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

i think i would go into shock if i was standing next to that heat vision beam, and might even neglect to get out of the way. who knows?!?!?

people often go into shock when they see a gun partially due to "wtf, it's a gun", and also the knowledge that any sudden movement could trigger a shot from the person holding it. When you see the trail of lolazers coming towards you, slowly and deliberately, I think most of us could manage the fortitude to stop messing our pants for three seconds and move ever so slightly out of the way.

perhaps they didn't want to live in a world where they relied on the protection of one of the Tudors

yes they should have outrun the eye-lasers that's what was wrong with this movie

because that's clearly what I said

Yeah. But he doesn't know how to extract those lil kryptonians.

― Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the (Treeship), Sunday, June 30, 2013 10:33 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i807.photobucket.com/albums/yy352/PLQMZY/dirties.gif

i didn't think cavill was bad at all, but the role was kind of incoherent as written

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Thursday, June 27, 2013 7:32 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

he played superman as a being of immense vapidity... the way he tells his mom "i've found my real parents" in the most vacant sounding way, like he's going to append it with "...and i stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night!" or when hes meant to be giving these looks of deep reflection and inner struggle and he just looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/KCZEOEy.gif

at best he made some really poorly judged choices for the character. christian bale's bruce wayne comes off like a harry lime style dynamo in comparison

my friend made some good points to me about this - like that if nolan/snyder/goyer are honest with themselves they'll do what the dark knight movies didnt have the guts to do and make luther the protagonist of the next one. based on this movie he'd be 100% in the right to mount an anti-superman campaign!

superman's autistic childhood gives way to a repressed rage-filled adulthood... the structure of the movie forces you to anticipate seeing him finally cut loose & deliver a country beatdown to zod. clark saves a bunch of people, but the movie treats it elliptically, the implicit message is that helping people is a sideshow to your own repressed brooding. instead of finding a moral compass and learning to become a force for good, he learns to brood until triggered into action by some kind of trauma.

when he and zod level metropolis, there's never a point where the character could credibly step back and say "no, this isn't what i'm about!" - because he's living his fuckin dream, he finally gets to beat the shit out of the bullies. jor-el had a value system that he could articulate when he wanted to stop zod; when zod pleads with supes not to fuck up his plan and doom the kryptonian race, superman answers with a dirty harry one liner and his angry eye lasers; it doesn't even occur to him to try and talk zod down, to reason with or console him

once he becomes superman nearly everything he says conveys his superiority, even the quip after he kisses lois. after clark saves pete ross, pete never says another word in the movie - hes awed into silence. why couldnt they be friends? when superman crashes into the IHOP and pete sees him, they act like two coworkers who just ran into each other at a porno shop and dont want to make eye contact. clark doesnt have friends, and he doesnt seem to want them either. who is he, The Man With No Name??? the movie reiterates over and over, You're Gonna Change The World, Choose The Man You Will Be... this superman is a terrifying demigod who can do anything he wants, and the 'choice' the movie shows him making is to be a smugly indifferent asshole who's getting back at everyone after his lonely childhood. this is a supervillain's origin story!

if future movies follow the nolan batman model, they'll foreground these qualities while having characters in the movie repeatedly let him off the hook and treat him like he's an amazing hero who's doing good. Perry white will have a speech where he goes This isnt just a man... hes a man made of things... strong things... like steel... and he does things to get us through this dark long night, at the end ogf which is an extremely bright dawn, and then a priest puts his hand on clarks shoulder and goes You're not just a man... your a super man [hans zimmer score goes crazy]

if i'm lucky i think i'm never ever ever gonna watch this

booming post h4a.

that post almost makes it worth having seen this thing

great post H4A. you articulate nicely what is "off" about this superman, his origin and motivations, and how he feels different from previous incarnations of the character. he really did seem much too shallow and one-dimensional to trust with all of that power.

i'd love it if they had luthor as an all's-fair-in-finance-and-war libertarian who rightfully sees superman as a pathetic fascist who's arbitrarily pro-America because he's "from Kansas," fighting Supes through channels he can't just punch through (which would force the action sequences to be more about disaster prevention and puppy saving). But really I don't have a lot of faith in the creative team to pull that off and not just have Brainiac or somebody blow up the city again.

Snyder's Metropolis =

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/3209334/no-no-no-no-o.gif

H4A otm x 10000000000000

the more i think about that nolan quote the more ridiculous it is... "i could never accept the idea that superman would kill anyone... until a writer took the unprecedented step of creating a scene in which a bad guy threatens some innocents."

i didn't realize the significance of that moment in the theater. i was more mystified as to why superman was conflicted about killing zod at that point.

totally understandable, as they don't give any indication that Superman actually cares about killing or Zod's life or being the last of his race or anything

i really don't get why they couldn't have squeezed something about that into the movie, but like i said, this is also the movie where his dad dies saving the family dog

that wasn't so weird. i would run into a tornado for my dog. she is the realest dude i know.

H4A OTM

i'm never sure how a movie ends up this incoherent on the level of character development/design. is there just no real guiding intelligence at work? or was the script just reworked and reworked and edited by committee until it's just a big palimpsest?

i mean, i was wonderfully distracted by much of this movie. i left feeling light enough. but it just doesn't withstand a moment's scrutiny if you're looking for some kind of characterological (yes, that's a word) coherence. i feel much the same about the two nolan batman films i've seen.

aren't screenwriters interested in coherent patterns, motifs, elegant narrative design, etc.? how does a screenwriter sign his name to something like this proudly?

"Man Of Steel: A Redemptive Reading" (by the dude who's been doing an excrutiatingly detailed, pomo deconstruction on all 50 years of Dr. Who)"

http://www.philipsandifer.com/2013/07/man-of-steel-redemptive-reading.html

Preview from the sequel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p671JaPTdbI

xp amateurist, i had this same conversation with someone after seeing dark knight rises. these superhero movies are great in so many ways: perfectly choreographed fight scenes, adept manipulation of the audience's emotions through editing and soundtrack etc. but their screenplays are often deeply incompetent. in dkr, bane's motivation for destroying gotham was totally stupid, considering the fact that he didn't even like ra's al ghul, and rachel wouldn't be around to appreciate him after he blew up gotham anyway. beside that, nothing we saw about bane indicated that he was that sentimental, and even so, it's doubtful someone could have the motivation to plan a terrorist attack that elaborate when they aren't enthusiastic about the governing ideology anyway.

this is strange to me, as it seems like getting a solid batman or superman script together would be the easiest part of the filmmaking process.

the answer probably lies in the fact that it's also the easiest element of the film for everyone involved to fuck with

i would never accuse christopher nolan of creating "perfectly choreographed fight scenes" but you're totally right about bane's ridiculous motivation, i never got why he didn't LOVE batman for killing the guy who kept him away from his true love??

yeah lost me at "perfectly choreographed fight scenes"

Seth Rogen's commentary about Green Hornet seems appropriate here

"It's weird what risks they're willing to take. The script is under great scrutiny, the lines, the characters, the dialogue, he should have a father, it should be this, it should be that. We just wanted to get it made and not waste all this time. And then things like the action sequences, which is really where all the money's getting spent, go under no scrutiny whatsoever. No one looks at it. No one looks at the pre-vis. No one looks at the storyboards. What we spent like literally $50 million dollars on, no one checks out. And that's whats crazy. The way the money was spent and the way the money is spent on a lot of these movies is crazy.

or basically Jon Lewis otm

The script is under great scrutiny, the lines, the characters, the dialogue, he should have a father, it should be this, it should be that

this bit doesn't seem appropriate tbh...

well it's under great scrutiny by people who aren't writers! or creative!

the script SHOULD be under the most scrutiny

by creative people, yes. Not by rando producers and backers and people with no idea how to write a story.

sorry, quote's out of context. Rogen's saying the movie is under great scrutiny by producers/backers/studio.

that seems otm. i don't know if it accounts for the dark knight rises, though, as it was my impression that nolan had a great deal of creative control over that film.

Haha well THAT accounts for TDKR

Man of Steel really reinforces for me that the safest way to make a good superhero movie is to secretly make it some other kind of movie dressed up like a superhero movie. (Which helps to explain why imo TDK > TDKR and Iron Man 3 > Iron Man 2 and, for me, 1.)

what? TDK i guess i could see the argument but Iron Man 3 was a superhero movie to the max

sure but it felt just as much like a standard Shane Black shit-talking buddy cop / action flick to me.

Iron Man 3 had a major 80's action/buddy cop vibe going on

X-post

Iron man 3 had a lot of action/buddy cop stuff but c'mon there were some A+ superhero setpieces, like the mid-air rescue and the suit ballet

woops, sorry, should have read further up - the point being that it was BOTH superhero movie and something else, I get it.

Yeah, exactly. TDK worked for me 'cause Nolan was cribbing hardcore from Heat and stuff like that while merging it pretty well with a comic-book universe. Helps that the outside influence seemed to ground the action sequences somewhat. Whereas TDKR and MOS play it too straight. (Not their only problems, obv.)

Man of Steel did try to play up the scifi elements of the Superman mythos which was kind of interesting but like everything else in the movie it gets lost among the endless scenes of destruction and superpunching

So u guys arr saying a superhero movie has to keep its identity secret

Heh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF2ayWcJfxo

totally off-topic but having not listened to that song in over two decades, how did this lame revamp of groove is in the heart/bust a move get airplay

savvy arsenio hall tie-in iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uSSxNpJy_0