Rewind Files: After Batman v Superman, Should We Reevaluate Man of Steel?

Rewind Files is when we take a second look at a piece of media to gain a better sense of its greatness, its awfulness, or its place in the cultural landscape. 

Carrying around a positive Man of Steel opinion for the past three years has been hard work. Most people thought it was a bad movie when it came out in 2013, and even more people think it’s a bad movie now because it spawned the grunting, clenching, constipated frontrunner for the Year’s Worst Movie: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. People don’t like Man of Steel both for what it is and what it created. It’s pretty fair.

Defending Man of Steel, then, might be considered indefensible, but maybe the case can be made that the first movie’s profoundly bad sequel justifies, or at least explains, some of the maligned decisions found therein. Batman v Superman is a terrible comic book movie, and that label is slapped on Man of Steel too … but what if Man of Steel never wanted to be a comic book movie at all? What if, in the words of Russell Crowe’s Jor-El, it aspired to something greater? Should we reward it for those aspirations, even if it failed to achieve them? The folks down at DC, strapped for critical affirmation, would almost certainly say yes.

After the 160-minute Linkin Park video that was Batman v Superman, the prospect of revisiting its similarly-toned predecessor was by itself exhausting. Add that to the usual “maybe this time I’ll realize that everyone else had a point about hating this movie” worries, and the second viewing of Man of Steel was an uphill battle from Day One. Indeed, many flaws are way more obvious in retrospect—Henry Cavill’s stubborn suppression of his own charisma, the utter lack of laughs, the cheap Instagram-filter color scheme—but a few things are still worth considering, and some of those things might make the flaws more tolerable, or at least understandable.

Man of Steel opens with a typical comic book movie “we’re gonna show you this little bit from the past to contextualize our hero and then jump forward in time to the present” scene, and that move announces the movie’s approach straightaway. Superman’s home planet Krypton is about to implode, and our hero’s parents smuggle him onto an earth-bound spaceship to ensure his survival. While that’s a simplistic way to summarize the movie’s first 20 godforsaken minutes (“I wish it was longer” is something no one said about Man of Steel), the beginning tells us how we’re supposed to see Superman: First and foremost, he’s an alien. This is a movie about an alien coming to earth and how earth deals with that.

And in Man of Steel’s first half, when that question sees some attention away from all the super-punches and special effects, there’s glimpses of a really smart movie. The flashback scenes—when a young Clark Kent struggles with the conflicting blessings of his powers and the suppression of his father—are often poignant and deft, and you can forgive the movie’s humorlessness when it actually touches upon some real emotion between Kevin Costner’s Jonathan Kent and the younger version of our hero. The high point, of course, is the tornado sequence.

While the haters tend to rag on this moment as a plot hole—couldn’t Superman have disobeyed and just saved his father anyway?—that complaint ignores the conflict we’ve been looking at since Clark arrived on earth: Should he expose his true identity and assume responsibility as a hero to mankind, even if people reject him, hate him, or fear him for it? His real father says it’s worth it. The father he grew up with says it’s not. It’s a different dilemma for Clark, and while that dilemma in itself might betray the traditional presentation of Superman as a humble and unquestioning servant of the people, that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

So if we take that central question of the movie and apply it to the finale, perhaps there’s a different way to look at our own dissatisfaction or exasperation. By this point we’ve been encouraged (albeit sloppily) to wonder if Superman should be Superman at all, and if that question is in play, then instead of the carnage and destruction of the climax being inexplicable, it becomes thematically consistent, which means our WTF reactions to the destruction of an entire city are appropriate and intentional. Maybe we were never supposed to see the toppling skyscrapers as necessary collateral. Maybe we were never supposed to see the death of General Zod as a righteous act of heroism. Maybe all this is underscoring our decidedly more sci-fi-esque premise about aliens and hero worship and the relative weakness of humans. Is it a stretch? Probably, but it’s not as far of a reach as we might have thought.

The movie’s biggest problem is that it kind of quits on itself in the interest of its commitment to the Justice League franchise. With more movies on the way, the filmmakers figured that they better end the story with a likeable, uncomplicated Superman, so they use the unlikeable, insulting audience-surrogate Lois Lane (send your regards to Amy Adams, who was in prime “When Do I Get Paid” form) to try and tell us that instead of looking at the complex spaceman underneath the hard exterior, that hard exterior—and all its ripples—is all we should care about. Superman never won us over that way in any of his movies. We need to see some humanity, which in his case is to say that we need to see some struggle and some pathos. The narrative of the two fathers tried to point us there, but before the script could go all-in, some studio execs hastened to stop all inventive thinking by announcing a couple of sequels. It’s a shame.

Somewhere in Man of Steel is the skeleton of a surprising, original, and daring Superman movie. The flick we have masks it well, but there are glimmers of a superhero story here that really wanted to stand on its own and be different. Instead, the movie we have tried to cover everything in chromatics and skate by with tissue-paper characters. The bright spots shine through and are worth consideration, but there’s plenty of merit to sitting back and just calling it a mess. Man of Steel might be bad, but it’s bad in a spectacular way, and while that stands as little relief for DC, at least it’s more interesting than being average.