Man of Steel

Eight years ago, Christopher Nolan reinvented a seemingly dead superhero franchise with his Dark Knight trilogy. Here he’s acting as a producer to attempt the same with another DC comic book hero and perhaps the most famous of all, Superman. There have been Superman films in the past of course and it’s only seven years since the forgettable Superman Returns hit screens to a decent critical and lukewarm box office reception. Taking control of Man of Steel is director Zack Snyder, a man a distinct style and experience of large, special effects movies. I’ve never had much affinity for the Superman character although I enjoyed the 90s TV series. The character, coupled with a director whose films I rarely enjoy lead me to having low expectations for the latest in a long line of superhero based blockbusters. Unfortunately even my low expectations failed to be met with Man of Steel, a dull movie which lasts for an age and goes nowhere.

The film does what all superhero re-boots are doing this century and gives us the origin story. The problem with Superman’s origin story is that it’s long and complex, or at least it is in this film. Spider-Man gets bitten by a spider, develops heightened senses and web stuff then goes with it. Batman invents stuff and goes from man to superhero. Superman though has a story which involves the end of a world, a race’s battle for survival, civil war, unusual childhood development and alienation before self discovery. That’s a lot to put in one movie and of course the movie doesn’t want to just give us the origin, it wants to entertain us with a villain and large scale battle. This results in a two and a half hour film which is full of long, unnecessary exposition and long winded flash backs.

Sucker Punch

I really don’t know where to begin with this terrible, misogynistic excuse for a film. The plot is as good a place as any but I don’t even know how to put it into words. As far as I could tell, Emily Browning (seen here in Sleeping Beauty) plays a girl who after the death of her mother, accidently kills her sister and is committed to a mental asylum. The asylum is populated entirely by good looking women in their early 20s. She is told that she will require four items to escape the asylum before she is lobotomized and for some reason enters a fantasy world where she attempts to find them. There are two fantasy worlds with one inside the other. In the first she is, for some reason a kind of lap dancer/prostitute. This world is populated by young women dancing around in their underwear. Why a 20 year old woman’s fantasy would be to be trapped in an evil lap dancing club I don’t know. The second level of fantasies occurs when she starts to dance. During these, Browning is transported, along with four other girls to some sort of battle scene where they must defeat the bad guy to get the map/knife/whatever they are looking for. During these scenes, the girls wear different skimpy outfits. And other than some borderline rape scenes, that’s basically it.

The film is massively over stylised. Zack Snyder well is known for this and although it worked ok in Watchmen, here it just looked stupid. The opening five minutes felt like a music video and from there on in it was a mixture of a computer game and a fourteen year old boy’s daydream. There were far too many slow motion shots which all zoomed in slowly. It was repetitive and unnecessary. The film dragged on and the slow motion made it feel even longer. By the time Browning’s character went in to her third fantasy featuring a Lord of the Rings style Orcs vs Knights battle, I let out a grown as I realised we were only about half way through.

This is the most video game like film I’ve ever watched. Each fantasy acts as a level which the characters must complete before moving onto the next and the CGI was like watching a trailer for a fantasy game. Browning’s character even dressed like a Japanese girl in one of those platform-fighting games.

Like all women, the cast wear their 'sex clothes' to coffee mornings

The film seems to suggest that the objectification of women is somehow empowering or makes them stronger. I find this assumption to be disgusting. I’m a little surprised that the film was even made given its clearly misogynistic tones. Why if the female characters are constantly on the brink of being raped are they seen in their own fantasies as fetishised versions of themselves? I would have thought that the fantasy versions of themselves would be as un-sexual as possible but instead we see them dressed as ‘sexy school girls’ in more up skirt shots than you’d find in the Daily Star. This film’s sexual politics are so unbelievably skewed that I am surprised that the actors agreed to appear in it.

The acting isn’t atrocious but when all the actors have to do is dress as sex workers and fight imaginary monsters, there’s not much you can do wrong. The Very Hungry Caterpillar probably has more dialogue than this film and that story is more compelling. The actors spend half of their time posing in their underwear and the rest of the time kicking giant Samurai warriors or German soldiers with red eyes.

For a film that contains so much action and titillation, it is incredibly boring. I think its astonishing that I was bored by two hours of scantily clad young women hitting monsters but I didn’t care what happened or when or even why. There is one nice moment towards the end where I thought to myself “Ahh that’s why she…” but for the other 108 minutes I was left feeling bored and angry. I don’t know why the film was made. If people want to see near naked women, they can go online. If they want to play a video game, they can. If they want to watch a film, they should avoid this pile of nonsense crap.

1/10