Smash

After watching Man of Steel over the weekend, I walked out of the theater pretty conflicted. There was lots to like and lots to hate. I don't think I'm alone if the Internet has anything to say about it. And the Internet, as it does, has an awful lot to say.

That's the thing, though. I've read a fair share of reviews and reactions to the movie today (writer Mark Waid's was pretty compelling) and everyone seems to agree with me on sort of a macro-scale: it was an ok movie, but it sure wasn't a masterpiece. But everyone has slightly different reasoning. While I know that people have differing opinions, and that everyone views everything from their own lens or whatever, but with film reviews there seems to be a sort of group think that floats in our shared Jungian consciousness. This movie was good and here's why. This movie is bad, here are specific examples. MoS director Zack Snyder felt the sting of the latter with his last couple of movies for sure. The going consensus is that Sucker Punch was the worst kind of male power fantasy masquerading as the opposite and that his adaptation of Watchmen was so slavish to its source material that it lost the point. With MoS, though, it's all over the map. Some people thought the fights were great representations of super-beings kicking the snot out of each other, plenty thought they were long and tedious. Many found the Cosnter/ Lane flashbacks poignant, many more thought they dragged the pace to a halt. Tons, and I mean tons of people found the mass destruction at the end of the film to be a over-the-top, and...well, most seem to agree on that. There is sentiment that this movie is pretty good, but not really that great. Nobody can agree on why.

Is it Snyder? Is the guy cursed? I think I might be starting to agree, but I don't want to be that much of a jerk to a man that figured out how to adapt 300. But we can't blame him solely, and there is plenty of finger pointing going at both script writers Goyer and Nolan today, but that just exacerbates the problem, and that problem is that this movie has problems, but articulating those problems has turned into a problem.

At least we can all agree that obliterating entire cities is a really big problem. Let's all remember this a few years from now when the sequel comes out.