As you’re probably aware, Man of Steel: A Superman Movie* opened last week, raking in absurd amounts of cash due to the marketing efforts of both Warner Brothers and Gillette. Man of Steel is the second major attempt to reboot Superman as a film franchise in the past decade. The last attempt, Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, didn’t make a deep enough dent in the box office to justify a sequel, possibly because Bryan Singer seemed interested in making an actual film rather than a delivery system of audio-visual stimuli designed to activate dopamine neurons in the brains of teenage boys and grown man boys alike.
For Man of Steel, Warner Brothers decided to rely on a different brand. Specifically, they decided to borrow from their enormously successful Dark Knight films, so they brought in Christopher Nolan to “godfather” the new project to fruition. Whether or not he had any creative input on the final film is anyone’s guess, but the trailers now say that the film comes from “Producer Christopher Nolan, Director of The Dark Knight” and in return for lending Warner Brothers his name, it’s safe to assume Nolan received a great deal of cash.
Christopher Nolan is not, however, the director of Man of Steel. Instead, Warner Brothers hired Zack Snyder, the geek-friendly maximalist who lent his “visionary” eye to such notable excrement as 300, Watchmen, and Sucker Punch. Whether it’s the obsessively detailed CGI compositions of 300 or the equally detailed set design of Watchmen, the common thread of Snyder’s films is that every frame of every film he’s ever made (excluding his relatively low budget, but still shitty, Dawn of the Dead remake) has been pre-designed, composed, photographed, colour corrected, and digitally altered to the point that they no longer represent anything that remotely resembles the actual world.
Like the sight of a porn star with augmented breasts, collagen lips, and bleached asshole, the sight of a Zack Snyder film offers some sort of visual interest, but it’s not exactly nourishing. There’s no denying that a lot of time, money, and effort went into the creation of Man of Steel, but the end result feels like it was designed for the purpose of giving adolescent males a jolt of energy, a chance to say “Whoah!” without ever asking them to think.
Of course, the idea of “turning your brain off” at the movies holds a certain appeal, even for the most cynical film snobs, but Zack Snyder’s ideological blindness is frightening. In 300, his first of several graphic novel or comic book adaptations, Snyder brought Frank Miller’s reprehensible politics to the screen using his unique visual sensibilities to fetishize the story’s fascism, along with its representations of infanticide, eugenics, and homophobia.
To read 300 as evidence that Snyder is a malevolent force bent on indoctrinating the earth’s youth with right-wing militarist zeal would be a mistake. It would also be an undeserved compliment to Snyder’s intellect, seeing how easily he can bounce from the fascism of 300 to the anarchism of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, his follow-up. The only common quality between the two films comes from, again, Snyder’s painstaking, belaboured approach to the visual.
If any film should represent Snyder’s actual view of the world, it would be Sucker Punch, the only original property in his entire oeuvre. Ostensibly, it’s a feminist story of empowerment. A group of young women unfairly locked up in an asylum find reprieve from their brutal realities by escaping to the fantasy realms of their imagination. On one fantasy-plane, they are prostitutes and dancers in a burlesque. On another, they fight their way–wearing miniskirts, heels, and big guns–through an apocalyptic landscape of Lord of the Rings-esque monsters, undead soldiers, and androids. And so a story about female empowerment becomes the hyper-sexualized fever dream of a caffeine-addled male comic book enthusiast.
I wouldn’t draw any malicious intent from Snyder’s hyper-sexualized representations of women in Sucker Punch. He seems incapable of not sexualizing whatever is on screen. After all, 300 gave us that intensely homoerotic sight of 300 titular Spartans charging into battle, almost naked, with their shiny washboard abs reflecting the computer generated sky, and Watchmen gave us Dr. Manhattan’s shiny blue dick.
Man of Steel might be the least sexually charged of Snyder’s films. Partially because star Henry Cavill and love interest Amy Adams have very little chemistry, but also because Cavill spend most of the movie either dressed or covered in a reflective synthetic material that clings to his body. Superman’s suit is now dark, and so is the world he lives in. Despite parting with his usual Director of Photography (Larry Fong), Man of Steel is, like most of Snyder’s previous films, a heavily desaturated affair. Zack Snyder jettisoned the colourful world of the Christopher Reeves films and replaced it with the overbearing aesthetics of Zack Snyder. A simple shot of Clark Kent walking through snow has become a distraction. It’s no longer just a shot, it’s a shot that’s had the colour drawn out of it and countless evenly spaced snowflakes digitally added to the frame.
Snyder’s aesthetic sensibilities are about as noteworthy as those of Ed Hardy’s Christian Audigier. He really likes details and things that shine and things that look like they cost money, but his sole purpose seems to be in appealing to douchebags. Snyder’s films are a chore to look at. They’re ugly.
Other than its appearance, Man of Steel fails to generate any other sort of interest. Unlike 300 or Sucker Punch, it’s not even risibly offensive, it’s just an uninteresting Christ allegory that decided its Christ should be partially responsible for an amount of urban destruction that dwarfs the wreckage of Manhattan left by The Avengers. And by the end of all this wanton Carnage, Snyder’s Metropolis looks much as it did prior to the arrival of Superman and his enemies, it’s dark, dreary, colourless, yet still somehow looks as if its been excessively storyboarded
If you’re wondering whether or not you should go see Man of Steel, the answer is ‘no’ (unless you have a special interest in Superman or, like me, a perverse need to watch every bloated blockbuster that Hollywood hurls down our throats in the summer months). Why shouldn’t you see it? Because Zack Snyder is the worst.
*Not an actual subtitle.
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Alan Jones writes about film (and sometimes music) for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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