Nobody cares much about Superman anymore, including, I think, the makers of this bloated disaster. In their uphill effort to make the last son of Krypton interesting today, they depict him as a tortured soul who just can’t fit in on planet Earth. He looks like a male model, can fly, can lift ninety-seven tons, has X-ray vision and laser eyes and nobody can hurt him—and he’s miserable over it. He’d be so much happier sitting in traffic, smarting from a hangnail and not being able to see through any woman’s clothes at any time. Superman here is truly the Eddie Vedder circa 1994 of superheroes. Kal-El spoke in class today. I don’t remember what he said.
Now, to be fair, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach. A new Superman flick has to distinguish itself from the lighter 1978 Richard Donner classic somehow. There might be a good story in Superman’s outsider angst.
Too bad they hired one of the worst directors in Hollywood today to call the shots. I’ve loathed this Zack Snyder hack ever since that bad music video with zombies that people tell me is a remake of Dawn of the Dead. There’s no dynamic to the filmmaking here. With Snyder, the needle is in the red 100% of the time—and not in a good way. His mediocre action scenes play like the work of a director who avoids quiet moments because he doesn’t know what to do with them. Snyder’s take on characters is like a bad comic book artist’s take on human anatomy. It’s rushed and unconvincing with no unique style to save it. When there’s actual conversation, you don’t hear characters breathe (Kevin Costner and Laurence Fishburne, as old man Kent and Perry White, respectively, look downright uncomfortable with the bullshit they’ve been given to recite). Instead, you feel the writers laying on Screenwriting 101 technique. You can see it like you can see the strings in a bad old UFO special effect. None of this film’s million miles of CGI hides it.