Saturday, November 01, 2014

Man of Steel

October is over, and I'll be watching much less horror for a while.

Everybody else in the house had seen Man of Steel, but I hadn't. The rest of the family thought I should see it, calling it "the best Superman movie". Damned by faint praise, I suspected, but I did watch it. I agree that it's the best Superman movie. Not that that's saying much. This looks like all the other superhero movies do these days. I like the superhero movies, so that's not a bad thing, but this doesn't distinguish itself.

trailer:



Moria praises Henry Cavill's acting as Superman but says, "In the quick soundbite response, Man of Steel ends up being a film where you spend the first half irritated with the substantial liberties it takes with comic-book canon and the other half bored with the mass destruction spectacle that drags on and on." Rolling Stone gives it 3 out of 4 stars and says, "Caught in the slipstream between action and angst, Man of Steel is a bumpy ride for sure. But there's no way to stay blind to its wonders."

DVD Talk says, "It took a classic story, gave audiences what they wanted from the genre, but honed the details until the whole movie shone. Don't go see it expecting Casablanca, but if you understand what you're getting into you can leave the theatre having seen a comic book movie on par with Batman Begins, if not better." Empire Online gives it 4 out of 5 stars and says, "It aches for more depth and warmth and humour, but this is spectacular sci-fi —huge, operatic, melodramatic, impressive. It feels the right Superman origin story for our era, and teases what would be a welcome new superfranchise." EW gives it a grade of C and concludes, "Never has a race to save the fate of humankind seemed so tedious."

Roger Ebert's site has a lengthy review and closes a mostly positive article by saying, ""Man of Steel" is in many ways an astonishing movie, but it won't do anything to quell complaints that the big-budget superhero genre is basically adolescent, that its creative development has been arrested for decades and might not budge anytime soon." It gets a 55% critics score and an audience rating of 76% at Rotten Tomatoes.

2 comments:

  1. Somehow I've never gotten into those superhero stories. I remember seeing the first two Superman movies with Christopher Reeves, but that was it. I thought the plots were quite predictable.

    I always like how you rate these movies so we can decide if we want to try to find them or not.

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    Replies
    1. I usually like the superhero movies, but Superman doesn't get as good a treatment onscreen as most of the others imo.

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