Zack Snyder: Man of Steel (2013)

After three viewings over nearly a decade, my thoughts on Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s gargantuan yet intimate retelling of the Superman origin story, haven’t so much changed as crystallized. Those things I initially admired about Man of Steel still stand out as praiseworthy, a few subtle features have clarified in my mind, and large stretches, notably in the second half, still leave me fatigued (to borrow my phrase from our Roundtable in 2013). The film boasts some of Snyder’s highest flights of visual storytelling and some of the deepest emotional cuts in his body of work, but aspects of the narrative are clunky and the audience is overburdened in the latter portions with overloaded, repetitive, and drawn-out action sequences. The result is a movie that has much beauty and something true to say about Superman, but also a few missteps and too much that numbs the mind.

Man of Steel was an incredible test for Zack Snyder, who was coming off of two relative commercial and critical duds (Legend of the Guardians and Sucker Punch). While he still enjoyed some fan and studio heft due to the wild, unforeseen success of 300, his first entry in the superhero genre, Watchmen, had divided audiences with its stylized take on one of the most revered superhero graphic novels. After the success of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan helped single out Snyder as the man who would helm the film which DC hoped would initiate a cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s. Nolan says that David S. Goyer, who helped develop the stories for Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and who wrote the screenplay for Man of Steel, came to him with an idea for how to present Superman to modern audiences, and Nolan took the idea to the studio. After considering a number of directors, Snyder was brought on to direct. 

With Man of Steel, not only did Snyder have to prove that he was still a bankable blockbuster filmmaker, but the film itself was laden with enormous expectations as a reimagining of one of pop culture’s most iconic properties. While I think it’s fair to say that Snyder passed the test, earning the right to make two sequels and help shape the DCEU, the result was far from an unmitigated triumph. Superman fans had objections, Warner Bros. had hoped for even larger box office receipts, and regular filmgoers complained that it was too long and not enough fun. If 300 made Snyder a new film god, Man of Steel kept him ascendant, but just barely. 

Although I have many qualms and criticisms, Man of Steel nevertheless displays heroic ambition in striving to retell one of the modern world’s most famous legends in a way that’s faithful to the tale while offering something new to 21st-century viewers long familiar with the basic features of Superman. To be fair to Snyder, though, in my view, all of the existing Superman films are uneven. Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), while understandably beloved, is far from perfect; nonetheless, it remains the most significant Superman movie and a touchstone for the superhero genre. Richard Lester’s Superman II (1980) contains achievements as well as follies. Superman III (1983) and IV (1987) are weak movies, yet not without their moments. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006) proved, however, that attempting to duplicate the successes of the first two Christopher Reeve films, with their earnest idealism, cartoonish humour, and comic book settings, with the addition of updated special effects, didn’t work for the new millennium. Snyder, Goyer, and Nolan pursued a different path to tell Superman afresh.

I.

I’ve always found C. S. Lewis’s comments on myth to be particularly illuminating when discussing the superheroes that have achieved mythic status in our modern world. In his Introduction to George MacDonald’s fantasy novel, Lilith, Lewis describes a myth as “a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters. . . . Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, ‘done the trick’ ” (ix).[1] This mythic patterning of events is noticeable, for example, in how almost all iterations of Batman depict Bruce Wayne’s parents murder, even down to the detail of his mother’s pearl necklace. Similarly, Superman stories endlessly repeat the sequence of Kal-El’s arrival on earth—the doomed planet, the child in the lifeboat-spaceship, his discovery by his earthborn parents. These are patterns that have become lodged in the public’s imagination, endowing superheroes such as Superman and Batman with the status of modern myths, regardless of what specific storylines DC continues to write about them in monthly comic book issues that only a core base now reads. Not all of Snyder’s (or Nolan/Goyer’s) alterations and innovations to Superman’s origin story are successful, but the film contains enough of the elements of the myth, enough of the events in the pattern, to be an effective retelling. What is more, Man of Steel possesses a number of intimate refashionings that bring new attention to aspects of the character. The effect of the film is to defamiliarize Superman, rather than make him substantially different or new.

Defamiliarization, a concept from literary theory that I’ve long studied (and applied in my writing elsewhere on the site), involves the use of various artistic techniques to encourage an audience to see an object from a new perspective. In Man of Steel, Snyder reorders the origin story, while placing new emphases, in order to defamiliarize Superman’s primary narrative. The effect of the film’s approach to the familiar structure of the Superman origin story is refreshing and illuminating. 

After a 20-minute prologue mini-epic on the planet Krypton, Man of Steel delivers a reordered telling of how Kal-El becomes Clark Kent who becomes Superman. After the Kryptonian lifeboat-spaceship crashes on Earth, Snyder smash cuts to a fishing boat crashing through rough waves, skipping over the discovery of the baby by passing motorists (usually the Kents). In Snyder’s version, certain familiar events, such as the Kents discovering the boy in the wreckage, are only related later on and indirectly, while other parts typically passed over are now fleshed out. Perhaps inspired by Bruce Wayne’s wanderings in Batman Begins, the film explores for about half an hour what Clark did as an adult before going to Metropolis to become a journalist.

Elegantly inserted into this newfangled story of a drifter-ghost-saviour roaming the cold coastlines and forest highways, helping those in need until he meets his destiny on a Kryptonian spaceship buried in the Arctic ice, are a series of flashbacks relating the boyhood of Clark Kent. The flashbacks to Clark’s childhood and adolescence fragment the new plot, intimately connecting events in Clark’s wanderings to key events in the boy-Clark’s emotional and super-powered development. Demonstrating Snyder’s often underappreciated dramatic direction, Clark’s feelings govern the structure of this sequence, rather than a sequential narrative. Seeing a wandering Clark as a fisherman and on other odd jobs offers a new view on Kal-El’s trials as an outsider, while also casting the young Clark in a Herculean mould. Snyder’s defamiliarization of the most familiar superhero origin story does in fact shed new light and bring new attention to elements. Although I initially had misgivings, I’ve come to think this is the finest portion of the film. It’s an artistic and insightful account of the famous character.

Even though Man of Steel is something of a reimagining of Superman, participating with Batman Begins and Casino Royale in the 2000s reboot phenomenon, like those two, it also knows and appreciates the previous iterations of the character. But Man of Steel also fuses the familiar with the wider world of geek culture, which is one of Snyder’s domains of expertise. Like those two other films I’ve just mentioned, Man of Steel is one of the better reboots out there, since it’s intention seems to be as artistic in orientation as it is commercial. The point of retelling the origin is to bring new emphases, as well as revive the property’s commercial storyline. We get the sense that Snyder has a definite perspective about the kind of Superman he wants to present. Other reboots, such as Jurassic World, seem primarily commercial and bring little new appreciation to the original material. In other words, Man of Steel makes me think differently about Superman in a way that Jurassic World doesn’t really make me rethink the original film.

The other dominant strategy Snyder utilizes is his deep knowledge of and affection for geek culture, be it sci-fi, fantasy, comics, video games, etc., to underscore new aspects of the story. For example, the wild world-building of Krypton is a mix of political intrigue and sci-fi action, featuring winged monsters and strange battle armour, and showing the influence of two important limited comic book series: John Byrne’s The Man of Steel (1986) and Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright (2003–4). There are also touches of the Star Wars prequels (1999, 2002, 2005) and Avatar (2009), as well as the look of Peter Jackson’s cinematic renderings of Tolkien (2001–3). The reference to The Matrix (1999), with the vats of Kryptonian children being grown, adds a dystopian tinge to the whole of Krypton, as does the plot point of Kryptonians mining their planet’s core.

However, Snyder’s allusive fusion of sources can obscure the fact that the film is largely repeating the familiar patterns of the first Superman movie (1978), similarly setting things up with an extended sequence on Krypton, in marked contrast to the breezy presentation of the origin in most early comic book and film short versions. 

Even the casting of a big name actor like Russell Crowe as Jor-El echoes Marlon Brando’s performance in the original film, while infusing Snyder’s version with the more macho masculinity of the Gladiator star. Snyder’s emphasis on action even renders Jor-El a warrior in addition to being a scientist, as he perfunctorily engages in armed combat with Zod. This is one of the places where the film goes wrong, reducing, like most blockbusters today, too much of the conflict simply to action.

Throughout Man of Steel, Snyder’s engagement with Christopher Reeve’s Superman movies is more subtle and persistent than is often remarked on. Perhaps this is reasonable given that Superman was the first big cinematic blockbuster feature about a superhero (there were shorts and TV shows on screens before, but not a full-length big budget movie). Snyder’s movie is generally working in relation to Reeve’s Superman, offering points of contact and contrast. For example, early on, in his time as a drifter, Clark gets into a bar fight with a trucker, which recalls a couple scenes from Superman II, in which a Superman without powers is badly hurt by a trucker. Similarly, the battle in Smallville replicates, with variation, the fight in a small town in Superman II, when Superman faces Zod’s Kryptonian minions for the first time.

This raises an important question, though: Why did Snyder and Goyer borrow the General Zod storyline to provide the villain and central conflict for the narrative? I originally thought that it trapped the movie within the shadow of the Donner film, but it does offer a way to avoid recasting Lex Luther, the main villain in all previous Superman movies, as the initial villain. Superman has never been known to have the same number of quality villains as Batman. Thematically, the Zod storyline allows Snyder and Goyer to truly explore the question of Superman as an alien, the contrast between Kal-El and Zod magnifying the response of humanity to outsiders as a dominant theme of the film.

II.

Superman being an alien defines Snyder's approach throughout Man of Steel, shaping his borrowings from not only other Superman works but also wider genre fare. For instance, the Kryptonian ship frozen in the Canadian Arctic ice recalls an old Fleischer Superman cartoon, “The Arctic Giant” (1942), in which a dinosaur is found frozen in the Arctic. The ancient alien ship trapped in the ice also evokes The Thing from Another World (1951) and its remake The Thing (1982) as well as The X-Files movie (1998).

Overall, Man of Steel is framed as an alien invasion movie. I didn’t fully appreciate how the alien invasion genre defines the film the first time I saw it. The Kryptonian ships hovering over cities clearly alludes to Independence Day (1996), and the destruction of Metropolis channels 9/11 via Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) (an intertextual intersection that would be revisited in BvS). Snyder’s exploitation of comic books and alien invasion stories also bends the film around the central question: how would a more realistic world greet an alien being with incredible powers? With fear and distrust, is Nolan, Goyer, and Snyder’s answer. 

Like many alien invasion and disaster movies, Snyder emphasizes the role of government, particularly the military, giving us the memorable imagery of Superman arriving in a desert to turn himself in, and being escorted by special ops down a hallway to his interrogation room. Such imagery displays Snyder’s ambiguous politics: is this the typical Hollywood blockbuster military jingoism or a critique of military posturing, since Superman laughably dismantles their attempts to contain him when the time is right.

Having Superman and Lois Lane first encounter each other on the alien ship also drastically alters the relationship between the two main characters in the Superman myth: Kal-El/Clark Kent and Lois Lane. This is perhaps the film’s biggest alteration, one of the most controversial (along with allowing Superman to kill Zod), and, in my view, the least satisfying choice. While I understand the reasons for having Lois know Superman’s real identity, something is lost in the characters and their interplay. 

Clark Kent, who doesn’t even become a journalist until the final minutes of the film, is barely a character. Christopher Reeve will never be bested as Clark Kent, playing up the perceived weakness of Clark with just enough winks at the audience to make everyone’s underestimation of Clark a joke that we the audience are let in on with him. The final shot of Man of Steel teases at the possibilities of a story world in which Clark Kent hides his identity from most people, with only Lois knowing (as is the case in about half the seasons of Lois & Clark [1993–97]), but sadly we never really get that world in the Snyder trilogy. 

Obviously, it wouldn’t have fit with Sndyer’s tone and approach (which also noticeably removes Lois’s main function as a damsel-in-distress in many Superman comics and cartoons), but it’s still the loss of a core element, just as the removal of Robin, while fitting with Nolan’s approach, is also a loss for the myth and character of Batman. In both films, important elements in the pattern have been removed, and their absence is felt.

III.

An exploration of Snyder’s use of source material and allusions helps to explain the film’s themes and narrative structure, but it’s really Snyder’s handling of formal features that defines his film’s successes and weaknesses. Man of Steel contains some of Snyder’s most hopeful, earnest, and heartfelt scenes along with some of his most plodding action.

In 2013, Man of Steel was at least exciting simply because we had never seen Superman perform the action feats he does on-screen. Superman Returns was noticeably one-dimensional in terms of action. Snyder deserves praise for opening up a full range of possibilities for action involving a man who can fly and move superfast and is as strong as anything on earth. 

There’s excitement to Superman flying, particularly the way Snyder has Superman charge up and burst from the earth’s surface, like some anime character. I also like Snyder’s delight in unleashing all of Superman’s powers, from his heat vision to flights in space to chilling breath.

Snyder draws on his signature directorial strengths—the manipulation of speed and movement, with fast and slow-motion and free-ranging digital camera work—to depict the slug fests between Kryptonians. They may be superfast, but they can still block each other. Snyder goes to great lengths showing the destruction these superbeings wreck on the world around them. How many times can we see someone thrown through a building though? 

In our superhero and CGI saturated worlds, in which all fantasies are now renderable to varying degrees of verisimilitude, the long extended action sequences now lack even the wonder of the new. But it’s not simply a matter of being an old hat. The key issue is duration. We get several climaxes in terms of narrative: Smallville against the Kryptonian henchman, then stopping the World Destroyers, then stopping Zod, all in a row. The elegance of the back-and-forth between the drifter scenes and childhood flashbacks, with smart visual transitions, turns to a beastly train that keeps adding extra and bigger cars on the end. Just stop already.

If all these scenes were drastically tightened overall, they would work. But they run on far too long. The last hour could be cut nearly in half. Snyder’s tendency is always to play on the largest possible scale. It’s operatic, mythic, grand, but something is lost, and too much is a fair criticism. 

The second half of Man of Steel exemplifies something I’ve long lamented in superhero films: apart from the films of Christopher Nolan and parts of Zack Snyder’s, our superheroes rarely actually fight crime any more. Snyder has Batman fight sex traffickers and other criminals in Batman v. Superman, and Superman rescues people in a few quick scenes in BvS, but Snyder’s Superman never stops common crooks. His Superman fights supervillains and alien invaders. The sole exceptions are the childhood and drifter scenes, between about 20 minutes and 50 minutes in the runtime. It’s a pleasure to see Superman save people, not just fight supervillains, and Snyder does it in a way that’s emotional and affecting, not hokey, like the early scene in Wonder Woman 1984 in which she stops crooks at a mall.

Superman doesn’t need to be a journalist in Snyder’s universe, because it gives him no special access to the kinds of villains and opponents his heroes face. Even Lois goes on to be more important as Superman’s romantic partner than as a journalist. This actually further removes superheroes from reality, putting their conflicts in entirely unreal scenarios. They become only super-heroes, no longer crime-fighters, thus removing the characters largely from the realm of socio-economic concerns, which the original comics of the Depression-era 1930s fermented in.

Perhaps the removal of journalism, crime-fighting, and Lois Lane’s dramatically ironic chemistry with Clark explain why the heart of Man of Steel, and its best engagement with the Superman mythos, are in the flashbacks. It helps that Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are great as the Kents. For instance, when Clark saves the kids on his school bus, Snyder gives us a nice revisionary account of Superboy. Afterwards, Jonathan Kent’s comment that maybe he should have let the boy die is a startling admission and a change from our normal perceptions of the Kents. The Christopher Reeve movies understand the amazing power and hope in seeing someone save people from disasters and accidents, not just supernatural bad guys, and this is one of the few examples of such super-heroics in Snyder’s universe.

Henry Cavill is very good as Superman, less so as Clark Kent, but as I said, we barely get Kent. Cavill’s performance is particularly good at adding a world-weariness combined with a deep yearning. His deep hope that Superman, as a symbol of goodness, can inspire others to choose the right path is clear to the audience. His destiny becomes bound up with the future of the human race. Will they join him in the Sun, as Jor-El prophecies?

The film is also clearly a Christ origin story. The space ship leaving was always a Moses story, but Snyder’s take draws out the Christian parallels even more strongly (Moses’ story foreshadows Christ’s story in Christian readings of the Old Testament). The restructuring of events, with Kal-El’s arrival in the space ship, but without showing us the baby in the ship being found by the parents, makes it less a Moses story (and thus less a Christmas story) and more about the short narratives of the boy Christ. Clark is always being told by Jonathan that he has to choose his future destiny, whether to hide in obscurity and safety, or risk it and become the hero we need. His adopted father even says he can choose between good and evil. This functions as Clark’s temptation in the wilderness, if you will, whether to use his powers for personal gain and power or for the salvation of the world in service, as Jonathan tells the teenage Clark. 

An encounter with a priest before a big decision not only is a throwback to the Americana of the Christopher Reeve movies but also underscores the Christian themes present in much of the film. In Snyder’s film world, religion is important mostly for its relation to myth, as both explain the power of heroes. Religion is bound up with myth and the hero myth in particular as makers of meaning, on the broadest possible canvases as well as in individual lives.

IV.

In his Best of the Decade list, incendiary contrarian critic Armond White describes Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (which White places at the front of his list) “as the decade’s most daring and unparalleled expression of our moral and aesthetic needs.” I can agree with a moderated version of White’s praise. I do think Man of Steel is a daring expression of our moral and aesthetic needs, but not an unparalleled one and certainly not the decade’s most important statement. At the same time, I believe that the movie is, in parts, a potent symbol of what went wrong with blockbuster movie-making of the 2010s—technical innovations unleashed the unrestrained depiction of fighting, destructive action, and sensory stimulus to the detriment of engaging storytelling and character development. The film is striking, for me, for combining polarized highs and lows of contemporary filmmaking. It has some of my favourite moments in Snyder’s canon, and some of my least.

However, one thing that makes Snyder an interesting director is that his filmmaking project responds to criticisms (a truth that the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut noise often obscures), and his later efforts to address the unrestrained destruction of Metropolis and Superman’s willingness to kill in Batman v. Superman and Justice League actually help to mitigate this film’s missteps. It’s a discussion to be hashed out in our writing on those later films, but reading Man of Steel as Part 1 in a trilogy actually makes it a better film. 

I’ll end off with one of the film’s final images, and perhaps its most memorable, as a key to the movie’s themes and its emotional power: the boy in the cape, with the father watching him from a distance. Scenes like this, which perform the commendable task of evoking real emotion (not limited to the emotion generated by prolonged engagement with a set of characters, which Marvel’s Endgame achieves), a scene that can move one to tears with its heartfelt desire for heroic goodness in the world, certainly pays the debts, and more so, of other sections that glaze the eyes and numb the mind. 

The image functions in two directions. Diegetically, it perhaps suggests that there’s something within the young Clark/Kal-El that remembers his ancestors: the House of El. You’ll notice that Jor-El wears a cape at points on Krypton in the early parts of the film, and that Superman’s costume, cape and all, is a Kryptonian relic preserved on the ship found in the ice. So the boy perhaps unconsciously remembers his original parentage and its heroic lineage. The second function is extra-textual. It’s a signal to the audience, which, although it might not make much sense if we think it through, actually works intensely on the audience’s shared experience of Superman. The image works because it activates our familiar knowledge of Superman as a man in a cape, the physical-pattern (of cape and arms heroically to the side) so many little kids play out almost unconsciously before they have ever even properly seen a Superman movie. The image of a young Clark, shot Terrance Malick-style with a shaky cam and golden hour lighting, a dog before him, is also presenting us with a vision just different enough of that old Superboy to make us see him anew, afresh. I think it’s a powerful example of film’s defamiliarizations and a potent visualization of its core themes. 

Snyder’s Superman is a symbol that evokes not only a god-like saviour but also the godly hero within each individual. As the phantom of Jor-El instructs his son: “The symbol of the House of El means hope. Embodied within that hope is the fundamental belief in the potential of every person to be a force for good. That’s what you can bring them.” Man of Steel demonstrates that Snyder conceives of heroes not as a special few among many, but as those, be they few or many, who realize and act upon their potential for heroism. For Snyder, a heroic elite is meant to be an inspiring and actualizing, rather than a limiting, principle. Only a few survivors act heroically at the start of Dawn of the Dead, but most of them learn to within the course of the film. In 300, the heroic sacrifice of Leonidas inspires not just the Spartans but eventually all Greeks to heroic resistance.   

In Man of Steel, Superman is something we can see in the sky but also in other people: in a stranger who appears in the nick of time (whether the seasoned fisherman who saves the greenhorn, or the strange burning man who opens the door for the riggers to escape); that an employee might see in their boss during a crisis (in the case of Perry White); that a parent can see in their adopted child; that a wise scientist can see in a distant people’s future; and that, ultimately, the stranger, the alien, will bring out in his new home. It’s Snyder’s attention and ability to evoke such themes that makes his Man of Steel, in spite of all its flaws in the forging and stretching out, a Superman movie of great strength, and one worth remembering.  

7 out of 10

Man of Steel (2013, USA/UK)

Directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David S. Goyer, based on a story by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan; starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, and Russell Crowe.

Notes

[1] C. S. Lewis, Introduction to Lilith: A Romance, by George MacDonald, 1895. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2000.

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