the character - it's just that Morrison is a far wittier and more inventive writer than the clowns who wrote Man of Steel).

terence stamp was such a great choice for zod, he not only oozes menace but this kind of above-it-all decadence that makes him both fun and a worthy adversary for the super-sincere superman

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), S

"I see you are practiced in worshiping things that fly. Good." That slight pause between the sentences. It's funny-scary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=8_RDx4skTp4

This was a drag to sit through. Thoughts:

-- Superman can't survive a solemn re-imagining like the Batman character got with the Frank Miller comics and later movies. Superman is too pre-1960s, ideologically, and the America it came from has been too stigmatized or debunked to death. The movie gets around Superman's optimistic all-American origins by making him an alien and the movie into pure sci/fi adventure.

-- There's little dramatic tension and the scenes aren't building towards anything for most of the movie. David Goyer's screenplay lacks good dialogue hooks to take the audience from scene to scene, those hooks suggest to an audience what the upcoming scene will be so when the movie cuts to an establishing shot or to a later event there isn't a scramble in the minds of the audience to place what they're seeing, because it's already been suggested subtly. You don't notice how seamless the scenes in most movies are until you see something disjointed like this. Man of Steel reminded me of Playstation games that let you view all the cutscenes from the game after you've beaten it -- stringing CGI scenes together to give you an incomplete movie.

-- the black military man at the end of the movie had a voice that was practically an Obama impression. I doubt that was a coincidence.

-- Henry Cavill was in over his head. He lacked the boyish swagger that Clark Kent should have. British actors playing American have a hard time doing guilelessness, but they can depict a manliness or strength that American leading men now lack (it's ironic to see American tough guy roles getting outsourced to, of all people, English actors)

-- Christopher Nolan's stamp was all over: the profoundly serious tone in every scene, making super heroes look super by making all non-hero characters flat and weak and in need of someone - anyone - with a bit of backbone; the mayhem villains cause is filmed like 9-11-style terror footage. This movie lacked the great pacing and editing that Nolan movies can have. Like I mentioned earlier, the scenes here tried to jump around and without warning like a Nolan movie but it couldn't pull it off.

Haven't seen it, don't want to see it, but would see it if Shannon played Zod like his maniac cop in "Premium Rush."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF3IMm-XrZY&t=0m40s

i liked this a lot more than i expected to!

not nearly as bad as this thread made me think it would be

-- There's little dramatic tension and the scenes aren't building towards anything for most of the movie. David Goyer's screenplay lacks good dialogue hooks to take the audience from scene to scene, those hooks suggest to an audience what the upcoming scene will be so when the movie cuts to an establishing shot or to a later event there isn't a scramble in the minds of the audience to place what they're seeing, because it's already been suggested subtly. You don't notice how seamless the scenes in most movies are until you see something disjointed like this. Man of Steel reminded me of Playstation games that let you view all the cutscenes from the game after you've beaten it -- stringing CGI scenes together to give you an incomplete movie.

― Cunga, Monday, June 17, 2013 10:39 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is OTM. all of the story beats felt totally mangled.

Man, this was awful. Ear-bleedingly loud and eye-bleedingly ugly. Probably didn't help that we arrived a bit late to our screening and had to sit in the front row, which made this already mercilessly chaotic movie one of the most unpleasant theatrical experiences I've ever had.

Terence Stamp has thoughts

Just saw Man Of Steel and enjoyed it for the most part. Noticed quite a few borrowings from elsewhere but still found it pretty good. I'm assuming this is supposed to be the first of a series?
Didn't enjoy the teenagers I was sitting next to talking through large chunks of the film then trying to read a mobile phone with a great shining light a couple of seats down from me.

the viewing experience of Man of Steel summed up in a gif

http://25.media.tumblr.com/c7a4c3cc004becf6da773231b0dfd902/tumblr_mona0gYSaV1s96p3io1_500.gif

a few articles I enjoyed:

What Man of Steel Gets Wrong

Man of Steel Destruction Analysis

Lol - "WTC puts the body count at 129,000, with over 250,000 missing and nearly a million injured."

This is the fucking problem. Superman didn't even attempt to avert the destruction, just carelessly bowling into buildings like a kid bumps into walls when he's learning to walk. In Superman II, Supes found a way to take the battle into space to avert further destruction to the city or civilian death.

Granted, this Zod has different motives, but you'd think given that Superman has something that Zod needs to fulfill his 'mission', don't you think maybe an ATTEMPT to possibly take the fight out of the city and quit knocking over fucking buildings MAY HAVE BEEN A GOOD IDEA?

For fuck's sake, less than 3k people died on 9/11, and out of that tragedy we got the TSA, Patriot Act, and a whole slew of changes to our common way of life. If 120,000 Americans died? Well, fairly sure people wouldn't just go on living and whistling Dixie like they did in the end sequence of the film. Metropolis would basically be living under martial law for eons!

Ugh, I fear I've thought way too much about this stupid plot. They should have named this film "Clark Cries".

all the above is more interestingly explored in miracleman
/hobbyhorse

i really liked the hans zimmer score

From the Walter Chaw review already linked above:

Charted on a graph, the rises and falls in action in Man of Steel would look like a mouthful of jagged teeth.

The decibel level on Krypton was pretty deafening. Wonder how bad it was elsewhere in the cinema, but at th eback where I was sitting the sound really boomed.

Somebody started a thread on boards.ie about poor sound in th escreening in th ecinema I saw it in. Sounded pretty clear this afternoon but volume was overly massive.

i liked this a lot more than i expected to!

― the late great, Wednesday, June 19, 2013 1:23 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not nearly as bad as this thread made me think it would be

― the late great, Wednesday, June 19, 2013 1:23 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, I liked it more than expected. but the wanton destruction stuff was too much to just write off. it was pretty gross.

http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2013/06/18/man-of-steel/

http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2010/12/17/supervillains-and-insurance-whos-gonna-pay-for-that/

OK what i wanna know is whether they could fly on krypton or not

why would they

they rode around on dinosaurs and jabba the hut and shit

well i'm surprised to learn zod and his dudes picked it up so quickly

at times Shannon's Zod reminded me too much of his Nelson Van Alden character when he killed his partner via extreme baptism at the end of Season 1.

it's true, this was a pretty shouty movie.

climactic battle should have just been a series of ricocheting close ups

I AM ZOD! ARRRRRRRRRR

I AM SUPERMAN! ARRRRRRRRRRR

ARRRRRRRRR

ARRRRRRRRR

ARRR--

ARRR--

AR--

AR--

final three shots

1: CU of ZOD. his eyes close, his head slumps.

2. CU of SUPERMAN.
SUPERMAN: ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

3. CU of Lois Lane, looking sympathetic

END

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