Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe
Have I Seen it Before: Yep.
Did I Like It: Honestly, kind of? I know that’s strange to hear from me, when I’ve been so blissfully, aggressively down on the follow-up, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)*, but there is something to this film that I find imminently watchable.
The casting is top notch all around. I don’t think Russell Crowe has ever been a better action hero than his spin on Jor-El, and makes him seem like more of a man than the distant God-like figure filled in by Marlon Brando in years past. For that matter, between unseen corpses in The Big Chill (1983) and certain Princes of Thieves, Kevin Costner has been miscast more than a few times, but Pa Kent is not one of those. Also, Richard Schiff is in it. That’s very nearly worth a Michael Keaton or two in my book.
It’s true strength is this: eschewing the slavish devotion to the Christopher Reeve/Richard Donner films that perhaps weighed down Superman Returns (2006), this film surprisingly tries to turn the story of the last son of Krypton coming to Earth to live among humanity into an actual alien invasion story.
It’s such a simple and refreshing take on the mythos that I’m tempted to give the film a pass on any flaws that can’t be avoided. Anyone who lives in the midwest will probably find stumbling on a tornado as a pretty unlikely set of circumstances, to say nothing for the fact that having Pa Kent eat it in the middle of cyclone falls far short of the pathos-filled slow heart attack which took out Glenn Ford. The third act is notoriously wall-to-wall disaster porn, and the choice to have Superman (Cavill) kill Zod (Michael Shannon) in something approaching cold bold feels antithetical to the purity of the character. That’s because it is. But at least here, it stems from the rest of the film as presented, and it isn’t exactly like it’s a lazy coincidence that resolves all of the tension in the movie.
For that, we’d have to wait for the sequel.
*Even five years later, that title is an absolute chore to type.