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Occasional Media Consumption: Man of Steel (2013)

Every so often, there's a movie where I watch it and think, "that was pretty bad", and then time goes by, and I see other people talking about it, and so I watch it again, thinking I was too harsh on it, and after watching it again, I think "not only was that movie bad, it was worse than I remember". I try very hard not to hate-watch anything, movies or TV or whatever, because that's a waste of time, energy, and emotion. My expectation was that my first reading of this film was overblown, that my reaction to it was as an outsider, someone who didn't know the depth and breadth of the Clark Kent / Kal-El story, and who couldn't appreciate the subtleties or easter eggs or whatever. But in the intervening years, I've read a bunch of DC comics, and many of them Superman comics. And I've come to a conclusion upon rewatching this movie, one that surprised me given the budget, the cast, and the story being told.

Rarely has any movie so misunderstood it's source material, the message of the source material, or for that matter the message the actual movie is sending. This is a movie that chooses wrong at every turn, placing spectacle and "cool" and "edgy" and "dark" above any faithfulness to the concepts it purports to refer to and the source material it borrows from. 

I was going to spend a bunch of time breaking down the ways in which this movie is bad, but I'm bored with it now. If you really want me to do that, then buy me a drink and we can have a discussion about it. Otherwise, just take my word on it: if you want to watch a good Superman movie, watch Christopher Reeve's Superman (1978). It gets it (mostly) right. Hell, even 2006's Superman Returns got more of it than this movie (Brandon Routh was done dirty in his portrayal of Clark, and deserved better than the material he had to work with, but that's another blog post). 

Honestly, watching paint dry is probably a better use of two hours of your time. 

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