Man of Steel: A Fangirl Review

Man of Steel:  A Fangirl Review

 

It’s a bird...It’s a plane...It’s… Superman?

As a kid I was definitely a DC fan!  I loved the Justice League and Wonder Woman was my hero—I have the Underoos to prove it.  I was never a huge Batman fan, but I enjoyed the Tim Burton movies, Batman Forever, and fanboys forgive me, Batman and Robin.  I know not a popular movie by fanboy standards, but I thought it was fun, except for maybe the nipples on the Bat suit, eww, ok bad flashback.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: I’m not a fan of Nolan’s Batman Trilogy.  I know most Fanboys and Fangirls LOVE it, but I just never connected with it.  There’s just something about superheroes being too grounded in everyday reality that turns me off.   So if you’ve seen Man of Steel, you might already know one of the problems I had with it.

There will be spoilers ahead for Man of Steel so if you haven’t seen it yet, come back and read this after you have and let me know what you think.

 

Superman has never been my favorite superhero, but I still loved him, so I was so excited to see this installment.  I’m a fan of Zack Snyder and I felt confident that he could do an amazing job with the material, and every trailer released for this movie blew me away.  I was beyond hopeful for it to wow me… sadly it did not.

Let me focus on some positive aspects that I really liked about the movie.  I liked the fact that they went in another direction rather than trying to remake a Christopher Reeve-esque movie.  He will forever be our ultimate Superman and you can’t recreate that. Superman Returns tried and failed which is why I think fans can’t get behind it.  A less Campy approach worked for me. 

 

I also liked what they did with Lois Lane.  I liked the fact that she wasn’t as clueless and helpless as the original character and I liked that she new Superman was Clark Kent!  That drove me crazy in the originals!!  How do you not know that’s the same guy?  I also liked the fact that she saw the bigger picture; she wasn’t just in it for the story or for the front page of the Daily Planet.  She knew the consequences of her actions if she revealed his true identity.

What didn’t work for me? A lot!  I wasn’t sure about the back and forth storytelling showing Clark’s childhood and his adult struggles with his identity. Sometimes it took me out of the story.  The battle scenes, while visually stunning, were too long and I got bored at the end.  After all the destruction, things just went back to normal.  They wanted to ground this movie in reality, but there’s no acknowledgment of the clean up and death that Metropolis went through.  The Superman I know wouldn’t have destroyed all those buildings.  He would have taken the battle to space to save the city and the people, same goes for the destruction of Smallville.  Superman would do whatever it took to save human life.  I just didn’t feel that in this movie.

 

I guess my biggest disappointment with Man of Steel is instead of DC making a movie that shows Superman at his moral best, they took the character and made him fit into the world we live in today.  Superman should represent the best of what humanity can be. We should strive to be more like him, not the other way around. 

Even though I didn’t love it like I wanted to, I’m glad it made money at the box office for DC.  I want a Justice League movie and I know the only way we’ll get one is if Man of Steel did well.  Maybe Man of Steel 2 will be better, and Superman will be the way he should be: a beacon of hope for which humanity can strive, not a reminder of what we already are.