stubs182

Too many TV spots, wayyy too many. After about the 7th TV spot I felt like I had pretty much seen the whole movie already and as it turns out, I had. All the best moments had been spoilt for me. But despite all that I really, really wanted to love this movie, when they first announced it would be Zack Snyder directing and Chris Nolan producing my head practically exploded with excitement. The dream team I thought to myself, Snyder's eye for epic, super powered action sequences and Nolan's dramatic, grounded story telling. How could this possibly fail? Well not that it failed exactly, but I certainly wasn't totally blown away in the fashion that I was sure I would be. Obviously my impression is massively tainted by the sky high level of anticipation I had for this film, but to be fair I was in the same state of mind when I saw The Dark Knight in the cinema and I walked away from that experience having had my high expectations absolutely blown through the roof, with Man of Steel however I left feeling just slightly meh…

Now having said all that I will say that this is easily the best Superman movie to date, it totally blows the rest of them out of the water. The action scenes, as we've all seen from the trailers, are the truest depiction of Superman's true power and the other great strength of the movie is the relationship between Clark and Lois, which is absolutely nailed this time. But other than that I found it pretty hard to care about a lot of the other characters. I wasn't overly impressed with Zod as I thought I would be, a lot of the obvious dramatic moments fell flat for me and a lot of the movie really felt by the numbers and predictable.

They actually gave most of the best sequences to Faora and she displayed most of the best moments of Kryptonian abilities, shockingly I found myself more interested in watching her than I was in Superman. I was sure this was to set up Supes in the last act to start truly kicking some ass but no, the flip never happened. Obviously Superman wins but not in any spectacular fashion, he just sort of wins….

In the final showdown Zod asks the appropriate question, if he was born and trained to be a warrior and on Earth he has all the same powers as Kal-El than what chance does he; a farm boy realistically have? And there is no answer for this question proposed. There real question then becomes why did they have that line in there when it's only purpose is to make the audience say to themselves, Yeah Zod really should have won.

That's just one of the little things that really irked me, and the point is if I'm taking the time to actually pick that apart and get annoyed by it then the movie's not doing something right. Man of Steel is movie with serious ups and downs and unfortunately did not live up to the hype that surrounded it and having now had some time to analyse it I really don't know if there's anything DC can do to bridge the ever expanding gap between themselves and Marvel. And unfortunately for all the fans out there dreaming of a Justice League movie to knock Avengers off the top spot, this really doesn't bode well for it. To be fair if Man of Steel had dropped before any of the Marvel stuff had been set in motion I probably would have looked far more favourably upon it, but it didn't. And the landscape for comic book movies has changed so much in the last few years it feels like DC will forever be lagging behind which is really unfortunate.

I don't want to end on such a down note, so I will say that there is the definite possibility for a successful Man of Steel sequel but I think there has to be a major change up, lose Zack Snyder.