I went into this film ready to forgive a lot. I really WANTED to love it. I tried to ignore all the bad reviews, and just have faith that Goyer and Snyder could be trusted with my hero.
While I was watching the film, I was STILL TRYING to love it. Literally making effort to excuse what I was starting to realise was a badly developed plot and script; plot points that make little to no sense, character's lacking in clear motivation and scenes that felt much too short to have the impact they were trying too.
I was getting the hang of it. I'd started accepting this wasn't the level of quality i'd been hoping for, but it was still fun and Cavill was still doing an awesome job of looking gorgeous, as well as conveying Clark's natural warmth and sense of loneliness and conflict.
I was starting to think it would be okay, and that I could still walk out of the cinema going 'well, it's not an amazingly well made film, but I enjoyed it a lot'. I'm not even one of those people who was all that bothered by the level of destruction ... that was expected to me, and something that happened often in the cartoons.
But then we get to the final act, and Superman is holding Zod round the neck while he is shooting a strangely very badly aimed and slowly moving beam of heat vision at a family with small children. And instead of doing any number of other options to stop him shooting that beam of heat vision, he snaps his neck. Snaps. His. Neck.
In front of a family with small children.
And why? Because Zod says he's never going to stop. Right... Okay... I could ALMOST be on board with that. Maybe. If there had perhaps been more of a build up to that. And if he'd done it away from the small children. And in a situation where the scenes that immediately follow are discussions of how it shapes his no kill rule for the future.
Like maybe a return to the priest from the middle (which I kind of liked as a reference to For Tomorrow) to mull over what he did. Or a chat with Ma Kent. Or Lois. Or Jor-el.
But they don't.
They follow it with his cocky conversation with Swanwick, in which he says he's as American as they come, and a girl swoons over how hot he is.
They then go on to talk about how proud pa kent would have been of his boy.
Right...
I'm sorry, but I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop the heart breaking effect that had on me.
Not just because it happened in this movie. But because I know what it could mean for the character in general, and how it alters the balance of the DC universe.
....
Beyond that, I then start being a lot less forgiving with the rest of the film. And I have a whole coach ride home with a phone that's out of battery and nothing to read... So I had plenty of time to let all the annoyances that i'd been trying to block out when I still wanted to love the film, find their way to the surface.
Here we go.
First thing I wanna say, is that I don't understand why they kept talking about this film being 'grounded in realism', cause it's not. It is so far out there, and so full of half baked plot devices. Avengers is more grounded in realism than this film is, by a mile (and remember, this is coming from someone who was never particularly impressed with Avengers).
One of the main problems, is that for a film to really feel 'grounded in realism', it's characters have to have scenes in which they become tangible as human beings... have conversations that feel like real like conversations and not badly scripted hokey exchanges. Have motivations and decisions that come across as logical and understandable to us, rather than doing things because they suit the plot or seem 'cool'.
Shannon was okay. Take a moment to digest that. I mean, I love his performances in other films SOOOO much. But he was just okay?
It's just that there is just nothing much to the character. We keep being told that he has these motivations to save his planet and such, but that doesn't give us an insight in to what has to happen to a man in order for him to be okay with killing a whole planet full of people so he can make new people of his own... we don't know him, or why he's turned into such a monster, even though we're told vaguely that he once was a good man.
I don't really understand what the attack was about in the beginning either.
What exactly did Zod hope to achieve? How was he planning to save the planet? Cause to me it sounds like his plan was to just carry on doing what the council already had been, but with him in charge... yeah, great plan
Then we have Jor-el, who thinks they should give up and let Krypton die off with one glimmer or kryptonian goodness still preserved out there somewhere. Odd way to feel about your entire race dying, but okay, whatever.
Then we move onto Pa Kent's ridiculous sacrifice that I will never understand in a million years.
I don't get why Clark couldn't just say 'No Dad, i'll go get the dog because I can do it quickly and safely and get back before the tornado hits, whereas you could get hurt and caught and die in the tornado cause your slower than me'.
That would be realism to me.
Instead, the superpowered teen let's his Dad run back to the car. Then he let's him get swept up by a tornado because his Dad says no and holds out his hand.
I don't know how we are supposed to take that as some noble decision, or a worthy reason for a good man like JK to die.
I've seen plenty of scenarios where someone will say 'No, don't save me, it's for the greater good'. But the hero always saves them anyway, despite what it means for them, cause that's what heroes do. They don't let people die to protect their secret... especially when it's not even to protect it forever, it's more of an 'it's not quite time yet... let me die so you can come out in a few years when your ready'.
Maybe if it had been dramatised a little better, and the scenario had seemed more like 'there was no way of saving him'... but it just felt stupid to me to try and make the decision to let his father die seem like one to be celebrated.
My final gripe with the film is the Clark/Lois relationship.
We have one scene were they meet and he saves her in the ship. Then we see her searching for him. Then he tells her the pa sacrifice story... and suddenly they are close friends?
That's ALSO not realism. I need a bit more than two conversations to feel that two people trust each other and support each other... which is what they go on to do for the rest of the film, but it just doesn't feel like it has any footing...
Half of how she was involved in the plot was so forced anyway... like why did Zod want her on the ship? She is brought on, and immediately shoved conveniently into the exact room with the key slot so she can talk to Jor-el... but there seems to be nothing that Zod actually wanted her for... which just seems kind of stupid.
Basically, overall this movie was already failing to be anything but a bad movie to me. And then it cemented itself as devestating.
I really really wanted to like it and forgive it's flaws. And I just couldn't. There were too many, and they were too big.
I was supposed to be watching it again tonight, but I couldn't bring myself to so soon, while the sting is still fresh
There were parts of it I liked. The action was great looking, the fights well put together (really liked the faora vs supes one), and I do think the cast fit their respective roles well even though the performances were nothing to shout about. And seeing Clark in the DP with the glasses on did bring a small smile back to my face (even though it's got the problem of 'how the hell did he get a job at the DP with no experience or references or even samples of writing?').
But other than that, it leaves me with a feeling of dread for the future of Superman
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