A Question to Viewers of the Escapist regarding Man of Steel and TDK.

[Drummodino]

Hi Escapist. I like you a lot. Probably my favorite gaming/nerd site on the internet. However there is one thing that I see a lot here that bugs me. What is with all the hate towards Man of Steel and The Dark Knight trilogy? I realize that people have different tastes and such, but the amount of venom directed at these movies (and people like Christopher Nolan, David Goyer and Zach Snyder) really takes me back.

I know Moviebob can't resist taking a potshot at these every other week, but surely you don't all feel they are that bad? Yes they are dark, yes they are gritty, but it works. Batman especially takes to dark and gritty like a fish takes to water.

Look I've been re-writing this post for ages and I know I sound like an ignorant fanboy, but can you just explain to me exactly what is wrong with these movies? Because everyone else I talk to at least likes them and a lot of people love them.

*please don't murder me

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I actually really like Nolan's Batman trilogy. I mean TDKR isn't a very good movie, it has a lot of problems, but in terms of spectacle and just being a popcorn movie, it's entertaining. The rest of the trilogy is really good, with The Dark Knight being one of my favorite movies of all time.

The thing is, all the stuff that made the Dark Knight Trilogy work is a lot of what didn't make Man of Steel work.

I dislike Man of Steel on two levels, an aesthetic level and on a script/character level.

Visually speaking the movie is very similar to the Dark Knight trilogy. Colors are muted, everything is slightly washed out, things are just dark. That kind of aesthetic works for Batman, because Batman the majority of the Batman movies are set at night, so it's expected that everything is dark, batman is a night time superhero. Also because batman himself is a dark character, he preys on the fear of criminals, his entire look and arsenal is there for him to intimidate the people his fighting. Not only that, but Gotham itself is supposed to be dark and depressing, so it's supposed to be grey and brown. Superman on the other hand should really have the exact opposite aesthetic, he's a bright and colorful superhero (I mean just look at his costume, it's red and blue for god's sake), and yet in the movie his costume is barely more colorful than the black suit's zod's soldiers wear. The majority of the movie takes place during the day, in environments that are supposed to be bright and beautiful, but there's still barely any color, everything is just kind of grey and brown.

What ended up being a very good aesthetic for a Batman movie just doesn't fit a Superman movie, because they're two heroes who are on completely different sides of the hero spectrum.

The other problem I had with Man of Steel was the script and the actors chosen to play the characters, and the way the characters were portrayed. In fact, this is the same problem that I had with The Dark Knight Rises. The characters, with the exception of Cavill as Superman and Shannon as Zod, are just not well acted. Everyone seems to act like a robot all the time, basically just there to further the plot without any kind of feeling. This could be bad casting, or it could just be the fact that the script is horribly cliche ridden and dumb.

So in terms of how good Man of Steel is, I would put it at about the same level as The Dark Knight Rises. Both movies had their problems, both because of dumb scripts and bad characters (seriously, Bane was terrible), but The Dark Knight Rises manages to be ever so slightly better just because the aesthetic of the movie was actually fitting.

There's nothing really wrong with making Superman slightly darker, especially when it's a movie about how he comes to terms with his abilities and responsibilities. The problem is when you let what is supposed to be an internal character struggle interfere with the rest of the film. They wanted to make a darker movie so they just made the visuals physically darker, when what they should have done is add believable characters who challenged Superman's perceptions of who he is. THAT'S the problem.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I haven't seen Man of Steel, but to me Nolan's Batman can kindly piss off.

It's not the dark grittiness that I dislike, it's the extreme measures to make Batman work in a realistic setting that makes the whole thing fall apart. Coupled with Nolan's obsession with expository dialoge, Bale's throat cancer, and terribly edited action scenes.

 

[Tanis]

The Nolan trilogy suffered from being, well, NOLAN films.
Dark, gritty, and boring save for a few moments or actors doing amazing jobs.

MoS suffered the same thing.
Nolan, and his ilk, don't 'get' Superman.
Superman is GOD AS A GOOD GUY.
Not a murder, or a destroyer of cities.
MoS suffered from a 'we need to be edgy for no reason other than to be edgy'.


It's like the 'No Russian' mission in CoD.
It was only there to be make some controversy and get free PR.

 

[Soxafloppin]

I didn't like DKR, I was just..really bored to be honest. (I enjoyed both BB and TDK)

I actually loved Man of Steel though, Admittedly I like Superman more than Batman but I really enjoyed the Kryptonian backstory and the huge ridiculous fight scenes. I have my quarrels with it though

Spoiler

(Pa Kents sort of pointless death, and I didn't really understand what Supes was doing in that bit with the giant beam of light)

 

[anthony87]

Not a murder, or a destroyer of cities.

I've seen this argument come up a lot....and then I remember all the times that both good guys and bad guys go smashing through buildings in the various comics and cartoons.

 

[JimB]

I know I sound like an ignorant fanboy, but can you just explain to me exactly what is wrong with these movies?

I've written too many words about Man of Steel to bother doing it again, so I'm just going to copy and paste some posts from elsewhere. I can't help you with the Dark Knight Rises because it left too little of an impression on me to care enough to remember it except to say the kinds of comic book contrivances Nolan is so ashamed of, like falling into chemicals somehow making your skin look like a clown's, are way less embarrassing than the contrivance of Joseph Gorden Levitt's orphan-vision superpower that lets him determine off-camera who Batman is.

Here we go. I'm trying to get these in chronological order to reflect how my opinion of the movie worsened the more I thought about it. I haven't included any posts I've made on this forum; if you want those, you can look through the link in my profile to my old posts.

Right, so, Man of Steel. I won't be giving out any major spoilers, but I will be discussing specific events in the movie, so, since I had to try very hard not to learn anything about this movie before I went into it, I'll do what I would have liked everyone to do and just encase this sucker in spoilers. Good? Good. Here we go.

Spoiler

When I went into the theater, I had a pocket-sized notebook and a pen on me for taking notes. I wanted to be sure I didn't forget anything I wanted to bring up, and every couple of minutes something would happen that I'd be sure to jot down...until about the middle of the movie, shortly after he put on the costume. After that point, I more or less ran out of things to talk about. I ran out of things to be interested in.

To be fair, I'm not sure anyone could make a Superman movie that wouldn't disappoint me on some level; as far as I'm concerned, All-Star Superman is pretty much the best Superman movie ever made, and any movie that doesn't grab hold of the bright colors and the emotional aesthetic of wonder combined with the prosaic has failed to grasp Superman, as far as I'm concerned. This isn't to say Man of Steel is a bad movie, but it isn't a very good one either. It's watchable, and it has a few okay moments, and though my gripes outweigh my compliments, they're all pretty minor.

The best symbolism I have for how this movie affected me is during the opening credits. The WB logo, the DC logo, and the Syncopy logo all show up on the screen rendered to look sculpted out of dingy metal that's been exposed to years of dust and humidity so the dirt caked sporadically across the metal is as deeply ingrained as rust, and as I looked at the dirty, grungy, CG metal of those emblems, I thought, "Yep, that's pretty much the mood I expected this movie to dwell in."

This is probably not a very bold or original observation, but seriously, I hate the movie's look. I've heard people complain about the shakycam, but it actually isn't as bad as I was led to expect it would be; it distracted me in a lot of places, but it wasn't, like, Transformers levels of bad. What bothered me is how heavily the movie relied on bleach bypass to deliver a dark, blue-filtered, grainy look that reminded me of nothing so much as a Youtube video blown up to full screen when it wasn't filmed in high enough definition for that sort of thing. My right hand kept twitching on the armrest as if to move the mouse cursor over to the button that would shrink the movie back down to an undistorted size.

The effects are really hit and miss. Sometimes they surprise me delightfully, like watching Superman's eyes change color as they fade back from a blast of heat vision, but other times they're just embarrassing. I'm going to say the flying effects are awful not because they're uniformly awful--sometimes they look very matter-of-fact about a man flying under his own power--but his ability to fly is introduced during the worst, laziest greenscreen scene I could have imagined of Superman flying through the African veldt. The quality of the first impression is like that of one of those "sit in the hydraulic cart and watch the movie screen to pretend you're on a roller coaster" rides at Universal Studios, and I don't know if I can forgive it. Also, I'm pretty sure his cape is CGI in every single scene, and it reminds me way too much of the cape effects in Spawn.

The story is better than I thought it would be. I've heard people complain that it's too astringent, too obsessed with tying up loose ends by making Zod and Jor-El be friends or how Jor-El doesn't just send Superman to Earth to escape an exploding planet but also because Krypton scouted out Earth for annexation a thousand years ago, or stuff like that, but personally, I was pretty much satisfied with it. I kept looking for symbolism that I'm not positive was there--I still think Superman catching the flaming I-beams is a visual metaphor for Christ carrying his cross, and I wonder if the whole plot isn't some metaphor for xenophobia and/or immigration--but I can't really find enough coherence to say there was much of it. I think it was pretty much just aliens beating each other up.

Where I think the movie really failed is the characters. I didn't get any real sense of who anyone is. Zod is easily the most complex character, with understandable and even twistedly noble motivations for all his evil, which works against the movie in ways I'll come back to later; likewise, Christopher Meloni managed to sneak in a lot of subtlety into what was supposed to be Stock Army Tough Guy that made me like his character. The main cast didn't really have anything to work with, though. Superman himself is irritatingly contradictory; though the movie takes pains to explain how he wants to be the best person possible to please his dad (without ever giving a toss what his mom wants because this is a Goyer/Nolan story), at one point, twenty years after he's solemnly vowed to always contain his anger, some dude driving an eighteen-wheeler hauling logs insults Superman, so Superman gets his revenge by crucifying the truck. No, I swear to god, he takes two of the logs off the truck's flatbed and rams them into the ground so he can impale a semi on them. A dude splashed beer on him, so he responded by committing at least forty thousand dollars of property damage. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen! But I guess you're probably not meant to understand him or his motivations when he gets less dialogue than the movie's villain.

Lois Lane--not Amy Adams, who did the best she could with what she had to work with, but Lois Lane--particularly got on my tits. She was an active participant in the movie, making her own decisions and asserting her own personality without living in Superman's shadow, which I approve of, but at the end of the movie they fall in love and I don't buy a second of it. I don't buy that they were in a situation that would lead to them being attracted to one another, I don't believe that they're attracted to each other because of their own chemistry, and I was staring at their kiss with naked disgust because it made about as much sense as the sex scene after Connor Macleod made whatserface stab him in Highlander. The lack of any kind of set-up for them to be in even the most base, physical, lustful form of love means the kiss reduced Lois to a prize, like Mario winning a kiss from Princess Peach.

...Actually, now that I mention video games, this movie looks like a video game to me. The dreary color palate, the grainy video quality, the shaky camera, Zod wearing a costume that looks like Master Chief while Faora-Ul wears a costume that looks like the glowing power armor from Crysis 2...yes, this movie looks like a video game. I wish I'd thought of this five paragraphs ago when discussing the visuals. Oh well.

The fight scenes deserve their own special mention. They're pretty good, but they're hampered by how bad the effects are. Like, I was told Superman's fight with Zod would redefine superhero brawls, but so much of it took place while using those Christ-awful flight effects that I couldn't enjoy it. Some of it is pretty great, but other parts are as bad as the ninja sword fight scene in front of the floodlights in Blade 2. There's one shot in particular of Zod grabbing Superman's cape and spinning him around like a discus before hurling him that makes Zod look like fucking Claymation. The fights in the middle of the movie are actually a lot more interesting, with characters all but teleporting from punch pose to punch pose in a technique that worked really well to indicate Kryptonian speed. There's another action scene of Superman fighting this skyscraper-sized machine that sends out dozens of giant tentacles composed of tiny, flying metal balls. The effects were so amazing I thought, 'The movie should have been just this, and the villain should have been Braniac so the movie could be just this,' which is compliment and condemnation when you think about it: An exciting action scene probably shouldn't make me stop paying attention to the movie I'm watching and start thinking about the movie I wish it had been.

What was really missing for me was the emotional content. I want to cry in a Superman movie, and I say that without shame. Like, as far as I'm concerned, Superman Returns is a basically successful Superman movie despite it being boring, brown, and a thinly veiled diary of Bryan Singer's adoption issues, because the scene where Superman catches the plane and everyone starts cheering as they realize everything will finally be okay again after five hopeless years brings tears to my eyes. Despite them having changed the movie to the point that his symbol literally means "hope," there is no point in this movie where hope is ever realized. I need that moment in a Superman movie or it doesn't work for me. I would have at least liked to crow out a laugh and clap my hands in glee at some amazing piece of violence against the final boss, like when the Hulk hammers Loki in the Avengers, but I didn't even get that because I sympathized with Zod too much to want him to get his ass kicked (I told you I'd come back to that).

That's been a lot of complaining on my part, so here are some random things I liked:

--The guy who plays Death in Supernatural is in it.
--There is a look of real anguish and regret when Zod kills Jor-El that makes Zod maybe the most human and likable character in the movie for me.
--Superman movies require a disaster no human could possibly fix, like a falling helicopter or airplane, and the exploding oil platform in the sea is a perfectly good one, not to mention an interesting replacement for the usual "stuff falls from the sky" thing Superman movies do.
--Kevin Costner, maybe the most wooden actor I can think of, is actually pretty okay. It's surprising how much his acting improves with even just a little trick like him pausing in the middle of a sentence to try to find the right words.
--Our very own Papa Bear has a cameo in this movie. [note: this is a reference to the forum I originally posted this on; ignore it]
--Though the ship Superman comes to Earth in looks like a Giger-inspired sex toy, there's a cute little reference to the spiky, crystalline spaceship from the original Superman movie that made me chuckle.
--Just before he figures out how to fly, Zod has to run up a building and does so on his toes and knuckles like a fucking gorilla, and it is hilarious to watch.
--EDIT: Oh yeah, and every punch Superman and Zod trade has a white-ringed, spherical shockwave. In some places this is cool and in others it's ridiculous (like Superman's final blow of the movie), but it made me smile enough to give it a place here.

So...yeah. It's basically okay. I disliked it more than I liked it, and I'm glad I only paid matinee price, but eh, it has its moments that either even it out or come close to it.

There. Now I can go read all the reviews I've been trying not to.

Hoo boy. Apparently the ending is a much bigger deal than I'd have guessed. Let me weigh in my own thoughts here, and you better believe I'm spoiling this shit out of this.

Spoiler

I do not hate Superman killing Zod.

Zod wanted to die. More than he wanted to kill Superman, he wanted to die. He said so at least twice after his soldiers were banished back to the Phantom Zone. He was going to put Superman in a position of choosing between all of humanity and Zod sooner or later, and in fact, he'd already well begun to do so by killing...Christ, I can't even guess how many people died in the attack on Smallville and the two attacks on Metropolis. Thousands, maybe a million. Zod in less than one day managed to rack up a body count generally reserved for people like Hitler.

I do think, though, that the killing was rushed and poorly executed (rimshot). I feel like the final fistfight with Zod and all the destruction it caused would have been an excellent chance to showcase how many people Zod was casually killing as he chucked Superman through skyscrapers and such, which would have built up more to Superman's decision to kill him and made it seem more necessary where, as it was filmed, I kind of wondered why he didn't just clap his hand over Zod's eyes, accept the burn on his palm, and fly Zod into outer space instead of acting like he had no options at that point; but if such a sequence was ever filmed, it was cut in favor of leaving in what so many have aptly called "disaster porn" (or, perhaps, one of the two sequences in which the history of Krypton is explained first to the viewer and then to Superman).

Zod's death was inevitable by the laws of action movies, and I think the way the writers chose to express it was fairly conceived and could have been pulled off by a less gleeful and self-indulgent director. I just think Superman comes off as a bit of a hypocrite for killing to save the lives of four people when he had just got done participating in a fight that must have killed about as many people as the Gulf War with no apparent show of concern.

Good god, fifty-five pages of this stretching back to 2010? I'll start around page 53 and then get to the rest of it over a long weekend.

I feel that Antje Traue's Faora is very under-appreciated.

I wish I could have liked her, but she was just too cartoony in her evil, too cruel for cruelty's sake. She's a soldier; she's supposed to kill her enemies, not play with them, not taunt them about how a good death is its own reward, not let them run up a flight of stairs to the plane's cockpit so she can make them watch her walk through the walls to make them tremble in fear of her power instead of, y'know, just doing her job and killing the enemy.

[snipped some personal conversation]

Personally, I find the movie disappointing. It is a lie. As my mother used to say, "Everything anyone says is a lie, so only pay attention to what they do, because that's what the truth is," and this movie lies with every word.* It talks incessantly about hope, yet the closest it comes to delivering a moment for hope to be realized is the Man of Steel (I have recently realized I cannot in good conscience call him Superman, and the movie won't either, so I don't want to hear it) turning himself over to the American authorities in the hopes they won't reject him by surrendering him to an evil force...which they then do, so the only instance of hope reached for is an instance of hope denied. Jor-El mentions at least twice that the Man of Steel can save everyone, yet dozens of people die on camera and thousands off-screen, and he sure doesn't save Zod, does he? The movie's words do not suit its actions, and like my mother would say when I lied to her, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.

*That hoary cripple, with malicious eye askance to watch the working of his lie on mine, and mouth scarce able to afford--no! Bad JimB! No references! Quit it!

[a snipped quote about how Man of Steel was intended as a deconstruction of Superman]

Okay.

So this movie is intended as a deconstruction of Superman? Fine. Let's grant that premise. It does not explain or excuse the film lying to me.

In a story, hope cannot just be a word or an invisible emotion; if it is, it's at best a waste of the audience's time and at worst a direct lie. Hope has to be accompanied by hopeful actions: by someone taking a risk out of the belief that things will turn out okay regardless. That happened once in this movie, when Kal-El turned himself over to the American military in the hopes they wouldn't betray him...which they promptly did, presumably because they were so married to the Jesus metaphor that they needed a Judas to turn him over to the Romans.* All the rest of the time, he's never taking a risk because he doesn't hope anything will turn out okay. When he does help people, he immediately minimizes the risk by abandoning all traces of his life and scurrying into a new hiding place.

If you want to drone on about hope, you better damned well back that up with something or you will put me into a position where I have to decide if you're just pretentious or actively disrespectful of my intelligence.


*And if I wanted to, I could make a pretty big deal out of the fact that there are two black people in this movie and one of them is Judas Iscariot, a man so evil he's one of four denizens of the deepest circle of Hell.

 

[Fappy]

I liked the Nolan films, but they are overrated in my mind. Man of Steel had some amazing action scenes, but that's about it. I'm sure the weak script didn't help.

 

[hermes]

I liked the first two movies in TDK trilogy, but by the time they reached the third movie, I perceived something new in Nolan: It looked like he didn't like the source material, he was even ashamed of it. All the references felt awkward and insincere.

I know both Superman and Batman have issues as characters, but the lengths they went to change them, to make them what they wanted them to be, makes me think they really didn't have much to say about them. I liked the action scenes in Man of Steel, I think it was better than the last 3 movies about the character, but the Jesus complex approach was sloppy and shallow.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Personally, I enjoyed all the movies in The Dark Knight trilogy as well as Man of Steel. The thing is, even I recognize some obvious problems.

As for The Dark Knight trilogy, you have:

1. The excessive levels of "realism" they are going after. This really wasn't an issue when the only villains in the movies were your average thug, Scarecrow, Ra'as al Ghul, and the Joker, but it did become an issue when they decided to have Bane as the villain in the final movie. They were basically given two options: either they screw over realism, or they screw over Bane's character, but in their effort to remain "realistic" while emulating Bane's superhuman nature without making him superhuman, they ended up messing both areas up. I mean, couldn't they have had a more "realistic" villain to compliment Tali in the final movie, such as Penguin, The Riddler, or Lock-Up?

2. Again, their efforts of holding to realism really fell apart in the final movie with Batman's very character. A guy who spent how long acting as a cripple suddenly gains all his fighting skill, strength, and flexibility back? He then has his back broken and not only gets it healed but gets back into fighting shape in only a few months? Again, having Bane as the main villain didn't help in this regard, and is another reason why they should have probably gone with someone like The Riddler.

3. The pacing of the films was really poor. It took forever for Batman Begins to actually get going. The Dark Knight felt like it should have ended close to an hour before it actually did. The Dark Knight Rises, oddly, was probably the best paced in my opinion, but again, that came at the expense of their approaches to "realism", as they attempt to speed through months of time without actually even beginning to explain what magic caused some things to happen in that time.

Well, those are the three major problems. Most of the rest can be attributed to those. Of course, I know some people who think The Joker's character was messed up in The Dark Knight, but all of those people have only ever seen the prison scene in that movie without ever actually watching the full film.

As for Man of Steel:

1. The characters were mostly boring, especially Lois, which is only made worse when you consider how important she is to the Superman story. Sure, each character had their moments where they were interesting, but most of them were just flat-out boring most of the time. I mean, Superman and Zod were good throughout the film, but that was about it.

2. There was a failure to really establish anything. The romance between Superman and Lois felt as fake as fake can be. The church scene felt out of place, especially since it was the only moment where they start establishing any messianic imagery, and when they do, it's them screaming at the audience, "YOU SEE ALL THIS MESSIANIC IMAGERY! WE'RE REALLY CLEVER AREN'T WE!" They never established that Superman never killed his enemies until right after he killed one (yes, I know that sentence sounds ridiculous). It was just them speeding through events without taking any time to establish much.

3. The story was mostly boring. I mean, there was some stuff to love if you're into all the religious right messages scattered throughout the film, but there are plenty of other shows and movies that takes its themes and works with them better.

4. The film attempted to have all of the Batman movies' storytelling prowess. That is, it tried to have everything connect together while also have some allegorical nature. What they forgot is that while that works in Batman, it doesn't fit as well in Superman. Then again, that might also be because of the storytelling issues it had.

Again, I enjoyed the films, which is saying a lot considering I'm not a big fan of the genre, but it's really hard to hold them up as some great example of how to make a film (at least when talking about The Dark Knight Rises or Man of Steel). I'm sure I'll always consider Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to be great films overall, with The Dark Knight Rises being an OK one in its own right and Man of Steel just being good, old-fashioned, stupid fun, but when it comes down to it, I can't really consider The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel to be great films. Maybe Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are deserving of being called great, but not the other two.

 

[Raioken18]

Not a murder, or a destroyer of cities.

I've seen this argument come up a lot....and then I remember all the times that both good guys and bad guys go smashing through buildings in the various comics and cartoons.

Also comic book Superman did kill people. He killed quite a few people. Doomsday, Darkseide the Joker along with killing other Kryptonians. So you may like your Sat AM cartoons or the cheezy movies of the 1980's but it's part of what makes Superman endearing is that he isn't perfect and has made mistakes to become who he is at the end of everything, he develops as a character. If the movies follow the comics then his murder of someone eventually leads to his understanding and appreciation of all life, and the reasoning behind why he vows not to murder people in the future. It also is part of the reasoning behind what eventually happens to him in various story lines.

It's a lack of understanding of this sort of character development that seems to create so much hate. I for one thought both MoS and TDK were awesome and really rounded out the backgrounds behind those characters.

People aren't born heroes.

I also don't get what people here have against Zach Snyder, in terms of visual design and fight scenes the man is a genius. He had one pretty crappy movie Suckerpunch, but even that was visually stunning.

I think it's Hip, to be critical of nerd culture now it's become mainstream, but... your only hurting yourselves. These are fantastic superhero movies tailored for you! The adult geek. It's the kind of thing I feel when someone claims to love anime but hates Naruto and anything mainstream. It's ok to enjoy something mainstream people, others enjoying what you enjoy is a good thing.

 

[Lightknight]

The Batman movies' insistence on realism creates a sort of uncanny valley where things look particularly fake to me when they aren't fully on one side or the other. It will occasionally pull me out of the movie to look at these things that strike me as unrealistic in a movie geared towards realism.

That being said, I certainly enjoyed them. Especially the second installment. This last one was the worst offender in my opinion. I particularly disliked it's failure to cross to the other side enough to even color my opinion of the series as a whole. But the first two? They were great.

I have not seen Superman. They certainly needed to do something about the awfulness of the previous attempts. I imagine I'll enjoy it for what it is.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, I personally liked it a lot. Not as much as The Dark Knight, but The Dark Knight is a pinnacle for superhero movies only because of Heath Ledger's Joker.

I guess people didn't like The Dark Knight Rises because it was trying to be The Dark Knight and it was fundamentally weaker in most aspects. No one could top Joker or Two Face, certainly not Talia al Ghul and her "NOW I ARE BECOME DEAD BLUGH" scene. Personally, I really liked Bane, but he wasn't that supervillain-y as Joker and he was pushed out of the picture after the halfway point of the movie. People trash its detraction of focus on Batman, its action scenes (the Batman vs. Bane fight in the sewer with no music was something I LOVED, but everyone else was annoyed by), the movies felt longer than they should've been, general interpretations of characters, side characters who are only side characters but could've been so much more, the nitty gritty.

The Man of Steel was just so bleh. The story was elementary, seemingly trying to appear smart but failing that, the general character of Superman is so filthy by how boring and incorruptible he HAS to be and the controversy that comes with any movie trying to even slightly alter that (OMG NO SUPERMAN CAN'T TIP LESS THAN 18% HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE A GOOD GUY WORST MOVIE EVER BOYCOTTING HOLLYWOOD AND KILLING MYSELF), most characters like Lois Lane or Jor-El were nothing more than plot devices instead of characters, general pacing and backstory badness.

Man of Steel had the most bitching action scenes though. That's what superhero action should be, two guys with no limits, unlike Iron Man's "My suit ran out of power" or Captain America's "I have no powers" or Thor's "Everyone I face is vastly underpowered".

 

[Something Amyss]

It's not the dark grittiness that I dislike, it's the extreme measures to make Batman work in a realistic setting that makes the whole thing fall apart.

Is THAT what they were trying to do? Huh. Never would have guessed.

 

[ninjapenguin1414]

I personally loved the Dark Knight trilogy, Rises had problems but overall it was fine and DK is my all time favorite "superhero" movie.

Man of Steel though just wasn't very good. Maybe I just had high expectations seeing as eventually this is the series that will lead to the Justice League movie and Marvel knocked their starter movies out of the park with both Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk movies. Also Man of Steel was just paced terribly, it felt like it was edited by someone who had no idea what order it was supposed to be in. Lois Lane as well felt as if she had no actual purpose (why the hell was she on that military plane on the end? Their is no way anyone would ever let that happen in real life and broke my suspension of disbelief more than "A flying alien that looks like a human and shoots lasers out of his eyes").

The action scenes were really well done though I found myself ignoring the actual story and just waiting for more action (which really isn't a good thing when you think about it). Also their is no need to have a Superman movie that is dark and gritty.

Also one last thing before I forget but the death of Johnathan Kent was the stupidest thing ever it served no purpose that his regular death scene (heart attack) couldn't have. In fact it would have made more sense seeing as Clark could have saved him at any time but was to stupid to to think for himself.

 

[Nexxis]

Personally, I haven't seen Man of Steel. I avoided it because the trailers just made it look like another dark and gritty take on the character, which I'm pretty fed up with. The Dark Knight Trilogy (which I call the Funny Voice Trilogy) is partially responsible for that. While I thought the first one was alright, I felt like all of them suffered from the broody-for-broody-sake syndrome. And I don't really like the idea of taking comic book characters and making them as realistic as possible, mostly because it doesn't allow anything to be as colorful or as creative as, say, a cartoon. Not to mention the preaching about human nature and bleh. Except for the first one, none of the other two movies did anything to make me care. So I usually spent the time poking fun at things to amuse myself until it was over. I was also disappointed that this didn't happen in the last one.

Spoiler