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While these add another layer, they and everything else are almost lost in the last 45 minutes, when Mr. A true Krypton believer, Zod has his own good reasons for chasing after the being he knows as Kal-El. Shannon, delightfully embracing gnashing-teeth villainy, proves one of the new film’s strengths. It’s hard to believe that any actor could compete with Terence Stamp’s dandified turn as Zod in the 1978 “Superman,” but Mr. Shannon), and in his attraction to Lois Lane (Ms. It’s one that he struggles with in his fights with an alien foe, General Zod (Mr. To be human or not to be is Superman’s great question, a schism that evokes other familiar God-human divides.
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Snyder borrows too many canted camera angles and too much sun-kissed fluttering laundry from Terrence Malick, but the Kansas scenes solidify the human foundation of a divided identity. His adoptive parents, Martha (Diane Lane) and Jonathan (Kevin Costner), come into focus, as does the bewildered child (played by Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry), who doesn’t understand why he’s so different. Each return to the past becomes another tile in the mosaic, adding to the emerging portrait of the adult wanderer and seeker he has become.
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His handling of the story’s many flashbacks, which fill in piecemeal Superman’s Kansas childhood as Clark, is fluid and apt. Snyder, perhaps intuiting how fast this image could slip away from him, cuts his way out of there fast.įor roughly 100 minutes, or the running time of an average movie, Mr. Cavill, a pretty man whose body has been inflated to Bluto-esque proportions, into barbecue beefcake. It’s a nifty, startling image, even if it transforms Mr.
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And then, like Hercules who rises from his funeral pyre - having cast off his mortal body and assumed his godly form - Superman, a k a Clark Kent, is engulfed in flames. A beat later and he’s also shirtless and holding back a tower wobbling on a burning oil platform. That’s because the next time you see Kal-El after liftoff, he’s all grown up and toiling on a fishing boat off the northwest Canadian coast, a filmic ellipsis that abruptly spans decades. By then, the rocketing baby has become the man and given a soul-sick mien. Snyder, with his characteristic lack of subtlety, hits the Jesus angle amusingly hard, primarily in a later scene in which Superman - framed by a stained-glass tableau of a supplicating Jesus draped in a red robe - consults with a priest in a church. (Superman’s Earth mom was originally named Mary.) Mr. Given that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were Jewish, much has been written about Superman’s similarities to Moses (“el” is a Hebrew word for God), which is complicated by the character’s likeness to Jesus. Jor-El and his wife, Lara Lor-Van (the Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer), decide to rocket their child to Earth, sending him off to safety in the futuristic equivalent of Moses’ basket. The birth of Superman, who’s given the name Kal-El, opens the film and precedes Krypton’s end. Snyder, whose earlier movies include a stillborn adaptation of the graphic novel “Watchmen,” is here playing with different narrative forms as he toggles between cinematic realism and the kind of comic-book-style exaggeration that distills ideas into images. The resemblances to Earth are blunt enough for an eco-savvy kindergartner and pop off the screen like speech balloons. Lovely and imperious, the headdresses are also emblems of the countervailing forces that have led to the ruin of Krypton, a civilization undone by its own advances. These graceful contours are further picked up in spaceships that float like jellyfish and in suits of armor that evoke crustaceans, adding to this alien world’s striking conceptual unity. It’s a measure of the film’s striking design here that the headdress latticework is echoed in some of the pleated clothing, as well as in the curvilinear buildings, suggesting that someone behind the scenes (the production designer is Alex McDowell) is an admirer of the architect Zaha Hadid and her flowing organic forms. Crowe) attempts to persuade its council, wearing dour expressions and ornate headdresses evocative of Gothic tracery, that their planet is doomed. To that end, the film begins at the beginning, back on Krypton where Jor-El (Mr. Nolan that extracts the canonical account from 75 years of seemingly infinitely layered supermythology. Goyer from a story that he created with Mr. He does all that in “Man of Steel,” which was written by David S.