Three stars. Rating: PG-13, for brief profanity and vicious, unrelenting violence and destruction
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.14.13
Grim, humorless and unpleasantly brutal.
Not to mention boring and
redundant, particularly during the interminable, body-slamming final act.
No fun at all.
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| Having been punched through half a dozen buildings by an equally super-powered adversary, our caped hero (Henry Cavill) pauses for breath before returning to the city-leveling skirmish. At which point, we wonder: With a hero like this, who needs enemies? |
Director Zack Snyder has
delivered a Superman film with the nasty, cataclysmic tone he employed so well
— and much more appropriately — in 300 and Watchman: a dark, dour mood that
also suited Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, but is wholly out of place
here. No surprise: Nolan shares story credit here with David S. Goyer, with
whom he co-wrote those Batman epics. All things considered, then, Snyder, Nolan
and Goyer have concocted precisely the sort of Superman we should have expected
from them.
I do not approve.
All concerned desperately need to
take lessons from Joss Whedon, when it comes to choreographing the real
estate-leveling carnage of a melee between super-powered beings. As Whedon
proved with The Avengers, he understands the importance of the occasional wink
and nod, not to mention his recognition of the fine emotional line between
necessary collateral damage and a callous disregard for brutalized civilian
bystanders.
Snyder obviously relished the
opportunity to envision what it really might be like for a being such as
Superman to be tossed through half a mile’s worth of office buildings; the
director and his special-effects wizards certainly beat such scenes to death.
But, speaking of death, it’s impossible to overlook the hundreds (thousands?)
of fragile humans who’d be maimed and killed along the way, as a result of each
super-powered punch ... which turns Superman’s “code against killing” into
something of a joke.
Hell, he must kill scores of
people every time he slams his evil, super-powered adversaries through said
buildings. Ironic, then, that his code eventually becomes an important — if
ill-defined — plot point.
On top of which, the various
Metropolis-shattering skirmishes go on for so long, and thus to such
diminishing returns, that they become no more meaningful than watching Godzilla
stomp and flatten a miniature cardboard Tokyo in all those 1950s and ’60s
Japanese monster flicks.
