I got up at 9:30AM on the day of the Castle Geek block screening of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, arrived at the office at 10:30AM, and proceeded to nap a chunk of the early afternoon away during a rain-soaked van ride to Trinoma. The train back to Makati was surprisingly comfy (aside from a spot of ninja flatulence), and I got to Glorietta with plenty of time to spare before the 6:55PM screening.
By the time the movie was over, I was exhausted.
This poster foreshadows the amount of brooding in this film. See what I did there?
Man of Steel is an enjoyable, but emotionally taxing film, qualities that are as much the product of Zack Snyder’s direction as they are of Christopher Nolan’s and David S. Goyer’s story. Snyder, for his part, overindulges himself on the movie’s many action scenes, making the final 45 minutes about as tiring as Transformers 3’s second half. Nolan and Goyer, on the other hand, crafted a tale that brought little – if any – levity to the film’s pace.
The co-writers tried to extend the success of their Dark Knight trilogy towards Batman’s conceptual antithesis, emphasizing plausibility to suspend the viewers’ disbelief. In many respects, it works: nearly everything, from the S symbol to Zod’s motivations to Clark working at the Daily Planet, is contextualized with believable enough motivations. What hurts the film, however, is its cold, sober examination of how we as a society have changed since Richard Donner’s Superman.