Man of Steel

Zack and Chrissie Make A Snorno

I never have had a great affinity for Superman as a comic-book hero, being more interested in human and damaged heroes such as Bruce Wayne's Batman or Tony Stark's Iron Man. Their stories contained flawed men trying to better themselves, as well as their world. 

However, Superman being an alien from Krypton, I never really related to the character.  He was always “Mister Goody Super Two-Shoes”, never breaking his high moral code to bring the bad guys down.  I didn't mind Batman using fear and intimidation to find out The Joker's location, it was for The Greater Good.  Try and get Superman to use his heat vision to go all Jack Bauer on a bad guy's kneecaps.  Not going to happen.

Broody, no?

So skip to 2013, and we have the newest Superman film, Man of Steel. The franchise has been rebooted under the helm of Zack Snyder, with Christopher Nolan producing. I'm a fan of Snyder's early directorial work, such as the rebooted Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen, but he's been slipping in recent years. Christopher Nolan on the other hand has just gone from strength to strength in his career. Starting with innovative films such as Memento, then creating the incredible dream-thieving of Inception and perfectly capturing a gritty and realistic Gotham in the Dark Knight trilogy, he can just do no wrong in my eyes.

Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder
(Producer and Director...)
(...I wish their roles were reversed)

Focussing on the realistic portrayal that Nolan gave Batman Begins, that is what the trailer for this film seemed to suggest Man of Steel would focus on.  The man that is Clark Kent/Kal-El and not the Superman he chooses to be.  The trailer showed a young child running through washing lines with a cape on his back, pretending to be the ideal than mankind could strive towards.  That was the film I wanted.  More Man than of Steel.  I wanted Clark to have the life we have seen before (reporter for the Daily Planet, budding relationship with Lois) but to have the realistic inner struggle of whether to reveal himself as Superman. And to be fair to Man of Steel, we do get that for about half the film.  It's just simply not enough.

General Zod
(Michael Shannon)

Clark struggles between keeping a low profile and not using his powers, therefore obeying his Earth father, played with a terrific subtlety by Kevin Costner, and utilising them to benefit those around him. This is so not to alert people that Clark is actually an alien, and proof that we are not alone in the Universe. It is an interesting way of taking the Superman idea, as no one has thought about how a realistic Earth would react to a man like Kal-El. Previous films simply show everyone instantly loving and supporting him, but the film's correct; people would freak the hell out knowing that there's a planet called Krypton that has not only intelligent life, but life that is way more advanced than us. That is why I enjoyed the style of intimidation that the villain, Krypton's General Zod, uses to announce his arrival to Earth, a broadcast around the world telling us that “We Are Not Alone” and that one of his people has been living amongst us.

However, when Clark goes on the road to try and find his true identity, that idea of a secret identity seems to begin to fade away. He starts using powers like super-strength and heat vision without hesitation, seemingly throwing away all the inner conflict he endured and the advice Costner gave him. This culminates in Clark blindly listening to his second father figure/Robin Hood of the film, Russell Crowe, and becoming the eponymous 'Man of Steel'. Just like that.  In the blink of an eye.

Then the film quickly degrades to becoming a 45 minute 'epic dual' between the two warring alien factions, which slowly becomes tedious and boring, despite the amount of collateral damage they mindlessly cause. For a guy fighting on behalf of Metropolis and it's people, Superman surely causes several hundred deaths in the final fight scene with General Zod. I imagine because Snyder and Nolan got a bit greedy with the effects and wanted another skyscraper to spectacularly tumble to the ground, rather than think “Would Superman be so brash as to collapse 20-odd buildings without hesitation?”.  

Most importantly, I felt no real desire to see Superman come out on top during the final fight due to my lack of connection with the guy.  Either that or the simple fact that I just knew that he'd be fine and finish the job, unscathed as usual, since he is freaking invunerable!  Kal-El literally gets pummelled into sides of buildings, gets blown up in explosions and flies through giant alien spaceships, but not a single hair is touched when he comes out the other side. There's no potential peril at all and therefore no tension in my mind or my heart.  At least Bruce Wayne had broken bones that need healing and Tony Stark required a Hulk roar to revitalise him in The Avengers. Supes needs none of that and therefore I really wasn't worried about him during any part of the film.

Even Hulk was momentarily subdued during
the Avengers' Final Fight, and LOOK at the guy!

It's not all bad, as I mentioned earlier. The first half of the film starts the character off well and tries to take it in a new and fresh direction, but ultimately falls down in the conclusion. Cavill does a good job as the conflicted Man of Steel, but the plaudits lie with Michael Shannon as General Zod, the film's antagonist. As usual Shannon played the role with a lethal intensity which fit the Kryptonian purist, who simply wanted to carry on the future of his planet, albeit on Earth.  Along with Costner, Shannon made the film bearable, but again, his talents were wasted in the second half of the film where he is hung from wires against a green screen and re-enacts the final fight from The Matrix Revolutions.

"Misterrrr....... Kent" doesn't have the same ring...

I feel like I was promised something much better than this reboot of a franchise, mainly from the trailer but the appointment of Nolan as producer led me to believe that another “comic book art film” such as Batman Begins would be projected onto the silver screen, but alas I was mistaken.  Since release, it has earned millions worldwide and received positive opinions from most of those who see it, so I implore you to watch and see for yourself, it's probably just me. But don't blame me when you're questioning Lois Lane's entire role in this storyline, as well as the origin of Superman's suit. In a film like this, you're not supposed to question the small details, but be brought along for the ride, forgiving such indiscretions. But as I was left with a laundry list of complaints after the credits rolled, I don't think it had the desired effect.  I simply had a lack of zeal.

Rating - 4/10

Shock and Awe

Sometimes when you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, you eventually discover that the reason for the slowdown was other drivers' morbid fascination in someone else's terrible car crash. And whilst you're shocked to discover the reason, you sometimes can't help but take a peek yourself. It's human curiosity and it's natural.

The same experience happens when watching a scary film or horror movie. You want to look away, but you just can't. You hide behind the sofa cushions, but you leave just enough room to peek and watch anyway. I can honestly say that despite my parents' warnings as a child, I stayed up to watch horror films that were much too adult for my juvenile brain, but I just couldn't help myself. The more I found myself disgusted, the more I found myself glued to the television. 

Good God, M. Night, why must you scare me so?

Since growing up, the fascination has only grown and I keep terrifying myself to the point of insomnia (mainly due to any film featuring aliens).  So why do millions of people around the world share my enthusiasm for scaring the living daylights out of ourselves? Is the appeal due to these films allowing the audience to safely see their hidden desires and fears?  Has the increase in so-called 'torture porn' helped or only made things worse?

To discover the roots of the issue, you first have to analyse the beginning. Humans have told each other ghost stories and urban myths since we learned to communicate, so it's little surprise that the instant we discovered how to create moving images, we used it to show horror to paying audiences.

The Crystal Maze's forfeits
started taking a dark turn...

The first to utilise such technology came from Europe, with films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu.  Both films present very abstract set designs, gothic architecture and hideous characters floating like spectres through their respective films, intended to unnerve and horrify the audience. The iconic image of Nosferatu's Count Orlok stooping over a sleeping woman is echoed in horror films for years to come.

With the innovation of sound in films, America started creating it's own 'monster movies' such as Dracula, King Kong and The Wolfman. These creature features now featured the added dimension of grunts, groans and howls to the ghostly figures on screen, as well as providing suspenseful and atmospheric music to guide the audience.  These films gave audiences a rare opportunity to see terrifying mythical creatures for the first time, leading to 80 million people attending the cinema on a weekly basis in 1930, some 65% of the total US population - all scared out of their minds! The prospect of never-before-seen monsters is summed up well by a quote from King Kong:

"I am about to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a King and a God in the world he knew. But now he comes to civilisation, merely a captive, a show to satisfy your curiosity."

With the maturing of the audience, so came the adolescence of the horror films. We evolved from being afraid of The Other, to being afraid of Ourselves. No film shows this better than William Friedkin's The Exorcist. 

A PG image for those of you left
terrified by real images from this film

The infamous film tells the story of a young girl possessed by a demon claiming to be The Devil.  During the film, Regan is transformed into a hideous monster and tries to frighten the titular exorcist by performing unbelievable actions, such as levitation, projectile vomiting and turning her head around 360°. This resulted in several people fainting in the auditoriums worldwide, outrage surrounding blasphemy and millions and millions of dollars at the box-office. People came in their droves to see “the most disgusting and vile film of all time” as they wanted their own opinion, but also because of the morbid fascination we have with repulsive things. We inherently desire the need to be frightened and excited. Many peoples' daily lives provide so little excitement, that the rush that they feel from such vile and disgusting acts is invigorating.

This attraction that we have towards films such as The Exorcist led to more directors trying to exceed the boundaries of taste and what we consider the limitations of horror. Following The Exorcist's success, several films featuring grotesqueries such as The Fly, Scanners and The Thing became critical and commercial successes.  However, the backlash was just around the corner. 

Life... er... found a way

In 1982, the Video Recordings Act banned a select number of films that it considered to be corruptible and dangerous to the public, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Driller Killer and I Spit On Your Grave, giving them the classification of 'video nasties'. The list was fraught with inconsistencies, such as most of the films not even being watched, but being banned due to their titles alone, for example Apocalypse Now. 

Ironically, this censorship only cemented their place in history, making them notorious in the eyes of the audience and providing a very convenient list for which people could aim to watch. Thankfully most of the censorship has since been repealed, but their legacy still proves that horror film audiences are attracted to that which is thought to be disgusting and corruptible.

In recent years, the genre 'torture-porn' has been thrown around to label films such as The Human Centipede, the Saw franchise and Eli Roth's Hostel movies, with many critics discrediting them as purely for sadists who enjoy watching others suffering through extreme circumstances; a sign of the decline in horror cinema. However, this idea of films being based purely on grotesque spectacle can be found in the early years of film when a film called Freaks was released in 1932. 

A very loose definition of the term 'amazing production'

Freaks revolves around a murder within a circus' sideshow performers; the titular 'Freaks' such as a bearded woman, a little person and a set of Siamese twins. It was produced purely focussed on benefiting from the pre-millennial audience's fascination with anything different from themselves, and resulted in quite a vicious backlash. The film horrified instead of frightened audiences and quite obviously degraded the actors of the film, dressing them up in embarrassing costumes and making them debase themselves, all in the name of entertainment. This shows that there is a line of decency that even horror film fans can distinguish and not all films provide the twin thrills of excitement and disgust; some films just exploit.

However, most film critics agree that whilst the Western world may be torturing for entertainment's sake, Asian cinema provides audiences with films that feature torture for a reason. These films from the East educate about the human condition, as well as take us on an emotional and psychological thrill-ride. Films from visionary directors such Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Park Chan Wook examine darker parts of the human soul and provide commentary on what make us who we are.  

One of my favourite
cinema villains of all time

Park Chan Wook's seminal Oldboy shows the extent a man will go to exact vengeance on those who wronged him, and how much that man is destroyed in the process.   However, Asian film-makers often don't concern themselves with how audiences react to the way that their films depict these commentaries, trusting in the viewer's own judgement of their personal threshold. These films have since gathered a vast appreciation and admiration, and many credit their balance between disgust and insight.

So what is next for horror cinema? Will it follow the current trend of Hollywood films, with a vast majority being shameless remakes and pale imitations of the Asian horror films, such as The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water? Or will they simply learn from those who have achieved more, by balancing the audience's thirst for vulgarity with their desire for respect? Whatever the outcome, it is certain that cinemagoers will attend in record numbers, ready to be repulsed and intrigued all over again.