I loved Man of Steel. I’m going to get out of the way up front. It wasn’t a perfect movie, but I thought it was very well done and I had a great time with it. To be fair I am not a Superman fanboy. I like Supes, I know his basic mythology, and the little kid inside of me gets kind of excited anytime I see him flying around doing super-stuff. But I enjoy stories that ask some harder questions, or that deal with the idea that part of what heroes do is make difficult choices. Man of Steel works for me precisely because it forces Superman to make difficult choices, where there is no particularly satisfying answer.
In a world where people seem to have totally unrealistic expectations of what other people, especially the government, can or ought to do for them, I have less use for escapism than I did even a decade ago. I like a movie that has the guts to say, “Superman can fly in space but do you know what he can’t do? He can’t use his powers against an equally powerful foe without incurring collateral damage.” Because if Superman were real, that would absolutely be the case. Paramedics, firefighters and police officers would love to save everybody, to not have to make difficult choices, but they all make difficult choices every single day. You can’t do all of the good, you can only do the most good that you possibly can. If a man were super-powered, he could save everybody out of a burning building, but if he had to fight a super-powered foe, the playing field is leveled. And so is everything else, because the collateral goes up exponentially the more power is in play.
So when I heard Zack Snyder was making a sequel to Man of Steel, and that it would have Batman in it, I was at first apprehensive that they were going too far too fast, and then I was curious, and finally pretty excited. The trailers got me pumped. Looked like a comic book come to life, in the way that the Marvel movies do.
Having seen it, I can only describe myself as conflicted. I enjoyed whole swaths of it. I think Ben Affleck was fantastic. Gal Gadot did very well with the small amount of material she had, and Henry Cavill remains a great Superman. Laurence Fishburne is fantastic in his limited role as Perry White. Jesse Eisenberg, Holly Hunter, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, everybody does solid work in this. The performances were maybe my most favorite aspect of the movie.
The issues I have are, basically, three. The first is that the pacing is kind of strange. The middle of the film starts to drag as we wind up stuck in the middle of sort of a thriller that has pushed our caped heroes more or less to the sidelines. I enjoyed what the film was doing, but I missed having some action beats in the middle that would drive the pace a bit more.
The second was that the way Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg are introduced feels completely gratuitous. It doesn’t service the film at all, or the pacing of it, it only serves to make sure you are aware that the earlier mention of “metahumans” is relevant to the big picture moving forward, and it has no real place in this film, certainly not at the moment where it is inserted.
The third is more difficult to pin down. The film has a strong story, as far as what happens and the reasoning behind it, but because we haven’t any prior history with this version of Lex Luthor, and only one film’s worth of history with the Cavill of Steel, there’s a sense that the legwork they’re doing to establish the DCEU, is actually taking away from this film.
By way of example, the two Avengers films don’t leave a lot of room for character development on the part of anybody but Banner, however most of the other heroes have solo films and those films focus very strongly on them, even when other MCU characters show up to party, so the Avengers movies can play fast and loose with things like character arcs because each Avengers picture is the climax to that particular MCU Phase.
Batman v Superman, however, hasn’t earned that luxury. And as great as Batfleck is, and as much as I am a Batman fanboy in the extreme, I feel as though Superman got boned. Batman not only has the most memorable scenes in the film, but because we have seen so many Batman stories on film, and because the most recent three have done the character such wonderful justice, I think you can get a sense of who Batfleck is and where he is in his career without needing a lot of explanation. My friend Darek’s son, Ean, nailed it on the ride home when he said, simply, “he’s old and he doesn’t care.”
Superman’s story is built on the foundation of Man of Steel, but the guy has very little to say or do for most of the movie. The ending did do a nice job of earning Superman the love and respect of the people of Earth, in a way that the end of Man of Steel didn’t, and I hope Justice League acknowledges that and lets Superman be Superman in earnest.
Zack Snyder has said that there is an R-rated Ultimate Cut of the film coming to Blu-Ray. Whether or not that is a good thing will depend on what the material is that he’ll be adding back in. Because anything that fleshes out Lex Luthor, and the Superman-Lois story, will be most welcome. Almost anything else is likely to do more harm than good. Entire characters (such as the one played by Jena Malone) were cut from the theatrical version, so I’m going to be watching for details about that release with great interest. Henry Cavill is a great Superman and he deserves a Superman film that lets him own the character the way “The Dark Knight” let Christian Bale own Batman.
Would I watch this movie again? Yes. I would, and I will. Do I love it? No. Not in its current form, at least. But Batfleck alone is well worth the price of admission. There is a lot of talk about the brutality of this Batman. As a lifelong fan, I’m here to tell you, it isn’t a problem. First of all, Keaton’s Batman killed people, a lot, and Batfleck is no worse a killer than him. Secondly, Batfleck has a character arc, and it’s the most successful arc of the film, without question. In the hands of the right director it would have been powerful enough to destroy people in their seats, but in Synder’s hands it’s merely a good story passably told. In short, to pick up where Ean left off in his assessment; Batman is old and he doesn’t care; but this is the story of how he learned to care again.
I hope the Ultimate Cut will make me care about the rest of the story as much. For now, I give the film a 7.5 out of 10. It’s got problems, but if you love Batman, you need to see it. It is without question the best live-action representation of that character in his entire 77 year history. The world needs more Batfleck.
[Note: Having now seen the BvS Ultimate Cut, most of my misgivings regarding the film are swept away. I’d give it a 9/10.]
“What just blew up?” “The legacy of more interesting characters.”
I admit it, I’m one of the few who likes the Star Wars prequels more than The Force Awakens. To be clear, I firmly recognize that The Force Awakens is a better film in terms of general storytelling, dialogue, pacing, etc. But it just hasn’t ever felt like a Star Wars movie to me. Since December I’ve been struggling to put my finger on just why that is. After a while I started hating it kind of irrationally, mostly as a reaction to all the love it was receiving. Why I reacted so negatively to that, I couldn’t have told you, but it should have been a clue. I recently saw it a second time in the theater, with my Dad, and I found that it was better than I remembered, but even so, the experience didn’t leave me feeling anything in particular when the lights came up.
I have listened to others’ complaints, including Max Landis, whose arguments stoked me up but ultimately weren’t sustainable. I keep trying to explain my feelings regarding the film and keep coming up empty, which is a bitter pill for someone like me considering that I love movies, I love to write, and I love to write about movies. It’s usually not hard for me to sort out my feelings about a given film, and The Force Awakens isn’t particularly complex, so it shouldn’t be hard for me to decide what it is that puts me off about it, but the struggle has been very real. Finally I think I understand. Because if all Star Wars was to me is a fun movie, I’d probably like Episode VII quite a bit. But that’s not how I watch Star Wars, and that’s the root of my reactions not only to TFA, but to the prequels as well. In 1996, I was a student at Longwood College in Farmville, VA. I had grown up with the original Star Wars trilogy, like a lot of people, but after Return of the Jedi, Star Wars kind of went away. I never forgot it but I didn’t really revisit it, either; moving on to other things. Star Wars had become a fond memory. By the time I got to Longwood I hadn’t seen the original trilogy in more than a decade. I didn’t remember them too well but I knew the characters and the basic storyline, and I remembered how it had fired up my imagination as a kid.
“That’s good. You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”
Through various circumstances I rediscovered the trilogy at Longwood, and fell in love with the movies all over again: just in time for the 20th anniversary and the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions. I had been devouring Star Wars video games and novels, collecting the new line of action figures they’d begun issuing in 1995, and generally becoming a full-blown fanboy. My friend Wayne Rankin and I watched the trilogy almost religiously during our time at Longwood. I learned to quote every line.
But it was 1996 that changed it all. I took a class called “World Religions.” Listed as a philosophy class by the college, it was taught by a lady professor who was also an ordained Episcopalian Priest and a one-time Buddhist monk who had studied at a temple in Tibet. While it was just a single course, and while I remain a confirmed United Methodist, I found my thinking and spirituality broadened by this wonderful professor’s class. I read the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, learned about Mohammed, and Buddha, and gained a fresh understanding of my own Christian faith.
I also studied the History of Western Civilization, and Art History, which go nicely hand-in-hand as a study of the western world and the culture that drove it. Through all of these courses, I began to understand Star Wars in a whole new way. I was sitting in Western Civ, listening to the professor lecture about the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire, when I realized that what I was hearing was also the backstory behind the Star Wars trilogy. Not that Emperor Palpatine (a not-so-surprisingly Roman-sounding name) is meant to directly correspond with Julius Caesar, but much of what he is, and much of what he does, comes directly from Caesar. He even gets (metaphorically) backstabbed by his right-hand man. Et tu, Vader?
There’s also the matter of the greatest army in the (known to them) world, and the Caesar having a secretive, elite group of soldiers as his personal bodyguard, known as the Praetorian Guard. So I understood even before George Lucas announced the Prequel Trilogy, that should he ever make them, it would be a literal Fall of Rome story, a sweeping epic about a “perfect” society crumbling with age, facing a grave threat and giving more and more emergency power to one man until he reveals his true nature. Knowing that Palpatine was a Sith Lord and that Vader was his apprentice, formerly a Jedi Knight trained by a young, headstrong Obi-Wan Kenobi (which is all information the Original Trilogy gives us), it wasn’t hard to piece together the basic framework of the story. Specific characters and situations were impossible to guess, but that was the fun of waiting for the movies.
As for the spiritual side, Lucas didn’t go into it in much depth in the original Star Wars. It wasn’t until The Empire Strikes Back where that side of the equation really deepened, and the director of that picture, Irvin Kirshner, was a Buddhist. Yoda, in the original script, was more spritely and serious, a weird little blue elf who was a difficult master and whose mood was somewhat mercurial. I suspect it was Kirshner who directed Frank Oz to take the character in a somewhat different direction, and it’s why Yoda is never again quite the same as he was in Empire. Because Irvin Kirshner’s Yoda is the Dalai Lama. He’s playful and curious, wise beyond words, in love with nature, and gravely serious about the nature of good and evil.
“Yes. A Jedi’s strength flows from the force. But beware the Dark Side. Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.”
And that’s where The Force lives. Christians often see in it a reflection of our faith, and that element is present, but the Force is intentionally something that is pretty relatable to members of any religion. The concept of the Force itself is drawn mostly from Eastern mysticism. The Qi (pronounced Chee) literally means Life Force, and is the major underlying principle in Chinese medicine and martial arts. It is defined as the vital part of any living thing. Many eastern cultures have a version of the idea, from India all the way to Pacific Islanders. Even certain western philosophies have a similar concept. What Lucas did is take that and make it a kind of superpower that is drawn from channeling the energy of all life. Many of the words Yoda speaks to Luke on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back, especially those regarding the nature of good and evil, the surrender of your own will, and the power of faith over doubt, would be recognized by both Buddha and Christ as words of wisdom.
I’ve said it here before, but the original three Star Wars movies were always a conglomeration of genres and archetypes. The Empire is like Rome but is also in some ways like Nazi Germany. The Imperial officers look like Nazis. The word “stormtrooper” refers to a Nazi soldier. The story is part cowboy movie, part Kung Fu movie, part Arthurian legend, part swords-and-sandals epic. Why that works is because they’re all the same on a certain, deeper level. Lucas drew elements from all of them and put them together in an appealing way, and added spaceships and lasers.
Around this time, in college, I began slowly losing interest in the Star Wars books, and pretty soon the games lost their appeal, too. I was getting something out of the movies that just wasn’t present in this other stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I like lightsabers and blasters, and spaceships and wookiees. But none of that means anything. What Star Wars is to me, is thoughtful and compelling because of what’s under the hood. It’s something very, very smart, wrapped up in the trappings of something very, very dumb. That’s why big blockbusters that try to ape Star Wars always fail. They don’t see all the layers, and sure as hell don’t contain all those layers.
So when the prequels arrived, I enjoyed them. The storytelling in Episodes I-III wasn’t particularly good, but the movies did what I wanted them to do. They channeled classic cinema to tell a story about the end of the republic, and the rise to power of evil over good, because good got complacent and went to sleep at the switch. It’s political, the big bad uses economics and diversionary tactics to divide the power players and draw them right into his hands. The story may not be well-executed, but it’s well-considered. So I enjoy the films intellectually. They contain the spirituality, historical references, and layers of symbolism that I expect from Star Wars. I stumbled onto Lucas’s playbook in college and I got his vibe, even when a lot of others didn’t.
Somewhere around Episode II I quit the books altogether. All I wanted was the movies. Nothing else mattered. Then years after Episode III, Lucas sells his company to Disney and gives them outlines for episodes VII-IX. I was curious, hopeful that they’d be good, but Disney threw out Lucas’s outlines and did their own thing, and I can tell, because Lucas’s knowledge of history and his interests in art and world religions are completely absent.
Luke Skywalker, who should be the spiritual heart of the film, is entirely absent until the last moments of the film, and he doesn’t say anything or do anything. Rey is on a spiritual journey but doesn’t know it at all until late in the movie. She has no parents. Her family abandoned her on Jakku and the audience has no idea who raised her, or if she just taught herself everything. Which seems unlikely. I get that her origins are a mystery, but it feels very thin, it’s difficult to decide if this is oversight or intentional.
What spiritual journey Rey has is, like her childhood, apparently, largely unguided. She’s being led toward something, I suppose, by the Force, but the film puts Han Solo in the Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan role, a juxtaposition that is interesting but again leaves Rey without any real guidance on what the Force is or how it works. They add in Lupita Nyongo’s Maz Kanata as a wise and mysterious little figure who may remind you just a tiny bit of Yoda, but she’s little more than a barkeep who may or may not be something more. We don’t know about that, either, and Kanata seems only a little more able than Solo to speak to the true nature of the Force. Whatever Rey learns, she seems to learn instinctively. Which again, is fine except that with nobody to give voice to the lessons she’s learning, it all feels very glib.
Yes, Rey fits into the same basic Campbellian archetype as Luke or Anakin, but apart from her being good at stuff there’s not much there to make me latch onto her as a character. And don’t call me sexist, it has nothing to do with gender or I wouldn’t like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who in the book is much more like Rey than Judy Garland. The thing is, it’s Luke Skywalker who seems modeled very much on Dorothy. Farmer who is raised by his aunt and uncle, horrible thing happens and he flies away. Throw in some Garland Dorothy too because Luke dreams of getting away from the farm.
Luke is basically every kid who ever sat on the porch and looked at the stars and wondered what was out there. He’s every kid who got sick of doing chores and resented the structure of their home life, but was actually enriched by it, even if he, or she, didn’t notice. And it’s telling that Luke, who dreamed of adventure and great deeds, had to surrender his own will to the Force in order to meet his destiny. That is a true spiritual journey. Better still, Anakin’s journey mirrors this because Anakin is called to surrender his will to the Force, and he doesn’t do it. Anakin tries to follow his own will, to control everything in his life, and that leads him to ruin. That, my friends, is also the message of most major religions, and is absolutely the message of Jesus of Nazareth. Heck, Jesus didn’t just advise it, he lived and died by it.
“You can’t stop the change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting.”
And so part of what got me about The Force Awakens is that it undoes Luke’s victory at the end of Return of the Jedi. Not just because the Dark Side is alive and kicking, and the Empire still exists, now as The First Order (shouldn’t they be the second…order…?) but philosophically. Spoilers here, but Luke met his father head-on, willing to let his dad kill him, but knowing in his heart that Anakin wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Han meets Kylo Ren head-on and Ren just kills him. If the message of Return of the Jedi was that selfless love conquers all, the message of The Force Awakens seems to be, “LOL NOPE,” and that is where I check out, honestly. Not because I think it was dramatically wrong to kill Han Solo but because it felt meaningless. Some have tried to explain to me that he was, I dunno, helping Kylo do what he thought he had to do, but that’s just wrong, because Kylo is following the dark path, and no parent, no matter how loving, ought to be supporting that. You don’t buy your kid meth just because they ask, and you don’t help them kill you or anyone else. Star Wars is about morality as viewed through the lens of faith, it just wears the clothing of a science fiction adventure story.
The good news is that this trilogy can get on track, depending on how they handle the next episode. After all, as I just got through saying, even the original trilogy waited until the second film to get into specifics about The Force. That could happen here as well. The Force Awakens just isn’t a setup that interests me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie. It’s just not Star Wars. It’s like the books that I quit reading a decade and a half ago. It looks a lot like Star Wars. Musically it sounds like Star Wars, and narratively it borrows story elements from existing Star Wars films. But it just… isn’t Star Wars. Not in the way that matters to me. You can have guys in black cloaks with red lightsabers marauding around, and space Nazis blowing crap up, but without the philosophical and theological underpinnings, and no clear sense of morality, it’s all just misguided fan fiction. And I outgrew fan fiction a very long time ago.
Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters” reboot released a trailer today. Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start. When this project was announced, Feig, purveyor of such gems as “Spy,” “The Heat,” and “Bridesmaids,” was adamant that the film was going to be a reboot and not a sequel to the two classic films by Ivan Reitman. Feig went on to explain that he didn’t like the idea of these women characters being handed the equipment and taught how to use it, because it undermined what he was trying to do, which was apparently to make a statement.
I shouldn’t have to explain this to either Paul Feig or Kate Dippold, who are both credited as the writers on this thing, but the one doesn’t really necessitate the other. As the writer you get to decide what happens and how. So you could have set this film in the same continuity and just…not do the thing you didn’t want to do. As Clayton Spinney has maintained from the beginning, it would have been a simple matter, playing off of the line from the original about how “the franchise rights alone could make us rich beyond our wildest dreams!” to have the women waiting to meet somebody at a particular place and be irritated because he’s late, starting to wonder if he’s going to show since their check cleared, or if they’ve been ripped off… only to have Venkman show up, dump off a pile of dilapidated equipment and and drive away like the devil was on his heels.
This then would leave Kristen Wiig or Kate McKinnon to be like, “look, this equipment is thirty years old, it’s poorly made, the power cells are unstable… I bet if we switched this on we’d level half the city. Not only can I do this better, but I WILL. Give me a week.” And then have her build new, better, more efficient and more powerful equipment. And before you tell me that this in any way undermines her, allow me to remind you that every single scientist on the planet Earth stands on the shoulders of all who have come before them. That’s how science works.
But even so, the film could have been good. Doesn’t look like that’s how it shook out, though. This looks like a film that can’t decide what it wants to be. The original drew most of its humor from the situations and the way the characters reacted. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) were crackpot scientists on a research grant at New York State University. Their funding was pulled because nobody was sure what the hell they were doing but everybody agreed it was crap. Peter Venkman was their old college buddy who probably floated through and got in on their program the same way he probably got them to do all of his homework for them. By being a first class BS artist. Venkman has degrees in psychology and parapsychology, but all he seems interested in is hooking up with college girls. However this termination of their funding comes right after a major breakthrough in Stantz and Spengler’s research, brought about by an interaction with “The Grey Lady,” a free-floating, full-torsal vaporous apparition at the New York Public Library.
Aykroyd wrote the first draft of the 1984 original, then Ramis was brought in to help him get it into shape. The thing about Dan Aykroyd is, he believes in the paranormal, and not only that, but he believes in it almost exactly the way it’s portrayed in the Ghostbusters movies he wrote. So he’s kind of a nut. But he’s a great comedian and good writer, and Ramis was a truly exceptional talent. Ramis didn’t believe in this stuff at all so he could look at it objectively and make the film function in a way that Aykroyd alone could not. They wrote these characters for themselves, and Venkman was originally written for John Belushi, sort of a version of his character from Animal House. When he passed away, the role went to Bill Murray who brought his own unique style to it, but the slacker who lives on the hard work of his smarter, socially awkward friends is so obviously a Belushi character once you know the truth. At any rate, Aykroyd’s personal belief system informs the film’s internal logic, so that Ray and Egon have lots of technobabble, or paratechnobabble if you like, to spout during their scenes.
And that’s the key, right there: they played their scenes straight. The reason we love these characters is because they believe 100% in the world they inhabit, they are doing what they need to in order to pay their bills, and later in order to survive: they are odd guys who just discovered their life’s work. They’re totally ineffectual in any other setting, and it’s absurd that they end up saving the world. It’s that absurdity that is the film’s lifeblood. It’s a comedy film that isn’t jokey. There are gags and wonderful lines, to be sure, but the humor is situational.
So what does this have to do with the new one? Well, looking at the trailer, it begins with a nod to the original two films. Not that the film itself does, but the trailer does, which tells you how Sony feels about this thing. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re nervous. They can’t be oblivious to all the negative backlash that existed even before the trailer came out. They know the original is a classic and they feel that they have to tie this new one, even if only in the most peripheral of ways, to the original in order to sell it. Mark my words: they know they have a bomb on their hands.
The trailer then takes us to the library, to a version of the “Grey Lady” scene, where the big payoff is a ghost vomiting slime on Kristen Wiig. That’s right. The ghost vomits slime onto Kristen Wiig. It’s like some weird fetish porn that I clicked on by mistake. It goes on for what feels like five minutes. *BLOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRPPPPPpppppp* So we’re going for gross-out humor here. The worst thing is, she’s playing one of the scientists, and she’s being all intelligent and kind of sweetly nerdy, and then, SLIME VOMIT. That’s not a joke, it’s an insult. And then the next scene is her post-shower explaining in fairly explicit detail how the slime got everywhere. Am I the only one who thinks this is the opposite of honoring women? It’s childish and not funny at all.
And I know, Pete Venkman got slimed in the Sedgewick Hotel, but remember, it happened off-screen, it was played as though he was in grave danger, Ray hears him yelling, and comes running in to find him on his back in the hallway coated in slime. It’s a dramatic buildup to something silly. And also remember that Pete had been asked in the library to collect samples of the ectoplasm, and had been grossed out by it, showing in yet another way that he was no scientist. So when he gets slimed, it’s a sort of comeuppance. I would add that he’s also the character that Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) describes as being “like a used-car salesman.” Which is a way of saying “slimy.” Because that’s what Venkman is. He’s a slimeball. It’s a joke with many subtle layers. Now I’m not saying that the joke in the remake can’t have contextually dependent layers, but I am saying right now that I doubt it does. Because it’s such a sophomoric gag. It feels slimy because unlike Venkman, Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert doesn’t appear to deserve it.
I could go on; because all of the jokes in the trailer are that dumb. Leslie Jones’s character appears to be nothing more than a racial stereotype. Kate McKinnon doesn’t appear to have played a single one of her scenes straight. It’s not her fault, it seems like her character, the “brilliant engineer” was written as a screwball. Melissa McCarthy is Melissa McCarthy.
Unfortunately.
So where does this leave us?
You could have taken what has come before and used that groundwork to build something new and unique on the foundation of something people love. Instead you threw the continuity away and re-made the same movie with dumb jokes and unlikable characters. How is this better? Are you really advancing gender equality when the movie around your leading ladies is pure rubbish? Are you really advancing gender equality when you make the women look totally undignified? The guys get to mostly play it straight and let the humor come from the absurdity of a blue-collar workforce dealing with the paranormal and the way it becomes mundane to them. They never had to embarrass themselves like this. So why do the women have to? Paul Feig talked about wanting to honor women.
