Man of Steel – Kal-El that ends well

The S stands for “Strike the pose”: Henry Cavill as Superman

It’s been 26 years since we last saw Superman punch a guy on the big screen. The sole attempt to bring back the last son of Krypton since Christopher Reeve last wore the red cape, 2006’s cringe-inducing Superman Returns, saw Supes battling his greatest nemesis yet: an inanimate chunk of rock. That anti-climax is perhaps the greatest of the reasons that film, and the Superman brand, has suffered so hugely in the public consciousness.

Rebooted here with the explosive verve of a Zack Snyder movie, this take on the Superman myth satisfies both those who crave faster-than-a-speeding-bullet aerial fistfight-ery and those who like their Christ allegories with really good hair.

Superman Returns hammered home its Christ metaphor with Superman descending from the sky, resurrected, in cruciform pose. Man of Steel attempts to one-up it, recreating that divine posture—although at a less pivotal moment—and even having a scene where Clark Kent soul-searches in a church, haloed by stained glass. But it’s actually a lot cleverer than this. Clark, born Kal-El, is planet Krypton’s equivalent of the Virgin Birth, a child born through natural reproduction on a dying planet where kids have been eugenixed in Matrix-like pods for generations. Even before the planet crumbles due to the hubris of its ruling elite, Kal-El is already the last hope for his people.

As the fascist General Zod (Michael Shannon) mounts a coup, Kal-El’s father Jor-El (an exceptionally enthusiastic Russell Crowe) embarks on a quest to preserve the history of his people, showing the sort of physicality that escaped Marlon Brando back in 1978. The “Codex” of the Kryptonian people is retrieved and launched into space with the miracle child, just as Zod’s rebellion is brought to a close and the planet devours itself in a bowl of lava-Os.

Jor of the Worlds: Russell Crowe showing his son how staring off into the distance dramatically is really done

After this extended introduction to this slightly different take on the Superman origin, David S. Goyer’s screenplay eschews the chronological tracing of the early years of Jor-El’s life as Clark Kent, of Smallville, Kansas, in favour of cutting to his Bruce Wayne-like journey of self-discovery, helping those in need across America with less than sufficient subtlety for the only alien on Earth. In moments of reflection Clark thinks back to suitable lessons from his youth, the calming tone of his mother Martha (a finely aged Diane Lane) and the baseball coach morality of his father Jonathan (Kevin Costner, back with a very calm and insightful vengeance).

The intercutting flashbacks allow us to get to Clark’s discovery of who he is more quickly, uncovering a lost Kryptonian craft hidden in the Arctic and downloading his birth father’s memories, giving Crowe considerably more—and welcome—screen time. Soon he is wearing the old blue, red and bit o’ yellow and blasting around the planet like he owns the place. But crafty reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is on the trail of this super-human do-gooder, and a vengeful General Zod emerges from the shadows of space searching for the Codex and the son of Jor-El.

Snyder, a filmmaker whose hitting and missing along the years have never allowed critics to deny his ambition and flair, shows remarkable restraint here, choosing to focus on the scale of the world(s) his story is set in instead of drawing all attention to action and movement; there is not a moment of his signature slow-down/speed-up style of editing, allowing the super-powered Kryptonians to blast around the screen at their own dizzying speeds. The scenes on Krypton could rival Avatar for sheer scale of world-building, while the flashbacks to Kansas are filmed with the tenderness and tone of an Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale: the director of 300 shooting like Richard Linklater meets Terrence Malick. Who’d have seen it coming?

Kent touch this: Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Pa and Ma Kent

The story is well-known, though there are a few new beats to this drum. Superman is unknown to the people before Zod and his army arrive. Lois is on to the son of Jor-El long before she meets Clark. Kryptonite and Lex Luthor play no part in the tale, although the latter’s industrial might is evident in one scene. A new extreme take on the life lessons Jonathan Kent teaches Clark provides one of the film’s most affecting scenes.

The action and drama are updated suitably, and there are some clever allusions to the world of today, with Superman in one scene forced to down a military drone sent to track his location. But the failure to properly evolve the Daily Planet, the “newspaper” of record, seems like both a missed opportunity and a cop-out. The internet is briefly mentioned as an alternative means to break a story, but there is no feel for the crisis in the industry. The scenes in the Daily Planet offices feel terribly dated, with even the layout of the newsroom floor looking like it’s from the 1970s. As if struck by a magic beam fired by some politically correct supervillian, editor Perry White is now black and Jimmy Olsen is now Jenny—all good progressive things, if only the characters were given anything to do.

The script is both the salvation and damnation of Man of Steel. Goyer, whose finest work rests in The Dark Knight trilogy, created this story with producer Christopher Nolan, taking a break from bats. The Batman Begins structure of the early earthbound sequences revels in this reunion, and Goyer’s screenplay is superb at contrasting the patriarchs and the lessons they imbue upon their shared son. But the dialogue outside of these father/son scenes is often dull, and almost every last one of Goyer’s jokes falls sigh-worthily flat. One military character has an identical arc to a police character in The Dark Knight Rises, almost scene for scene. The burden of two enormous themes—what does it mean to be human? and; what does it mean to be the last of one’s kind?—proves too much for Goyer to balance, and by the end one of these questions has been all but completely dropped.

British actor Henry Cavill, following performances in The Tudors and Immortals, shows himself a strong leading man as the adult Clark Kent. Preposterously handsome, like TV Clark Kent Tom Welling but sculpted in marble, Cavill’s presence dominates when he is not pitched against the two Robin Hoods, who utterly steal the film. Cavill may not be given too many opportunities to show off his talents, but in the few scenes where it counts his face unleashes an intensity and pain that totally sell the moment.

Hard-knocking journalism: Amy Adams as Lois Lane

Amy Adams is less lucky as Lois, working with an awkwardly written version of the character, but still ever-believable as a successful female reporter. Zack Snyder, whose Sucker Punch has been the subject of more women’s studies PhDs than Sylvia Plath (FACT), refrains from making an obvious sex symbol out of Lois, keeping her professionally dressed throughout, and able to give as good as she gets in debate with even the most alpha male of men. If Goyer had been more successful in writing both her character and the love story between Lois and Clark, Adams could no doubt have stolen the show. Michael Shannon is similarly let down by lax characterisation, but his undeniable intensity makes him a riveting Hitler-esque Zod to Terence Stamp’s more Rasputiny take.

Hans Zimmer may be no John Williams, but his score rises at the most crucial moments and lingers in the ear with the same fire, if not the same bombast. This is a film with an almost faultless soundscape, and the sound effects on Krypton help sell it as both a believable world and society. The production design on Krypton is fantastic, with devices using Pin Art-style illustrations to communicate instead of video screens, and the costumes looking like Liberace-in-space, flamboyant but superbly detailed.

This all brings us back to the action, because yes—indeed—Superman does punch someone in the face. Several times. For the most part Snyder conceives a remarkable, rocketing look to his action scenes, although the speed can be hard to follow. Clark’s first battle with the Kryptonians is thrilling but overstays its welcome, and the camera at times is more concerned with framing the logo of an IHOP than showing the fates of those thrown through its windows. A battle with a tentacled robot is a poorly edited and indecipherable mess, but the payoff is immense. A re-enactment of a major scene from Independence Day slips from homage into theft, and the film’s recurring usage of the fatal consequences of buttons being only half-pressed down is insulting to the audience.

Zod man out: Michael Shannon looks, as ever, as if he is only moments away from snapping and killing everyone

The carnage of the finale is unspeakable, and the presence of Transformers 3 DP Amir Mokri seems hardly a coincidence, with buildings crumbling and exploding all across Metropolis in a veritable blitzkrieg of CGI. It looks superb, but with Goyer choosing to focus on only three civilians throughout the colossal donnybrook there is little sense of human tragedy in what must be a ground zero of Nagasakian proportions. The Avengers was far more concerned with the average citizen.

Like the film itself, the action sequences are troubled, but overall satisfying. Snyder has not made the magisterial Superman film that people had hoped for, but he has made the most exciting take on the tale yet. Sequels will come, and the end earns them. But no scene is more deserving of a Superman franchise than that moment when Henry Cavill first takes to the skies, as if lifted by Zimmer’s score, and jets across the world, Snyder’s camera slamming from left to right, struggling to keep up with the superhero. It’s the cinematic moment the character has been craving since Action Comics #1.

You won’t need to believe a man can fly; you’ll see it.

3/5

(originally published at http://www.nextprojection.com)

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Django Unchained – Slave laboured storytelling

Hootenanny on the Bounty: Chistoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx

After a lifetime of slavery, Django (Jamie Foxx) has just been freed by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist turned Wild West bounty hunter. Planning to use Django to help identify three slavers with warrants on their heads, Schultz ponders that maybe he can “make this slavery malarkey work to my benefit”. Somewhere in the darkest recesses of Quentin Tarantino’s brain, the Hollywood outlaw appears to have been thinking much the same thing.

Ostensibly an anti-slavery rebuttal to Inglourious Basterds’ raucous Jewish revenge fable, Tarantino’s Django Unchained, a fusion of blaxploitation and spaghetti western, never manages to be either with much success. Sure, there’s plenty of sampling of Ennio Morricone and hints of African American badassery, but the film is so tepidly formulaic, watch-glancingly drawn-out and, criminally for a Tarantino film, eye-raisingly predictable, that it feels more like the film of a Tarantino impersonator than of the mastermind of Pulp Fiction himself.

Starting strong with richly shot desert landscapes punctuated by a marching chain gang of slaves and a witty introduction to Schultz as he frees Django and grants the other slaves a bloody vengeance on their owners, Django Unchained never lets its steam build. Waltz, the multilinguist character actor prone to delightful moments of wide-eyed madness, brings life to the underwritten Schultz. Often all he has to do is deliver some flowery English with an accent to shoot for cheap laughs – which he does with verbal marksmanship – but the dialogue is beneath him, which is all the more startling given the same writer/director gave him Hans Landa to run amuck with only a few years back. Waltz should be complimented furthermore for holding so much of the film up on his shoulders as he stars opposite Foxx, a man-shaped charisma-vaccuum whose constantly confused face and hopelessly delivered questions evoke less the heroes of the spaghetti westerns or Shaft, and more Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace.

Once Django has helped dispatch his former captors, he is trained by Schultz to be a bounty hunter as well, and the not-utterly-unlikely duo go on the hunt for more badguys. This is one of the film’s least disagreeable sequences, with truly impressive location shoots on wide brown hills and in snowy valleys, featuring some mildly thrilling shoot-outs.

Then everything goes pear-shaped. Schultz agrees out of the goodness of his barely defined heart to help Django rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), educated by a German family and now sold to vile plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Disguising themselves as “Mandingo trainers” (referencing another blaxploitation gem, Mandingo), who buy muscle-bound slaves to pit against each other in fights to the death, Schultz and Django blag their way into Candieland, Candie’s ironically titled homestead. The plan seems to be getting along without a hitch, until Candie’s purse-lipped house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a militantly pro-white Uncle Tom, begins to suspect a ruse, spelling zip-a-dee-danger for our heroes.

The Candie man can’t: Leonardo DiCaprio

Dragging its heels at a merciless 165 minutes, Django Unchained relentlessly fails to cut to the chase, despite having only a light sprinkling of story. It does however look great, with bright colours cleverly contrasting the inherent nastiness of the era, and superb production design that never holds back on the excesses and inhumanity of slave-mistreatment. Flashbacks are amusingly shot in grainy, colour-bled Grindhouse style. The soundtrack makes some fine selections and new compositions team Morricone with contemporary rap. For these things Tarantino and his team can be applauded.

But really Django Unchained never feels as tight as a Tarantino film should. One scene in which a moronic masked lynch mob, a Special KKK if you will, surrounds the dynamite duo, spells it all out. A sketch begins in which the vigilantes complain that the eyeholes in their bag-hoods are in the wrong places; it extends to an eye-rolling five minutes. Once upon a time the scene would at best have been a lesser quality Gary Larson cartoon, but at least then it would have been just one frame, not 5x60x24. Jonah Hill cameos for no reason. Worse still, the scene is preceded by Schultz laying out explosives to greet the mob – disembowelling the scene of tension as its wit runs thin. This from the director of the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds!

When the film threatens to be clever, it shoots itself in the foot. Schultz draws parallels between Django’s quest for Broomhilda and the German hero Siegfried’s seemingly similar quest in the epic poem Nibelungenlied, but it is only paying lip-service and the comparison never properly pays off. Tarantino has always been so competent with his literary and movie references, but here he seems to be getting off on reading a Wikipedia entry.

The Siegfried comparison drags up one of Django’s biggest problems. While some have gone after the film for its overuse of the N-word, something which feels mostly in keeping with the time, the story is inherently racist in that this tale of a black man taking revenge is only possible because a much smarter and more talented white man is willing to help him.  Tarantino, who previously saw Jews pull off not one but two successful assassinations against their great enemy, here has a simple black man have his hand held while a brilliant white man does all the hard work. It’s as if Tarantino is saying a black hero isn’t really believable – and it’s certain that once Django goes out on his own the film takes on a far more cartoonish air. The less said about the fact that the film features a black slave liberated by a white “Dr. King”, the better.

Love shackled, baby love shackled: Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington

Kerry Washington is hardly used at all as Broomhilda, bringing to an end Tarantino’s near-20-year run as the best director of strong female characters in American cinema – Joss Whedon will be along to pick up the sash and crown shortly. DiCaprio should be lauded for going against type as the villainous Candie, but his boyish gurning does not make for a very strong performance of a weak character, who feels less like a Tarantino villain than like Peter Ustinov’s Prince John in the Disney Robin Hood. A pox on the phony king of the world. Samuel L. Jackson is the only actor keeping any kind of pace with Waltz, giving Stephen plenty of vitriol and uppity outrage, while milking the black-hating black man discrepancy for all it’s worth. However, the character feels like a milder version of the grotesque, black-despising Uncle Ruckus from the animated comedy series The Boondocks, a show Jackson is no doubt familiar with, given that he voices one of its characters. That character, for the record, is a white guy who likes to talk street, a far greater racial commentary than anything Django Unchained has managed.

As if the tension-free, extended dinner scene, with its repetitive dialogue and phrenology demonstration (we get it, slavery and Candie are evil and stupid), aren’t enough, Tarantino concludes with his greatest filmmaking sin ever. Just as the final action sequence – an entertaining, splatter-gored shoot-out that oddly borrows Austin Power’s repeatedly injured henchman gag – reaches its crescendo, Tarantino halts the action for 20 minutes of scrotum and director cameo, before returning to exactly the point where we left off. This outrageous act of self-indulgence is the director at his very worst. It does seem fitting that his appearance as an Australian slaver follows so quickly the inverted genitalia, given this dramatic cavity is Tarantino’s final descent into artistic auto-fellatio.

Whatever fun there is to be had in Django Unchained is undermined utterly by the excessive whims of its power-mad auteur. Condescending to black audiences, humourless and regularly just plain boring, Django Unchained is a white stain on the blouse of film history. Too stupid to be homage, too self-important to be parody, it is hopefully the worst film Tarantino will ever direct.

2/5