As American As They Come

Truth, Justice, and The American Way. That's what Superman has stood for since his inception back in 1938. But in an effort to make Superman "relevant" for our more jaded, ironic age, the makers of Man of Steel (including director Zack Synder, producer Christopher Nolan, and writer David Goyer) have taken steps to ensure that their version of Superman isn't seen as a corny relic from a simpler time. In doing so, they do more harm than good to the character.

Now, if you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm about to jump into spoilers so stop reading now unless you want to know everything about Man of Steel's climax.

I'm serious. If you don't know and don't want to know, come back after you've seen the movie.

Ok, fair warning given. Now let's get into that ending...

At the end of Man of Steel, after a lengthy battle, General Zod is trying to fry a group of defenseless humans with his heat vision, straining against the neck hold that Superman has him in. As Zod refuses to give up, Superman resorts to lethal force, snapping Zod's neck and instantly killing him.

Henry Cavill delivers a powerful reaction immediately following but it's simply a moment that should not have happened. It's just too ugly. As readers know, Superman has killed in the comics before - killing Zod and his Kryptonian cronies, in fact - back at the end of John Byrne's historic run on Superman. In Superman #22, Superman acts as judge, jury, and executioner - exposing a Kryptonian trio to green kryptonite, killing all three. This deed occurs away from any witnesses but although the knowledge of what he's done rests solely with himself, Superman feels the full weight of his deadly actions, ruminating on the fact that none of the people of Earth who look up to him as a hero know that he's been tarnished.

So yes, Superman has killed but Man of Steel handles it much differently than Byrne did, depicting this monumental act in a much less responsible fashion. For one, in the Byrne issue, Superman kills his Kryptonian adversaries by means of a very "comic book-y" method. Seeing characters on a comic page fading away as they succumb to Kryptonite radiation is not nearly the same as the sight of Superman snapping a man's neck on the big screen, with the crack echoing in Dolby digital sound. We're talking about a very real world level of brutality here that is acceptable from a one man killing machine like The Punisher, but not from Superman.

This is a character that has inspired children for decades and still does. To have him straight-up murder someone, no matter what the circumstance, is just wrong. At 44, I'm plenty jaded and onscreen violence is nothing that I'm against as long as it's for an appropriate audience but there are some things that always need to be safe for kids to enjoy and Superman is way up there at the very top of that list. I'm the father of an eight-year-old boy who loves Superman and it was genuinely dispiriting to have our first Superman movie together on the big screen be crowned by the sight of Superman savagely murdering his opponent. Sorry, but it's just not cool. It's a sad conversation to have to have as you explain to your child that Superman was wrong and that he should've found a better way.

For those who want to cite Superman II (1981) as evidence that Superman has killed on film before, in the theatrical cut, the fate of Zod, Ursa, and Nod is left ambiguous and in the longer cut of the film that aired on ABC during its first television broadcast, there's a scene of all three being taken away from the Fortress of Solitude by the feds. So no, it's not quite the same. And for those who want to say, hey, times are different now - are they any worse than during the Depression or during World Wars or the tumult of the '60s? Or is just that people have poorer characters today? I'd say it's the latter.

As poor a decision as it was to have Superman kill, I could've almost gone with it had there been a thoughtful follow-up. But no, it's just glossed over. When Martha and Clark are standing over Pa Kent's grave at the end and Martha's saying she wishes Jonathan could've lived to see the man that Clark has became, my first thought was that he would've surely been appalled. After all, didn't Jonathan raise his son to be better? Couldn't they at least have had Clark acknowledge that he crossed a line that he never wants to cross again - that this is something that will haunt him and drive him to be a better hero? That even though no one blames him for killing Zod, he knows that he has to hold himself to a higher standard?

Some indication of guilt or shame would've been in line with Superman and it actually could've added a richer dimension to the character where he feels that he doesn't deserve the adulation he's receiving because, in his heart, he feels he could've avoided killing Zod.

Unfortunately, this movie was made by people who hold the short-sighted belief that a more violent Superman must naturally be a cooler Superman. It's just sad that the responsibility for this movie wound up in their hands and I wonder how anyone connected with this film (at least those who were in the position to make key creative decisions) can possibly feel good about themselves.


Even in Frank Miller's landmark The Dark Knight Returns, Batman starts to take The Joker's life by breaking his foe's neck but stops short of it. In a final mad act, The Joker finishes the job himself but Batman, the grimmest of heroes, couldn't bring himself to go there. Now we're saying that Superman can? No, I can't go along with that.

In one of Man of Steel's final scenes, Superman assures a general who still harbors a modicum of suspicion towards him that he's "as American as it gets."

And truth be told, in being depicted as content to go for an expedient, lazy, and morally wrong solution rather than working harder and smarter to do what's right, this Superman is as American as it gets.

That just doesn't say anything good about either modern Americans or Superman.

Trick Or Trailers: Dawn of the Dead (2004)

When director Zack Synder's reimagining of George Romero's watershed zombie epic Dawn of the Dead (1978) was announced, no amount of outrage in the horror community was spared. How could Romero's independent, unrated splatter classic (this was the very film, in fact, that Romero coined the term 'splatter movie' for) possibly be translated into an R-rated studio film? Even worse, this atrocity was going to be helmed by a music video director who had never directed a feature film - and it was scripted by James Gunn, who at the time was known mostly as the writer from the godawful live-action Scooby-Doo. If there was ever a film that had fandom united in anticipation of impending suckitude, the Dawn of the Dead remake was it. To call it a hard sell to the horror crowd doesn't even cover the amount of animosity that Dawn of the Dead '04 had to overcome.

And that's why this trailer is one of the all-time greats - because it immediately turned the tide of opinion on this movie. What had been the target of nothing but 'fuck this movie' diatribes suddenly was looking pretty sweet. Whether Dawn of the Dead '04 is the greatest zombie movie ever is debatable (it's not, but feel free to debate it) but no zombie movie has ever had a more bad-ass trailer.

Watchmen

In advance, I expected that I'd be giving the Watchmen adaptation all kinds of leeway to please me. After all, everyone agrees that the book isn't the most adaptation-friendly material so for it even to get Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic partly right would seem like a really neat feat. But while the first sight of a black Warner Bros. logo against a yellow background had me feeling that I was in for something special, as it turns out whatever slack I was willing to cut director Zack Synder and co. evaporated awfully quick - like by about the twenty five minute mark. There's so much I disliked about this movie, it's hard to pinpoint what turned me off the most but ultimately I just never felt involved with anything happening on screen. It felt more like a comic book than the comic book itself, a work so artificial and stylized that it was impossible to see its characters as real. And in condensing the comic's sprawling storyline, Watchmen the movie becomes too cramped with incidents to have a natural flow to its narrative and because of that, nothing that happens ever has any weight to it - not even the threat of doomsday.

Among the bigger issues I had with the movie was its violence. I'm all for gratuitous cinematic bloodshed but the adolescent glee that Zack Synder shows here for bone-breaking and meat cleavers to the head only points to why he was the altogether wrong choice for this film. He gets off on the fight scenes (every hero here is some kind of kung fu master, by the way - which might make some viewers unfamiliar with the comic wonder if all of these costumed characters are supposed to have superpowers) and the gore - but whenever someone isn't being beaten, dismembered or scalded, there's a lack of conviction. Even worse, for all the violence in the film he's unable to portray any of it as being truly harrowing. Rorschach's origin, which should close on a true heart of darkness moment, instead ends with a splatter gag that belongs in a Friday the 13th movie (a damn good Friday the 13th movie, yes, but a Friday the 13th movie nonetheless). Synder even caps the climatic death of a major character with a gore punchline. Several reviewers have cited the reflective Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence as proving that Synder has more up his sleeve than just an eye for stylized violence but outside of the fact that this sequence is recreated almost verbatim from the comic - leaving little room for Synder to contribute his own vision - I feel that sequence missed capturing the original life-affirming poetry of that celebrated issue. Like the rest of the film (save for Jackie Earle Haley's indelible performance as Rorschach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's equally strong turn as The Comedian), it feels wooden.

And although one of Moore's key points with Watchmen was that these self-styled superheroes were actually pathetic (as Dr. Manhattan remarks at one point: "...friendly middle-aged men who like to dress up..."), Synder is unwilling to be totally true to that. It may be hip to love Watchmen now but it's always been a story about uncool people and I don't think Synder understands how to do uncool. Under Synder's direction, a character like Laurie Juspeczyk aka Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) is portrayed as being what her comic book counterpart can only imagine she is - slick, sexy, dangerous. As Moore wrote these characters, they didn't turn into conventional superheroes when they put their costumes on. Moore showed psychological acuity, revealing his characters to be ridiculous in how they used their super ID's to compensate for their (sometimes literal) shortcomings. One of the lines of the comic that always stuck with me was the observation of a policemen while Rorschach was being arrested that "the runt wears elevator shoes!" - it showed Rorschach's arrest to be a personal humiliation, tearing away his mystique as a fearsome vigilante. It's those moments that made the book and it's the absence of them that keeps the movie from coming to life.

Before seeing the movie, I thought everything about it looked terrific, that Synder clearly understood the book. But his take on the material is a limited one - the work of someone who is in love with the surface of Watchmen as a book that was racier and more violent than other comics of its era. While the graphic novel was a leap forward in maturity for the comic medium, the movie - for all its technical proficiency - is a case of arrested development.

Waiting For The Watchmen

As the release date for Watchmen sits just a week away, I just realized why my anticipation for this landmark adaptation has been just a little muted - I can't quite believe that a Watchmen film actually exists. Sure I've been following its progress with a mix of curiosity and anxiousness but it still seems unreal that Watchmen has finally been made into a feature film - much less one that looks to have such fidelity to the source material.

It's been well over a decade since I last re-read Watchmen so unless I get a chance to read it again before next week, I'm sure there'll be plenty of details Synder left out that won't even register with me as missing. And that's fine with me - although I expect if this movie is as faithful as it's reported to be, every frame will bring back a flood of memories, jarring my recollections of the book as it goes along.

I first read Watchmen in monthly installments when it was released in '86. Even though I was a high school senior then, I still think the series was just a little over my head at times - or maybe it was just such a different experience than anything else I had found in comics up to that point. Even the way it was packaged was dramatically different in which each cover was a detail from within the issue (a trophy, a Rorschach blot, etc.) and not the traditional style of comic book cover that emphasized action or character.

When I finished reading issue #12, I didn't think of the series in terms of it being a masterpiece or a classic - I just knew that I had loved the story and that it had gripped me straight through the year-plus change that it took to be released. I certainly didn't expect that nothing else in comics would ever come close to it - which is probably the saddest part of Watchmen's legacy, that it stands alone in the history of the medium. Many wonderful comics have come along since, some of them classics in their own right (everything from Sandman to Y: The Last Man to Alias to Preacher), but none of them have been the singular achievement that Watchmen is.

Even though I'm extremely excited to see the film, I agree with writer Alan Moore's unhappy assertion that Watchmen is so specific to the comic book form (thanks to such artistic choices as reserving the use of splash pages until the final issue to reveal the dramatic destruction of Manhattan) that to take it out of its home medium is taking a large part of its impact with it. On the other hand, as director Zack Synder has pointed out, mainstream movie audiences have become fluent in the tropes of superhero fiction in a way they weren't twenty years ago thanks to the popularity of superhero movies so that a Watchmen film can more readily comment on the genre in a way now that it couldn't when Watchmen the book was first released. Had this been made in the late '80s, as initially planned, with Sam Hamm writing and Terry Gilliam directing, it would've been a nightmare. There would have no confidence that audiences would be able to keep up with the material without making drastic changes to get mainstream viewers up to speed.

Speaking to Comics Interview in issue #70 about the then pending release of Batman, Sam Hamm discussed the challenges of adapting Watchmen, saying "...I couldn't see how anyone could turn it into a movie because 1) there's too much sprawl in the story, too much time shifting and flashbacks, and 2) there's too much expositional material to get across." Hamm also said of his resulting screenplay (which jettisoned the beginning of the book, its ending and the entire history of the Minutemen, keeping only the present-day characters) that "I feel like what I came in to do was essentially the writerly equivalent of what Kodak used to do, take elegant technology and dumb it down for mass consumption." I've never read Hamm's screenplay (or if I have, I've long since forgotten it) but remarks like that illuminate how much things have opened up in mainstream culture for even the most geek-centric material. To make Watchmen the way that Synder has approached it would've been an impossible sell twenty years ago - it would've been unpalatable for a wider audience - now it seems inevitable that this is the way it had to be made, if it were to be made at all.

I've only skimmed a few reviews so far and at this point I'll hold off on looking any further into other's opinions until I've seen the film for myself. Even if I walk away feeling that Synder got Watchmen 90% right, I'll consider it to be some kind of triumph. It doesn't have to be 100%. In the end it really can't be - that's what the comic is for.