Apocalypse Now (a movie that Mr. Snyder nods
at), Apocalypse Then: The 21st century has been tough for Superman, at
least at the box office. After decades of saving the world on the screen
and on the page, the movie character seemed stuck, particularly after
the dreary 2006 reboot, “Superman Returns.” The Superman
story had been told in so many ways and in so many moods in the comics —
he has married and mourned, died and been reborn — but shaping these
transformative cycles into a new film, much less a viable series,
remained elusive. Christopher Nolan went dark and then darker with
another DC Comics legend in the Dark Knight films, but this was
Superman, idealism embodied. What was there left to say about the man in
the primary-color suit, especially after Sept. 11?
For starters, return to basics, and add a fighting-trim Russell Crowe, a howlingly mad Michael Shannon, that emotional guidepost Amy Adams and a superdude — the British actor Henry Cavill
— so ripped that he’s nearly shredded. Much like “Batman Begins,” the
first part of the Dark Knight trilogy, “Man of Steel” narrates the how
and why of its character, tracing an existential arc from child to man.
The difference is that while Batman has to journey into the world (with a
layover in a bat cave) to acquire his particular skill set, Superman
comes fully loaded. He just needs to burrow into his innermost self,
hang out at the Fortress of Solitude and meet the right woman.
He does all that in “Man of Steel,” which was written by David S. Goyer
from a story that he created with Mr. Nolan that extracts the canonical
account from 75 years of seemingly infinitely layered supermythology.
To that end, the film begins at the beginning, back on Krypton where
Jor-El (Mr. Crowe) attempts to persuade its council, wearing dour
expressions and ornate headdresses evocative of Gothic tracery,
that their planet is doomed. It’s a measure of the film’s striking
design here that the headdress latticework is echoed in some of the
pleated clothing, as well as in the curvilinear buildings, suggesting
that someone behind the scenes (the production designer is Alex
McDowell) is an admirer of the architect Zaha Hadid and her flowing organic forms.
These graceful contours are further picked
up in spaceships that float like jellyfish and in suits of armor that
evoke crustaceans, adding to this alien world’s striking conceptual
unity. Lovely and imperious, the headdresses are also emblems of the
countervailing forces that have led to the ruin of Krypton, a
civilization undone by its own advances. The resemblances to Earth are
blunt enough for an eco-savvy kindergartner and pop off the screen like
speech balloons. But, then, this is Superman, and Mr. Snyder, whose
earlier movies include a stillborn adaptation of the graphic novel
“Watchmen,” is here playing with different narrative forms as he toggles
between cinematic realism and the kind of comic-book-style exaggeration
that distills ideas into images.
The birth of Superman, who’s given the name
Kal-El, opens the film and precedes Krypton’s end. Jor-El and his wife,
Lara Lor-Van (the Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer), decide to rocket their
child to Earth, sending him off to safety in the futuristic equivalent
of Moses’ basket. Given that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster, were Jewish, much has been written about Superman’s
similarities to Moses (“el” is a Hebrew word for God), which is
complicated by the character’s likeness to Jesus. (Superman’s Earth mom
was originally named Mary.)
Mr. Snyder, with his characteristic lack of subtlety, hits the Jesus
angle amusingly hard, primarily in a later scene in which Superman —
framed by a stained-glass tableau of a supplicating Jesus draped in a
red robe — consults with a priest in a church. By then, the rocketing
baby has become the man and given a soul-sick mien. That’s because the
next time you see Kal-El after liftoff, he’s all grown up and toiling on
a fishing boat off the northwest Canadian coast, a filmic ellipsis that
abruptly spans decades. A beat later and he’s also shirtless and
holding back a tower wobbling on a burning oil platform. And then, like
Hercules who rises from his funeral pyre — having cast off his mortal
body and assumed his godly form — Superman, a k a Clark Kent, is
engulfed in flames. It’s a nifty, startling image, even if it transforms
Mr. Cavill, a pretty man whose body has been inflated to Bluto-esque
proportions, into barbecue beefcake. Mr. Snyder, perhaps intuiting how
fast this image could slip away from him, cuts his way out of there
fast.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar