Is Man of Steel Haunted by Donner and Reeve?

This weekend, intrigued by the earlier reporting that Man of Steel is coming in with lower marks than passable-but-not-amazing comic book films like Iron Man 3 and Superman Returns on Rotten Tomatoes, I figured it was a good idea to look and see what the criticisms were of a movie that's had great word-of-mouth from Hollywood for months now and from screenings the last three weeks or so. First of all, let me clarify that I don't take these kinds of things particularly seriously for a few reasons. First of all, this kind of film aren't meant to be critical darlings. "No movie is critic-proof," Henry Cavill told me at the Man of Steel World Premiere in New York--but a film like this is not done for critics. There's a sense that a big spectacle of an action movie--especially one based on a recognizable property--has to have certain key components in order to be universally loved by critics. Harry Potter, for instance, captured the family-friendly spirit of the source material without losing its intellect. The Avengers was lauded in part because Whedon managed to make the almost-impossible balancing act work without collapsing under its own weight. In both instances, those are testaments to the writers and directors in question but they're hardly applicable to Man of Steel. The second component that can really help your big blockbuster film critically is the element of surprise. Batman Begins was a beautifully-done film, but more than that it was able to overcome massive negativity and and the seeming death of the franchise in order to BE a good film. Many critics didn't particularly expect themselves to ever want to see Batman again after the Schumacher films, but Nolan won them over in grand fashion. While the Superman franchise has arguably been dead in the water for much longer than Batman ever was, there was never that truly atrocious film that everyone hated. Superman Returns may be reviled by fans, but it did alright with critics and there's a sense that after it failed there was some degree of head-shaking and "It's too bad that didn't catch on"-style lamenting its flaws. Between a fair-to-middling (not atrocious) most recent chapter and unambiguously positive word-of-mouth from the studio, rival studios and audiences for quite some time now, there was little chance that critics were going to be pleasantly surprised with the film. Those challenges, of course, are broadly applicable. Just as Iron Man 2 didn't manage to live up to Iron Man (which was an example of the "pleasant surprise" guildeline mentioned above when it came out), it's unlikely that the next Avengers movie will live up to the expectations built for it by audiences and critics based on how beloved Whedon's blockbuster was last year. One of the things that's unique to Man of Steel, though, is the memory of Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve's Superman: The Movie and the films that proceeded it. For many viewers--especially those in the film community, whose perspective on comics is quite limited--the 1978 film is the definitive take on Superman. That's a fair position to take when you're discussing your personal tastes, but if you're trying to be critical and thoughtful about it, it's wise for critics to recognize that's no more true than Tim Burton's Batman being definitive. These decades-old characters come with a lot of baggage and almost necessarily, any filmmaker is going to take the pieces he's interested in exploring and leave the rest for the next guy. That the next guy would take what's left behind for them rather than remaking the film in a previous director's image is simply common sense, but there are those out there saying, essentially, that by not remaking the Donner films faithfully, Snyder has betrayed Superman and the audience. Let's be honest--there are some critics and fans who have legitimate concerns about the film which, just because I don't agree with them, don't invalidate their opinions. But to many critics, Man of Steel is flawed because it doesn't live up to their idea of the character--an idea that's based in a thirty-five-year-old film and which hasn't been reflected in the comics in about twenty-five years. It's not an entirely unique challenge, but an uncommon one; you'll get people who moan at Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, for instance, because it doesn't, in their opinion, measure up to the Franco Zefferelli version. The claim, there, is that you needn't fix what isn't broken--but in both cases, the '60s and '70s versions wouldn't resonate with a younger audience. Once one version of a myth takes hold in the public imagination, though, those people will have a hard time letting go and it can insulate the story from evolution or from connecting to another audience. Superman, at least in film, was on the cusp of becoming another stagnant icon that nobody really knows what to do with anymore. This movie now presents a starting point. Man of Steel had some things that I would have done differently, but trying to recapture the "joy and optimism" of the Reeve films isn't one of them. A film that's a bit less bleak probably wouldn't have hurt anybody, but trying to recapture the feel of a movie made in an entirely different era just leads to Superman Returns, and nobody wants that.