Christmas With The Super-Heroes C43

Santa’s Super Helpers

Christmas With The Super-Heroes 
DC Limited Collectors Edition C43
DC
ISBN 761942387284

I recently reviewed one of the new treasury sized facsimile editions of the various DC treasuries which have ben released over this last year (my understanding is that their next two releases will be the two Spider-Man VS Superman Marvel crossovers, which I still have from the 1970s but, I look forward to getting new foil cover variants). Their December release is yet another I didn’t have as a kid although, I have talked about two of the stories here as they were reprinted in A DC Universe Christmas (reviewed here) but, it’s nice to read them at the size they were reprinted at during the 1970s (both those tales are from the 1940s).

The first of those two starts off this volume and is an untitled Superman story. This is where he shows a spoiled, rich kid those worse off than him at Christmas and also gets involved in a scheme of two villains trying to sabotage Christmas at the North Pole, coming to both Santa and Lois Lane’s rescue. And it’s a nice, positive tale which re-enforces childrens’ ideas of Santa Claus and also sees the last son of Krypton replacing the gassed and unconscious reindeer, by transporting Santa on his sled on Christmas Eve. 

The Second story here, which is a really great and moving one, is The Silent Night Of The Batman, where Batman is approached by the spirit of the season as a hallucination of Commissioner Gordon and his fellow cops. While Batman is convinced to stay with them at the police station and sing Christmas carols with them, we see various crimes and tragedies taking place, with absolutely no dialogue... and then right themselves to a series of positive resolutions, all without the intervention of The Batman. It’s actually a pretty heart warming sequence of pages, relying solely on the artwork of both the great Neal Adams and industry veteran Dick Giordano. 

Then we have a short story from House Of Mystery called Night Prowler. It’s a three page quickie which doesn’t actually contain any horror, just a sense of threat before the obvious identity of said night prowler is revealed to one of the characters... it works really well. 

Next up is the first of the usual activity pages which were the blessing/curse of the treasury editions put out by DC. It’s a double page spread of 8 circular artworks of various DC characters and a Christmas message from each entitled Christmas Greetings From The Super-Heroes. 

Then the second of those stories I’d already read comes in and it’s the brilliant, untitled  1940s Wonder Woman tale where it’s all narrated from the point of view of a friendly Christmas tree, who helps Wonder Woman out by giving her the information necessary to save the lives of a family and find a Nazi base. Luckily, Diana Prince is able to talk tree speak and, obviously, saves the day. 

After that we have Santa’s Scrambled Super List wordsearch, which invites you to find a load of super-heroes hidden in the grid, along with the names of a few of the creators too.

Then we get the last strip in theis selection, The Sandman in Santa Fronts For The Mob. This is the 1970s version of The Sandman and his sidekick, both in yellow super-hero costumes and not really remembered by many comic book readers these days (is my guess). But it’s a nice story about a bunch of criminals using a shop Santa, played by a heavy weight boxer, to cover up for their crimes... but, of course, when the boxer finds out what’s going on, he saves The Sandman’s life and helps him break up the racket. 

After that we have a two page spread highlighting the lyrics of six Christmas carols called Sing Along with the Super-Heroes and then a maze page called Santa’s Super-Deliveries… where you have to find Santa’s route to each of the characters waiting in the maze for their presents. 

On the inside back cover we have Season’s Greetings From The DC Editors, with drawings of them and a little bit of promotional blurb for each and, on the back cover we have, not a cut out diorama this time but just a nice holiday scene. 

And that’s me done with Christmas With The Super-Heroes - DC Limited Collectors Edition C43, I think. I really enjoyed reading this one and, it has to be said, none of the tales were in any way a let down. Just good, wholesome holiday reading for kids and ‘young at heart’ adults alike. And a nice addition to the treasury shelf, it has to be said. 

Superman

Kal To Arms

Superman
Directed by James Gunn
USA/Canada/Australia/New Zealand 2025
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Okay... I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much from the new iteration of The Man of Steel at my local movie house. Firstly, I think DC have given up too quickly on their DCU, just when it was getting good enough to compete on an equal footing with Marvel’s MCU. Also, it means no more Gal Gadot/Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman films... which is pretty disasterous. 

As it happens, though, this new reboot under the name of Superman surprised me by actually being quite an entertaining, if somewhat muddled film. Now I’m going to list the bad things first because, they matter to me. One thing being what I just said about jettisoning the previous DCU (even though there is a cameo in this by one of them which... honestly... makes no sense whatsoever). 

Another thing... you DO NOT give me a curly headed Superman. Get out of here. 

Yet another thing... what a lot of modern iterations of the character seem to somehow forget or screw up, just as they do here... Superman has a kiss curl in the shape of an S. Don’t mess with the kiss curl, it’s iconic. 

And that’s most of the bad things. I’ll get on to the good stuff as I go. 

Okay, so... David Corenswet plays Kal El aka Superman aka Clark Kent in a film which completely dispenses with the origins of the character and fills the audience in on that stuff in brief snatches of text at the start of the movie. Good call. There is the back story of his Kryptonian parents which comes back to haunt him as an important plot point but, in this one he starts off already living with his girlfriend Lois Lane (played in this iteration by Rachel Brosnahan), works at the Daily Planet with her and Jimmy Olsen (played by Skyler Gisondo) and, occasionally helps out The Justice Gang... headed up by the Guy Gardner version of Green Lantern (played by Nathan Fillion), along with the second version of Mr. Terrific and ‘a version’ of Hawkgirl. But, due to the machinations of Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, Superman is questioned for his political motivations (after he stops a full scale invasion of one country by another... ripped from today’s headlines, folks) and locked up in a pocket universe created by Lex in which he is tortured and people are killed. And then it’s shenanigans as he fights for truth, justice and, in some political ways, the American way... to make matters right and to stop a temporal rift from pulling the Earth and surrounding universe apart. 

And it’s kind of throwing a whole load of plot elements in to the story and seeing how they land but, yeah, they’ve kind of made it work. 

And it’s nothing if not a postmodern movie. 

Now the homages to the 1970s Superman The Movie are obvious... from the opening and closing credits to the use of certain segments (repeated too often, without natural progression) of John Williams original 1978 theme. Also from the 1970s version of the mythos is the visual representation of the Fortress of Solitude, looking almost exactly as it did in that movie (which is totally not how it looked in the comics people... the comic book one looked like the one in the original Doc Savage pulps, which is where they stole the idea from) and we have characters like Eve Teschmacher and Otis Berg. 

However, for older Superman readers like myself, I found it leant more heavily into the Superman comics of the 1950s and early 1960s. You know, the days when every silly concept was worked through a number of the DC titles and the grittier 1930s/40s versions of the characters were somewhat jettisoned. So we have elements like the robot guardians in the Fortress of Solitude, Metamorpho and, most importantly... because he has a big role in the movie... we have the super-dog Krypto. Who, it has to be said, looks nothing like Krypto did in the comics as, instead, it’s based on James Gunn’s own dog. But Krypto does kind of steal every scene he’s in and, yeah, he’s thankfully in a lot of them. Causing lots of well observed doggy style chaos as he goes.

And that’s me done with Superman. Overall, I thought it was very entertaining and I think they definitely got the writing of the title character... who is a very difficult character to get right, for sure... pretty much in the ball park he’s supposed to be in. So, yeah, I didn’t hate this one, as I’d expected to and, I think this one deserves some good box office if it manages it (there were only about five other people in the screening I went to). Heads up... two end credits scenes in this one... one half way through and one right at the final knockings. Neither have much to say but, maybe they’ve not got the next DCU2 films planned out yet.  

Crumbs

Trail At The
End Of The World

Crumbs
Spain/Ethiopia/Finland 2015
Directed by Miguel Llansó
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
Second disc in Arrow’s Blu Ray set
of Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

Warning: Very mild spoilers, of a sort, kind of...

Well this is a strange movie, I’m glad to say. I realised that Crumbs, the first feature by Miguel Llansó, was included on the second disc in Arrow’s presentation of Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway (the same director’s second movie). Being as I suspect that any reissue they do of this one will probably not include the Crumbs disc, I decided to watch the trailers for both movies to see if they were my kind of thing. Those two trailers were ticking all the right boxes and so I bought this limited edition version of the release while I still could. So glad I did.

The film starts off with the information that we are in a post-apocalyptic, future version of our world. A devastating war has left the remaining humans interested in surviving only for any kind of future generations. The population has dwindled to almost nothing and a few people are scattered in this landscape, trying to just enjoy their days and maybe find some meaning.

Not that meaning is in any way forthcoming in this surrealist melange of broken people and the lionisation of ancient artefacts. The back story, which is in itself a quote from something else, seems to be a frame to hang together some almost logical story beats into something which, in all honesty, defines categorisation and takes you to a point, perhaps, where the attempt to find something more clearly defined in the story content might leave you clutching at straws... or at the very least clutching at various pop culture objects in an attempt to make sense of it all.

We have two main protagonists in this movie, which is almost a surrealist road movie in some ways, although the quest which seems somewhat central to the future of the two is cross cut with the incidents which make up the days of one of the two who is left behind, waiting for her man to return. These two are Candy, a hunchbacked person of small stature played by Daniel Tadesse and Birdy, played by Selam Tesfayie. Candy spends his days scavenging the wasteland for artefacts which Birdy can use in her found sculptural art works.

However, the spaceship left over, apparently, from the war... which hovers in the skies all day and night and has a large arm with a giant hand coming out of the top of it... has started to show signs of activity. Candy notices that a version of Santa Claus is living in the underside of the machine in the bowling alley (which keeps activating by itself) so he goes on a journey to track down Santa so he can get his wish for him and Birdy, reserving a seat on the spaceship before it takes off. On his way he encounters a mouse masked Nazi, a horse backed bandit, a train driver and various other people and objects such as the local witch, played by Shitaye Abraha, who gives him a clue as to where to find Santa. Of course, when he finds Santa and confronts him in his deserted, lion decorated theme park, Candy has to peel off his clothes and reveal that he is really Superman... but this doesn’t prevent Santa Claus from hitting him with a bicycle. Of course, this encounter is watched by Birdy as she looks through the mechanism of the bowling alley.

And it’s an interesting and certainly entertaining movie. The pacing is very slow and the ponderous establishing shots of the colourful landscapes and locations in deep focus are absolutely beautiful. There are some amazing little sequences too. For instance, a local ‘fence’ character buys the ancient artefacts found by various scavengers, as they have become valuable currency in this dwindling world. Artefacts such as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle amulet, a plastic Max Steel sword (which Birdy gives to Candy to protect him) or a vinyl copy of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album. A little while after such artefacts are found or lost, there is a beautiful sequence of each artefact spinning in slow motion in space, as the fence mis-identifies and mis-explains the history of the object in question.

If you do want to impose some meaning on the film then a sequence of ‘mistaken identity’ when Candy goes into a deserted cinema which has been showing the same movie non-stop for the last 40 years (it’s the so terrible it's good Turkish Superman, which I have seen and own and, yeah, perhaps one day I’ll review it for this blog). In a scene a little later, he is seen throwing away his Superman suit and it gives you pause for thought on the true history of the character, who has been telling everyone he is an alien trying to get back to the spaceship with his lover.

And that’s that. Crumbs is a wonderful surrealist movie with a certain level of emotional atmosphere to it, in spite of the way the ideas and scenes are threaded together in an almost throw away but mesmerising fashion. Recommended for anyone who is interested in the art of cinema, for sure. Oh... and if you want to find out the final fate of the spaceship, stick around until about half way through the end credits.

A DC Universe Christmas

The Wonder Of Christmas

A DC Universe Christmas
by various writers and artists
DC Comics ISBN: 9781563896408

A DC Universe Christmas is a nice, festive, trade paperback reprint of a number of DC Christmas stories drawn from various decades of the company’s output... or, you know, a shameless seasonal tie in to shift old stories and repackage them for new readers. You decide.

Now, the fact that the stories come from varying time periods means that there is a complete mixture of art (not to mention writing) styles in the tome and I’d have to say, I much preferred the stories reprinted from the 1940s through to the 1960s than any of the other ones from later time periods. Also, I noticed that those ones were more likely to entertain the idea of Santa Claus as a real person rather than just an invention to keep the dreams of children alive... or to keep them quiet.

The age of various strips means there are some characters in here from recent years (up until 2000, when this was published) who I had never come across before and, also, a few second tier characters from the 1960s (but these tales they appear in date from much later), who I had no idea about. So characters like Impulse, Enemy Ace and Bat Lash were not on my radar but, can’t see that I’m missing much of anything, although the Wild West story of Bat Lash showed some promise. What’s worse is that some of the characters had changed identity from the ones I used to read as a kid. For instance, The Flash is neither Jay Garrick or Barry Allen in his story here. Instead he’s... Wally West. Seriously? Wally West was Kid Flash, the sidekick, when I was growing up. I guess he grew up too. Also, well, this seems to be the Tim Drake version of Robin in one of the stories... who I think I remember came on board as the third Robin after Jason Todd was killed by The Joker, if memory serves. Actually, the short Robin story in this, where he’s feeling lonely for the holidays and then suckered into turning up at a surprise Christmas party with his ‘superhero family’ is a nice one and worthy of something written 50 or more years before it actually debuted in 1999. Which is a pleasant surprise.

So, yeah, a bit of a mish mash of a collection but, seriously, I wouldn’t expect anything more and these kind of things are always going to be a hit and miss kind of affair. For me, though, there were some nice highlights to the book...

For instance, although it’s one I’d read before, there’s a nice Wonder Woman story reprinted from a 1943 issue of Sensation Comics called The Story Of Fir Balsam. This one is a snow bound adventure and is told from the point of view of the titular Fir tree. In it, Fir Balsam helps Wonder Woman, who is Amazonian so she can speak to Fir because she knows tree language, to both thwart a nazi racket and also restore an estranged family, bringing two kids and their father back to the mother. This one is pretty good.

Another good one is Billy Batson’s Xmas, reprinted from a 1947 issue of Captain Marvel Adventures. Nowadays he’s known as Shazam... which makes no sense whatsoever (but I’m really not going to go into that yet again). This involves Captain Marvel getting an unfairly dismissed department store Santa his job back and also has the not so brilliantly resolved question of... what did Billy Batson and his alter ego Captain Marvel (who were very much their own beings in those days, remember) get each other when they went out Christmas shopping?

Perhaps the oddest story here, A Swingin’ Christmas Carol, is a reprint from a 1968 issue of Teen Titans. This one features characters like Ebeneezer Scrounge, Jacob Farley and Tiny Tom and, as soon as the Teen Titans realise the adventure they are living is a strange parallel to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, they try to solve the problems posed by the story by masquerading as the three ghosts from that book... with not the kind of solution they were necessarily expecting. This one is annoying because the criminals have a ray gun that can turn rubbish into valuable retail products and, at no point in the story does anyone stop to question what possible science there could be behind this... it just makes no sense. It’s also annoying when... and this kind of dates it... all the characters (including the guy writing the captions) refer to Wonder Girl as Wonder Chick. A sign of the times, I guess.

The last story in the book is a reprint of the 1940 comic Superman’s Christmas Adventure and, yeah, it’s pretty good. In this one, Clark and Lois try to bring Christmas to the poor kids of Metropolis, show a spoiled brat the error of his ways and, ultimately, thwart an evil scheme of Dr. Grouch and Mr. Meany when they try to shut down Santa’s operation at the North Pole. When they kidnap and then gas the reindeer, it’s up to Superman to work with Santa Claus to not only keep Christmas going (Superman pulls the sleigh for the sleeping reindeer) but also to reform the two killjoy criminals by showing them Christmas kindness. This kind of stuff is pretty much what Christmas is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s about it for my quick overview of this one. A DC Universe Christmas is not the best Christmas superhero comic I’ve read but it does contain a mixture of different styles and sometimes even differing views of just what the Christmas spirit is, or should be. It’s a good stocking filler for that superhero lover in your life and you should find something that will warm your heart inside. The world needs more collections like this, I think.

Brightburn

Tyger Tyger

Brightburn
USA 2019 Directed by David Yarovesky
UK cinema release print (brutalised by collusion with the BBFC).

Brightburn is a movie produced by James Gunn, written by his brother and cousin - Brian and Mark Gunn - and directed somewhat brilliantly by David Yarovesky. The film takes place in the fictional town of Brightburn in Kansas and it’s clear that the location is this story’s Smallville. This is one of those 'superhero goes wrong' stories (like Chronicle, reviewed here) but it’s a concept which hasn’t been done too often on film... although, to be fair, it’s probably been done to death in various books and comics over the decades.

This one, in fact, is not afraid to wear it’s influences on its sleeve and there are many references in origin and similarity to the famous DC comic book character Superman. This is because the movie makers really don’t want you to forget this here... it’s what the film is really about. In fact, this is almost, in some ways and in all but copyright evading names, characters and situations only, a typical example of a DC Elseworlds comic book writ large on the big screen. To further extend that analogy, this time in a Marvel comics concept, it’s a What If...? story. Except the premise here, as you will no doubt know from the iconography of the crashed spaceship with it’s infant cargo landing in Kansas in the trailer, is... “What If Superman Had Crashed On Earth As An Infant But, Instead Of Choosing To Use His Alien Powers For Good, He Goes Psychotic At The Age Of Twelve And Uses Those Powers To Kill People In Fairly Unpleasant Ways”. Except, you know, Brightburn is a lot shorter title and really works a whole lot better, I suspect.

Now, this is very clichéd, to be sure. All the set ups within the plot such as the main antagonist’s personal Kryptonite (nicely saved to a point where it becomes tenuous as a weapon by the end of the movie) and the way the central antagonist, young Brandon Breyer (played with an impressively sinister demeanour by child actor Jackson A. Dunn), is shaped by negative experiences at school and also the influence of the remnants of his alien heritage reprogramming him... are easy to spot coming a mile off. Both Elizabeth Banks and David Denman as his parents, Tori and Kyle, are equally impressive as two individuals who want to do right by their son and fail to see him, at first, as the psychopathic alien monster he has become. Everything falls into place nicely but...

... but it is still very clichéd and there aren’t any real surprises. But here’s the thing with that... Brightburn is still a very interesting and completely entertaining film and, since it’s one of the first to really get to grips with this on the big screen (and especially within an almost strict Superman template)... it really does need to be clichéd and play to those expectations to keep the audience interested in the characters. To keep the audience in suspense. Which it does, in no uncertain terms.

One of the director’s ways of doing this was, it seemed to me, a little odd. In that, he takes an overtly voyeuristic stance. He’ll go from an establishing shot and either cut or move the camera to take you in further to pull you into a scene but... and here’s the thing... he does it a lot and, sometimes, even within a scene that already playing out. So he’ll cut away from the mother, say, to bring the camera back from another, distant vantage point... and then slowly pull you back to her again. Normally this might be a little distracting but the way he manages to pull it off here, without really popping the audience out of the action... indeed, using this technique to draw them in further... is very well executed and I’m wondering now if this particular way of shooting around a scene, which gives the camera a very distant, fly on the wall kind of voyeuristic atmosphere, is something this particular director does in every film he works on.

Also, there’s a lot of cross-cutting between two separate scenes in this, almost too much... and he uses this to accomplish two things. One is the obvious thing where he uses two adjacent sets of events to make a visual metaphor about some subtext of the film but, the other thing he does with this... and I guess it’s kind of a traditional thing to use this way of editing things together but it really works well here... is to build suspense when you don’t know just how close the lethal boy is to walking/flying into the other sequence and letting loose his child-like wrath.

Talking of which, when he does let loose said wrath, it gets pretty grim and disturbing. Now I knew before I went to see this that the film has been edited for violence in two places by the film company in collusion with the accursed BBFC in order to get it a lower, 15 rating. Normally I would just boycott the film accordingly but, like Aquaman before it, I was very interested in seeing this so, in those kinds of instances, my cinema trip basically becomes a window shopping trip. I know I’m not really watching the film but I can see roughly what it looks like so, when the US edition of the Blu Ray comes out, which will be an uncut version, I can just import it over and have that version instead (and probably before it even gets released in this country, I suspect). So yeah... definitely one of my ‘try first’ before buying the real deal trips and, in regards to this film, yeah I’ll definitely be grabbing a US edition of the film at some point.

Now I’ve got that out of the way.... even with those two cuts here, the film is still truly gory and violent. It’s not just the normal grimness you get when you see a young, sinister kid committing murders... these are elements of goriness which are especially graphic with human flesh and bone mangled into something it’s not supposed to be on characters who, more often than not, don’t die quickly. Now some of those set pieces you will see coming... every kid has wondered just what Superman could do with his heat vision if made angry... others you won’t, especially in terms of lingering on the violence and playing with it once the initial physical assault is committed. There’s a lot of bloody demise here so I’m truly interested in seeing what the BBFC suggested the company removed. Time and heinous US postal fees will tell soon enough, I guess.

So, yeah... really not much to say in criticism of Brightburn, to be honest. At least not in terms of negative criticism. The audience I saw it with were on the edge of their seat and I thought this was a perfectly good attempt at making a horror movie which is, in all the obvious ways, an anti-superhero movie. A super-villain movie, I guess... in a year where we’ve already had Glass (reviewed here) and with a Joker movie soon upon us. If you’ve seen the trailer for Brightburn and liked what you saw... well, this does exactly what it says on the tin but in a way which doesn’t run out of steam and is not overly long. An easy recommendation from me for fans of both horror and superhero movies. I’m hoping we’ll get some kind of well made sequel to this one at some point in the future. I can see how this could be expanded in a few directions.

Justice League

Beleaguered Leaguers

Justice League
2017 USA Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there will be some spoilers in this one, I think.

Okay, so let me just say up front that Justice League is not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination... it’s just not a very good one either. It has its great little moments and a whole bunch of problems but, out of the five films to date making up the story arc of this particular set of interlocking DC superhero movies, this is about halfway up the list in terms of being an effective and entertaining movie.

DC’s track record hasn’t been all that great since the fantastic last part of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night trilogy, it has to be said. Man Of Steel (reviewed here) was just dreadful. Batman Vs Superman - Dawn of Justice (reviewed here) was a fair bit better but ultimately not very well received by critics and audiences alike, it seemed to me. Suicide Squad (reviewed here) was... okayish but really wasn’t making people that happy either. But then we had ‘the movie’. Wonder Woman (reviewed here) isn’t just the greatest superhero movie of all time (and, yeah, I know that’s a brave and bold claim to make but I promise this is not a knee jerk reaction to it)... it’s also one of the best movies in the past few years, period. It’s also flattened all the competition at the box office for the forseeable future (or just maybe until the new Star Wars movie premieres next month) and it more than deserves its success.

The thing is, though, everyone was kinda hoping that Justice League would somehow live up to the almost impossible standard that Patty Jenkins set with Wonder Woman and, frankly, that would be hard to top even by her, when she comes to work on the sequel. So I guess it’s no surprise that this movie comes nowhere near as close to the dizzying heights that Professor William Moulton Marston’s amazonian princess scaled to in her own solo movie adaptation. A shame, though, that Justice League doesn’t come close to the Batman VS Superman movie either.

Now I’m not going to go into the production problems this film had, what with Zack Snyder leaving for very understandable reasons and Joss Whedon reshooting the thing in places... firstly because I would be no good at figuring out which bits were directed by whom and, secondly, because it’s the film we’ve ended up with, for better or worse. Given Snyder’s reasons for leaving, there’s absolutely no point in having an autopsy on why this theatrically released cut doesn't really cut it.

Okay... so lets look at the good stuff first and get that out of the way...

Well, some of the action was okay, especially the Amazon’s fighting the villain of the piece, Steppenwolf, near the start... and also in the bank scene where Gal Gadot’s Diana saves a bunch of people by doing some cool action stuff. That being said, I did miss the sudden glow of orange as the metal on her wrist bands cool down after a bullet hit, which was a nice detail in Patty Jenkins movie during the alley scene in London... itself an homage, presumably, to the alley scene in Superman The Movie. Gadot is just wonderful again here, as she was in her previous two movies with this character because a) she looks just like she could do all this stuff in real life and b) because she performed it in such a way that she doesn’t betray the character as set up in the previous two films.

Similarly, say what you will about Ben Affleck but I think he makes a brilliant Bruce Wayne/Batman and I really hope he doesn’t leave the role after this. I think he could really do well in a solo Batman movie and I would really like to see it.

Henry Cavill... well I hated Superman in Man Of Steel but that’s more because of the script than Cavill’s performance and I certainly warmed to him more in Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice. He’s great here too and you really believe in his character, who he portrays with the same kind of honourable presence as some of the great actors who have played the part before him... and I’m specifically thinking of Kirk Alyn and Christopher Reeve here. Now if they’d only bring back the ‘S’ kiss curl and the red trunks then the illusion would be complete.

Jeremy Irons as Alfred has about as much screen time as he did in the previous movie but I think his character makes a bigger impact here, with various ironic comments thrown at Bruce Wayne which I found fairly entertaining.

 It was also great seeing a Green Lantern in the sequence flashing back to a battle on Earth which took places many hundreds of years ago, too. It’s been suggested that the cloak on him was a reference to the original Golden Age iteration of the character in comics but, the people saying that might do well to remember that the original Green Lantern’s costume was red (yeah, I know that’s ridiculous but don’t blame me... I didn’t write those things).

And that’s mostly the good stuff.

Now we also have three new members on the team...

Ezra Miller does okay as a really bizarre and teenage angsty version of the silver age version of The Flash (aka Barry Allen) and he was getting a good reaction from the audience at my screening. Personally I didn’t find him all that easy to identify with and I could take him or leave him, to be fair. Then we have Cyborg, who was a member of the Teen Titans the last time I read of him (sometime in the early 1980s) so goodness knows what he’s doing in the Justice League of America (as the supergroup was always known in the comics... until maybe recently). He’s played here by a guy called Ray Fisher and, although he turns in a solid performance, I couldn’t help but think that the script wasn’t doing him any favours. He just comes across as a bit dull, to be honest.

Jason Momoa’s version of Aquaman is a more fun character but, honestly, is nothing like the Aquaman I used to enjoy reading about when I was a kid (I even had a little action figure). The clean shaven, blonde version of Superman with the blue eyes, orange suit and green legs and gauntlets has morphed into what is presumably a more contemporary comic book version of the character (well... at least he still has both of his arms here). Again... he was okay but I really would have preferred the version of the character I grew up with here.

Okay... let’s get to the really bad then...

So much of the dialogue between Batman and Diana feels forced and, bearing in mind the amount of times that Steve Trevor’s name is bandied about, it somehow seems disrespectful of the truly marvellous solo Wonder Woman movie what came out earlier in the year.

Another thing which felt out of place was that the background story about the ‘mother boxes’ seemed like it came completely out of the blue and Diana never once goes to Thermyscira to consult with the Amazons. Indeed, she even goes so far as to say that they cannot leave their island... which is a completely redundant and contradictory idea in terms of their purpose on Earth, to be honest. This film so badly needed a scene between Diana and her mother and it similarly needed ‘the amazon horde’ to come galloping in for the somewhat bland (as it is here) action finale too. Especially since their own battle with Steppenwolf near the beginning of the movie was a heck of a lot better.

The way Superman is brought back to life is really stupid Doctor Frankenstein stuff and I couldn’t help but think it all seemed just a little too optimistic and contrived. “Gee whiz... wouldn’t it be great if we could use this mother box technology to bring Superman back to life with?”... well, okay, it wasn’t quite like that but it was pretty close. It felt like the whole thing was written by a small child at this point. What was worse than that though was... Superman and Batman were allies by the end of Batman Vs Superman. In fact, Batman saved Superman’s mother’s life. So why the heck would the newly woken Superman be so aggressively hostile to Batman and the others and try to kill them all? It made no sense. It was like watching that truly dumb scene in Superman III where he splits into two and the evil and good halves fight. It just made no sense.

And then they trot out Amy Adam’s Lois Lane to calm him down? Honestly, it felt like her role was really pushed to the back in this and the scene where she and Diane Lane as Martha Kent were talking in the newspaper offices felt like it was shot quickly in the director’s favourite room in his house one afternoon. The set dressing and feel of the scene seemed to be completely unconvincing.

The music is perplexing too. Danny Elfman has been tapped for this one but I felt like either Hans Zimmer or, especially, Rupert Gregson-Williams (who had provided real emotional depth to the Wonder Woman movie) should have got the gig here. Instead, Elfman uses various themes from films gone by to weave a new musical direction for the franchise and... it just felt wrong. Okay, so he uses Zimmer’s Superman theme from Man Of Steel at one point and he similarly uses Zimmer’s “Is She With You?” theme for Wonder Woman in a less striking arrangement (but without using Gregson-Williams gorgeous thematic material). However, he also uses John WIlliams' Superman music at one point too plus... he even uses his own 1980s Batman theme for some of Ben Affleck’s Batcentric shenanigans. None of that really made sense... what’s he trying to evoke here. It’s a nice enough score, when you can hear it over the noisy sound effects but... it doesn’t knock it out of the park like some of the films in this series do.

Okay, last thing I’ll highlight here is the running time. This is the shortest of the recent DC movies, clocking in at one minute shy of two hours. But you are dealing with six superhero characters, not to mention the big bad guy and the introduction of the mother box on the narrative. How do you cram all that into two hours without losing sight of something? Short answer... you don’t. This film feels like it should be a lot longer and, I dunno, less flippant and somewhat darker in tone considering the events that have birthed it in the previous films. Things felt somewhat rushed... especially when it hurtles to a climax that is less than interesting.

Also... you have continuity errors like the mother box being used to bring Cyborg to life being in the previous film, which makes no sense. Or the fact that the third mother box was found during World War I when, if you check out the epilogue scene included on the home video version of Wonder Woman, you’ll know that Etta Candy and the others were tasked with the mission to find it after the end of the war depicted in that film. Thins like this just seemed a bit like sloppy writing to me, it has to be said.

So, yeah, that’s my review of Justice League. All in all I’m glad I went to see it... if for nothing more than to see Gal Gadot totally slaying it as Wonder Woman. However, the film didn’t blow me away, for sure and it certainly felt a little more anti-climactic than I was expecting. All in all, if you loved Wonder Woman then you’ll probably want to see this one anyway. I can’t really recommend it to anyone on any other basis though so... make of that what you will. Old school DC comics fans, though, would do well to look out for the first of the two post-credits scenes if they want to see a familiar homage and... don’t miss the end if you want to see what happened to another character from a previous movie in the series.

Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice

Diana’ther Day

Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice
(aka Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice)
2016 USA
Directed by Zack Snyder
UK cinema release print.

I had it all worked out that I’d deliver a scathing critical blow by calling this review The Brave And The Dulled when I came to write up this movie. However, after having seen said movie, I realised that was impossible because, contrary to both my own expectations based on the awful previous movie, Man Of Steel (reviewed here), and the negative reactions by the press... not to mention terrible word of mouth online... it turns out that Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice is actually a pretty good little movie. It has a few problems, for sure, and you can bet I’ll be pointing them out in a minute, but...  ultimately, it’s both a vast improvement over director Snyder’s former Superman movie and it delivers a nice spin, although not an original one, on some of DCs flagship characters. I’ll fess up and say I’ve seen almost all of the director’s previous movies and Man Of Steel is the only one I didn’t like... so I’m happy that this movie sees a certain ‘return to form’ for the director. At least as far as I’m concerned.

So the good stuff here is that the film doesn’t change or in any way pervert the characters like the previous film did... and fans of Batman who are saying it does, really need to look back to both the character’s origins and, also, the history of comic books, for a little enlightenment there. I count myself as an ardent admirer of the character over the years and this certainly does him justice. Also, the problems in the last film of Superman making the decision to kill General Zod and also not being able to stop gazillions of innocent people being killed are used as a motivator on the plot point on this movie’s ‘bout of the century’ and the weight it’s given in the script does make amends, somewhat, for Snyder’s choices on Man Of Steel. Although Superman still doesn’t wear his underpants on the outside here and that’s a detail that definitely needs some correcting.

Okay, so I can guess that some non-comic book fans or, more, people who don’t know the rich legacy of multi-character cross-overs, don’t understand the politics of character ‘team ups’ and I can imagine a lot of the movie going feeling short changed on this movie over what is, frankly, a little punch up towards the end of the story between the two title characters. But it is a greatly misleading title and one which, I’m sure, a lot of comic book fans discounted as being in any way truthful very early on in the marketing of this movie... especially when the subtitle Dawn Of Justice was added. Now, personally, I think they should have stuck to the legacy of the two characters crossing over because, after the first few times they did it in one or other of their comics, back in the 1940s I seem to remember, they were doing it a lot under the title World's Finest... and that was a comic that ran for many decades, if memory serves me correctly. I wish the studio had been more honest and less ‘marketing monded’ with the general public and called it that. Perhaps, then, there’d be a few less disappointed audiences out there on this one.

Either way, this is how a comic book cross-over works in both the DC and Marvel Universes... and you already saw a little bit about how this plays on film in Marvel’s The Avengers (reviewed here). So the characters would meet and they’d basically start fighting each other over a disagreement or because they’ve been duped by one or more villains. This is even how it happened in the famous, first 'cross-company' oversized comic book in the 1970s... Spider-Man Vs Spiderman. The heroes will fight for a short while and then find the error of their ways and spend the rest of the time teamed up against their common villain/s. And that’s pretty much the way this movie works too... except the prelude to the fight takes most of the movie and leads up to a kind of prelude to the final act. But getting their is entertaining enough, even if the showdown is a bit of a damp squib of a battle.

Okay, so no surprises in this film and lots of nicely shot, nicely edited and well acted drama. It’s a cool piece of work with Henry Cavill still being a good fit for Superman... and with a script that helps him do that, this time around. Ben Affleck was always going to be a perfect fit for Bruce Wayne and he decides to play him very cynically here but it still works pretty well. Jeremy Iron’s Alfred is pretty cool too, and I prefer him to Michael Caine’s recent take on the character in some ways... although neither of these versions are in any way faithful to the original Alfred Pennyworth in the comics, it seems to me. Gal Godot as Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman is pretty great in this movie and... yeah, she kind of steals it by the final act, that’s for sure. Looking forward to seeing her in action in cinemas next year which presumably tells the story of her exploits in World War One, referenced in a photograph in this movie. Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor is a little off with his ‘madness’ it seems to me.... although he does have an interesting quirk where he invades the space of other characters regularly by touching them, which was interesting. Amy Adams is pretty cool and Holly Hunter is wasted but certainly knocks her role out of the park. All pretty good.

Okay... there are a couple of problems.

Right from the start the writers wisely gets through the whole Batman origin story by cross-cutting the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne with the discovery of the bat-cave, during the credits. Good. This saves time in the rest of the film and the director can hit the ground running. However, there’s a point in that opening which had me growling my head off until I realised that it had been mixed into a dream sequence (for the record, Batman can’t levitate) and this sets up the fact that Bruce Wayne has a lot of ‘dream state’ visions in this movie and it’s a way over-relied on ploy by the film-makers to access some beautiful scenes (at least one of which owes a very strong debt to Frank Miller’s classic Batman tale, The Dark Knight Returns) but it really is a ‘have your cake and eat it’ kind of scenario and the problem is that you can never tell if you’ve suddenly gone into a ‘dream moment’ or not. Which means a scene which seems like a foreshadowing of disaster, and may or may not return in a future movie, is not to be trusted and seems like a nonsense at the moment. So that’s a bit of a shame.

Another problem is the physics of this universe, which seem to have changed since the last movie. In that movie Superman warned Lois to move further back and then further still so he wouldn’t hurt her with the aftermath of him taking off to flight from standing still. Fair enough but in this movie, he can do it standing right next to her on a balcony with no warning and no consequences... doesn’t make sense, does it?

Okay, now four other members of the Justic League of America make appearances in this film, three of them small, and a larger role for Wonder Woman. The problem is that the sequence where the other three are shown means that in a scene set in water, later on in the film, you assume a certain other character will make a return appearance and, when he doesn’t, it leaves you a bit disappointed. Secondly, if the whole thing seems shoehorned in to give the DC cinematic universe something to quickly combat the slowly earned and built up Marvel Avengers movies to rake in the cash... well, yeah, it does seem like it and it does kinda hurt the film, to be honest. The exception being Wonder Woman who is carefully worked into the story right from the start and who appears naturally in a scene which shouldn’t have been used in the trailers because it’s such a great entrance.

Another problem is that there’s another very famous character, and I’m not talking about Wonder Woman, featured in the last trailer for the movie and as soon as comic book fans see that character, they’ll have another pretty good idea of just where the producers are going with this movie. Yes, they do make it a partial adaptation of a very famous Superman comic and yes, we are left with an ending to the film that none of us really believe, and with good reason. There’s no post credits scene in this movie but viewers would be advised not to blink as they get to the end of the very obvious final shot of the film.

Okay, what else? Well, for a two and a half hour movie, the action is flat and minimal. Personally I don’t mind that but I think some audiences are going to be disappointed with that. It’s not great fun, nor probable when you think of the way Batman’s ‘gun’ works, that Superman can be taken down so easily in certain scenes. The physics seems slightly ‘off’ but it’s okay, I guess... just not very interesting. A bit dull. But it serves the story so, what the heck.

Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL’s score (plus a load of others if you read the fine print at the end of the movie credits) is not terrible in that it at least builds upon the leitmotif that Zimmer used in the previous film and their are definitely some thematic elements for the other characters. Wonder Woman’s one is kinda interesting. I haven’t listened to it as a stand alone score as yet but am hoping to give the CD a spin once I’m done writing this. I need to revisit the original score again too, after it started growing on me when I rewatched Man Of Steel last week in preparation for this movie. It doesn’t hurt the film and seems appropriate, pretty much. So that’s all cool. I’m seeing Zimmer in concert next month so it’ll be interesting to see if he does any of this score then.

Okay, that’s about it. There are some nice references for comic book fans such as the nod to The Mark Of Zorro (augmented here with Excalibur) as the film playing before Bruce Wayne loses his parents and a nice dig to audience members such as myself who prefer the Superman character rooted in the values of his origins in 1938. This kind of thing is always good and doesn’t hurt the film either. Other than that... not much else to say. Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice is a far better movie than I was expecting and certainly helps fill in the crater left by Man Of Steel. There’s a scene where a character from the first film returns which might annoy some people but I’m trying hard not to put spoilers in here so won't address that now. All in all, though, I think some people will like this a lot more than most of the critics and I reckon its something you just need to take a chance on, truth be told. I’m glad I didn’t get putt off seeing it... although I really wasn’t looking forward to it. Pleasantly surprised, though, so that’s good.

In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials

Image Chapter

In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials
by William C. Cline 
McFarland Classics 
ISBN: 978-0786404711

I was really looking forward to reading this book when I initially bought it. I’d already read one pretty good book on serials, The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury (reviewed here), and, although I enjoyed it greatly, I felt it was lacking in some areas for a number of reasons, not least of which because the serials which are available to us now on home video systems were not readily available to the writers of that book in 1973. It was still a great read, however, and I was looking forward to reading what I thought would be a, relatively, modern take on the genre, looking at the components and key themes of these chapter plays in a more critical and enlightening manner.

However, what I didn’t realise is that this is actually a reprint of a book which was originally published in 1984, so although the writer would have possibly had a little more access to his subject matter, the book doesn’t really break down the form of the serial in a way which might have been more useful. To be fair, it does analyse aspects of the chapter plays to a certain degree, but I did find this one a hard and, in some ways, monotonous read for large sections of the book.

Now I fully comprehend that the author did, in fact, see pretty much all the serials he talks about and was in a unique position to do so for some of his time as a cinema programmer. This is not in question. However, I did find it hard to read that, according to the writer, serials were primarily aimed at the juvenile end of the market and that the reason they are neglected by many is because they are not sophisticated enoutgh to hold an adult audience. While I can tentatively object to the first accusation on the grounds that I’m pretty sure expensive serials like the Flash Gordon series were as much for adults as they were the children, I can certainly raise the issue that an adult appreciation of all art forms, whatever their primary market, is not without reward or interest and certainly I am able to enjoy the format, formulaic as it is, from a modern context as much as I can from pitching my viewing to a historical perspective... albeit with a different level of appreciation juxtaposed with the initial thrill of the action.

Nevertheless, the author may have got off to a bad start with me but at least he is passionate enough about the serials that he’s written at length about them. Like the earlier book I read on serials, In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials eschews any real glances at the early silent film serials, instead choosing to pitch its tent firmly within the era of the talkies... although the way the subject is organised, it could have easily been used to cover both forms, I suspect.

My main problem with the book is, although it is split into dedicated chapters on specific tropes of the serials such as heroes, sidekicks, leading ladies, villains etc, it mostly reads like a series of lists strung together to pass for sentences. Extremelely detailed lists, granted, but also not very interesting in that they seem to be saying such stuff as “actor x played this kind of character in serial A, serial B and Serical C, totalling y number of serials for this company and z number of serials for that company”... before just moving onto the next person in another paragraph and repeating this kind of exercise throughout. It doesn’t breakdown the serial formula to specific story arc styles so much, or refer to the psychological reasoning that brought certain kinds of serials to our screens and, much as some of this book was quite informative, it’s really not the critical study of the form I have been searching for so far (although, if anybody knows of one, please either tweet me or pop it in the comments section at the bottom of the page).

To be fair to it, some of the sections are quite valuable taking this kind of approach, such as the one on score composers, but when I did find something as interesting as this, I found it not going into enough detail on the subject... possibly for a lack of research resources in this kind of area (the composers were rarely credited and most of the serials recycled music from here, there and everywhere, including cannibalising their own past successes... although the part about why the Spy Smasher music was like it was is something I found very interesting).

And there, I think, lies the nub of why I just didn’t get as much joy from this tome as I thought I would. For the casual reader who is interested in these things, there’s probably way more irrelevant detail than required but, for the reader who wants to explore these in more depth and gain more of an understanding of just what made these chapter plays tick in the way they did, there’s maybe not enough focus in those areas... it has to be said.

However, you have to respect the author of this work because he certainly knows his stuff and, for the time in which this was written, this was probably an essential addition for any cinephile’s shelf. By no means a hard recommend from me but, since there’s not exactly a glut of books on this unique form of cinematic entertainment, it’s possibly one you might want to welcome into your hands at some point, if you have no others on the subject. An honourable attempt with, I hasten to add, a very valuable and lengthy reference appendix detailing every sound serial shot and released in any given year from 1930 to 1956... so if you need an essential checklist of sound era serials, this book has it.

The Lego Movie

I Get A Brick Outta You

The Lego Movie
(aka Batman 40, Superman 55, Green Lantern 2, 
Star Wars 9, Lord Of the Rings 7, Harry Potter 9)
2014 Australia/USA/Denmark
Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Hmmm.

Seems to me Lego has been with me all my life in one way or another.

I remember the really large, oversized bricks we used to play with in infants school... and how I invented a three-brick bomber to cause carnage and drop bombs on the other kid’s creations. I was actively discouraged from exercising my sense of invention in that way by the teachers and very soon learned not to stand out from my fellow classmates in any way which would make anyone think I was in any way special or unique. So after the age of about 4 or 5, I never put my hand up to volunteer for anything ever again... a policy I still practice to this day.

I remember when I was 10 years old, I won a runner up prize in a Lego competition at Selfridges by making a Star Wars X-Wing fighter out of scraps of Lego they had in their tub. Now that might not sound like a bid deal to anyone these days... but back then there was a minimum of themed Lego other than the odd set like “Police Station” or “Fire Station”... certainly no film tie-in stuff. This was just standard Lego bricks ‘n pieces I found in the “communal tub”. Luckily, I was able to score two hinged pieces and so I could at least build a useful X-Wing fighter with “s-foils” which locked into attack position when required... just like in the movie I’d seen at the cinema at the tail end of the year before (1977). I remember going to the prize ceremony at the Grovesnor Hotel for ice cream and the presentation of my runner-up prize... um... a Lego set.

I remember when I built the lego set I got as a prize back then. It had one of the “first wave” minifigures as part of the set and, if you weren’t around in the time of early 1970s Lego, then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. These were not the “really old” minifigures like the Spaceman you see in The Lego Movie. These things pre-dated even those and were first brought out in 1975. Although they had the same basic head design, there were no features painted on them (they were just blank... kids in those days actually were allowed to have imaginations, if I recall correctly) and they were just static figures made out of bricks... no movable arms or legs on them. In fact, no arms or legs of any description, actually.

Flash forward to the middle of the last decade and Lego re-entered my life in a new and, strangely, quite special way. I had a girlfriend but she lived a fair distance away, in Ipswich. I used to go down there weekends and the way we connected, when we finally discovered it, was to get a couple of controllers hooked up to her Playstation 2 and play the heck out of the Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones games. Those games were, and still are, the best platform oriented games ever made... I still play the Lego Star Wars, now it’s been released on the iphone (at the tail end of last year). Girlfriends come and go but the Lego games remained something I’ll always love.

One of the good things about the Lego games was always the humour of the cut scenes. The silent pantomime parodies of famous movie scenes with a whacky twist. I guess a lot of people felt the same and so here we have a movie which caters for the people who like that kind of humour... almost.

You see, the thing I always liked about those Lego cut scenes was their lack of dialogue... it brought you back into a realm of silent cinema. Well, the games have dumbed down a little since then. They’ve put voices into the mix and this is the tactic which they’ve taken with the movie. It’s an easier tactic to follow I guess... it’s harder to come up with something fun without words and, I have to say that, for the most part, The Lego Movie succeeds pretty well in at least being fun.

It starts out with a plot where the main villain of the piece is doomed by a prophecy of the “special” person who will someday find the “piece de resistance” and scotch his plans for world domination which, at the point we arrive at in the movie, culminates with the “Krazy Gluing” of all the Lego worlds into one fixed position as the overall “evil plan”. The film tackles the not so strange idea of people, in this case Lego people, brainwashed and controlled by their governments and constantly distracted by just the “correct” versions of the ruling power’s favourite “bread and circuses”. If this concept sounds familiar, by the way, it’s because that’s the way pretty much everyone of us is forced to live our lives... but that’s a different conversation for a different time.

The film is full of humour and, more importantly, chock full of ideas involving construction and the way the “builder” analogy is applied to various aspects of everyday life and popular culture, including the more surreal flights of fancy and “go anywhere in your head” kind of attitude which I personally can only ever approve of in, pretty much, most all walks of life. However, there’s a point when the neat, self sealed world of, um, Legoland, kinda dies a little for me in the movie... when the film decides to enter the real world of humans and justify why all this would be happening from the viewpoint of real people. And there, in the last 20 mins or so of the movie, is where I think the film loses its edge and starts to feel flat. I can understand that there could be a rich vein of exploration in terms of the outside world and the way the human spirit enables the imagination, but I think in the modern, or should that be post-modern, cinema scene, this kind of almost sugar coated justification is no longer necessary. I think the inner world set up within the picture is enough to highlight the spirit of the human imagination in itself. What with the film being made by, you know, real people and all.

So yeah, the last sequences of this film kinda dulled the edge of the execution of the concept for me, but this didn’t stop the rest of the movie being fun and, like I’ve said a few times before, sometimes the journey is worth it even if the end goal is not always attainable. The effects work, which obviously makes up the bulk of the movie, is all fantastic and the story moves along quite a lot. Batman is in it a fair bit but you also get a fair few cameos from characters in other franchises, including a little sequence where Dumbledore from the Harry Potter films and Gandalf from Lord Of The Rings get into a little verbal disagreement... which made me chuckle and wish I’d brought my dad along.

All in all, despite the unnecessary contextualisation of the play area of the story of the movie, the film works well. It’s not one I could see myself watching again, in all honesty, but it’s certainly an entertaining time at the cinema and the kids will most likely love it.

Man of Steel

Zeal Before Nod

Man of Steel
2013 USA/Canada/UK
Directed by Zack Snyder
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Some big Kryptonite nugget sized 
spoilers lurking in here later...

You know, in some ways, I owe Superman a lot.

When I was two or three years old, I was encouraged to read via Superman and Batman comics which my dad or my uncle would pick up from the stand, long gone I imagine, at the Angel, Edmonton in the very early seventies (1970 in fact, I suspect). These comics, along with Green Arrow/Green Lantern, World’s Finest, Shazam!, Justice League Of America, Daredevil and The Amazing Spider-Man and also the annual Christmas time reprints in such tomes as The Batman Bumper Book, The Superman Bumper Book and, wait for it, The Superman and Batman Bumper Book, were pretty much how I learned to read and by the time I got to junior school I was already out-reading all the other kids in the class (and writing epic length tales of imaginary spaceway heroes in some lessons too, from what I can recall). I particularly remember the cover to one specific Superman comic I read which, unfortunately, was the only comic which didn’t survive my childhood because I just read it too much and it finally fell apart. But the cover was so good to a kid my age... Superman VS The Electronic Ghost of Metropolis. It would probably cost an inappropriate amount of money these days if I were to track it down in the chance I could read it again but that cover will always live on in my memory.

So Superman meant a lot to me and I remember how thrilled I was when I used to watch the reruns of the old George Reeves The Adventures Of Superman show when I was a kid... and even the old Superfriends cartoon show. And I still have my Superman reels for my old 3D viewmaster somewhere about, I’m sure. When the first of the Christopher Reeves movies came out at the cinema, many years later, it was an event almost as big as the Star Wars movie of the previous year. All the kids loved both that and the sequel and I even got on well with the third in the series at the time... barring one scene which totally enraged me... but that’s another story.

Years later I discovered the old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 40s and was absolutely blown away by the visual sophistication of these which, I believe, are the most expensive cartoon shorts ever made. I remember when a film some years ago called Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow was released into cinemas and I also loved that for being able to so perfectly invoke the spirit and visual feel of those Fleischer animations.

As the years have gone by I’ve rewatched all the old George Reeves shows on DVD and, more importantly for this fan of the last son of Krypton... about seven or eight years ago I now acquired and watched on DVD the very first live action Superman theatrical serials from 1948 and 1950, starring Kirk Alyn in the title role, who will now always be my favourite live action Superman, I think.

Now, as far as the new Man Of Steel movie goes, it has to be acknowledged that I really wasn’t looking forward to it. Two reasons for this, actually... one was the fact that every trailer I’ve seen for this movie was... well... a bit rubbish. Two was the fact that, in their wisdom, the producers decided to get rid of Superman’s red pants. To explain to all my international readers (and thank you all so much for coming on here and reading, you’re all very much appreciated), I am English. In the UK the term pants is not what we call trousers as it is in the US, apparently. Over here it means underpants, or Y-fronts or... um... I dunno... men’s knickers. It’s long been a jokey but undeniable fact that Superman wears his underpants, the wrong way around, over his trousers. Funny or not, though, it’s always been an integral part of his costume and, along with one or two other minor but equally unwelcome tweaks to the uniform, these basic “no brainer, you don’t change these things” elements have been unnecessarily tinkered with in this movie. So even going into the screening I knew this was not going to be a proper Superman movie. No red knickers... no Superman!

But... I trusted Zack Snyder as a director and he’d not let me down in even the most challenging movie properties before this. He took liberties with Watchmen, to be sure, but certainly not as many as with Man Of Steel and I thought, even though it didn’t have the fake alien squid monster (which it really should have) it still kinda worked as a movie. Dawn Of The Dead, a reboot of one of the classic zombie movies, was also really cool (and works better when you realise it’s really not a remake of the original in anything but name and location similarities). I even thought Sucker Punch, a much maligned movie on its initial cinema release (don’t worry, a film that good will be rediscovered and lionised to classic status in approximately 23 years time) was a brilliant and highly cinematic experience (reviewed here). So on the strength of these I went along to see Man Of Steel anyway.

Besides... I wanted to hear what Hans Zimmer was going to do with the score.

Now, I took my folks out to see this and frankly, the cross section family assessment of this movie is as follows...

Dad: That was a terrible, terrible, atrociously bad movie.
Mum: It was a bit long winded and could have done with being a lot shorter. Not very good.
Me: It wasn’t completely terrible. It was way too noisy. There were no red underpants.

So... well there you have it. But let me give you a little more about what I thought of this noble intentioned monstrosity.

Well, firstly, it’s like no Superman movie you’ve seen before, even though it’s practically a remake of the opening half hour of Superman The Movie and most of Superman II. After a spectacularly realised set piece that shows the rebel General Zod and his cohorts defeated and Jor El (Superman’s father) himself becoming a fugitive on his own planet before the baby (Kal El) is finally launched towards Earth and Krypton destroyed... we are propelled immediately into a series of early “adult Superman” adventure sequences with him performing various, low profile, super-powered rescues. It would be fair to say that the director hits the ground running but, frankly, as spectacular and as enjoyable as the early Krypton scenes are on a purely cinematic level, they really are inappropriate to the subject matter, I felt, and would have been much better off in a Flash Gordon movie (for the record, I would love to see Zack Snyder direct a Flash Gordon movie, especially if it’s done in the proper time period). There’s an element of adaptation to this movie, whether you like that or not, and this “interpretation” of Krypton was beautiful but just not what was needed, I feel.

Also, another problem for some will be the eliptical way in which Snyder tells his tale of Superman. It’s, quite appropriately, much more like a comic strip, jumping backwards and forwards in time so we can get to the action as well as seeing his defining years on Earth at the same time without slowing down the high level of energy on the screen (this film is nothing if not pacey). It’s another example of Hollywood wanting to have its cake and eat it at the same time but, for the majority of the film it really kind of works and I was certainly buying into this technique for a while. However, if you’re a complete novice to the legend of Superman and unfamiliar with any of the previous versions (and there are many who are these days, I promise you) then you may have a hard time following the back story is my guess. The crash landing of young Kal El’s space capsule on Earth, for example, is never even shown... we just have to take the implication which, if you don’t know the story, may be a bit of a leap, is my guess.

There are some good things about the movie, though...

Superman could never fly in the early comics... he could leap tall buildings in a single bound though and this later developed in the strip into the kind of high flying ariel stunts we are used to associating with the character post-1930s. This new version pays homage to this in its “first flight” sequence and it’s  a really nice nod to those origins. It reminded me of a similarly successful scene in the much maligned John Carter movie, when the title character in that film (and Edgar Rice Burroughs original source novel) has to learn to cope with extra muscular activity in a gravity a lot lighter than on his home world (review here). So this was all good when it comes to Man Of Steel. Although, he didn’t have red pants on, of course, so... it wasn’t really Superman.

The performances are all superb, although many of the characterisations are quite off. It’s not the fault of the actors, presumably, if they’re being written like that in the script.  Larry Fishburne makes a surprisingly cool version of Perry White and Ma Kent is brilliantly played by Judge Hershey herself, actress Diane Lane. The title character, played by some guy I’d not heard of called Henry Cavill, really looks and acts the part as far as he’s allowed, although he does look extremely worried all through the movie. Also, losing the kiss curl (and that’s been done before many times too) is a big mistake. It’s not just a kiss curl you guys, it’s the "S" symbol. It’s as much a part of the Superman costume as his red underpants... oh, wait.

Hans Zimmer’s percussion heavy score, too, is excellent but quite noisy. Not as memorable as some of the Superman scores in the past but certainly he’s had a good go at it and I look forward to hearing the score CDs when they finally arrive in the post.

Anyway, yeah, there are some nice things about the movie but... the number of bad things happening maybe outweighs all that.

The plotting is atrocious, for example and completely relies on a ridiculous piece of “deus ex machina” towards the end of the picture which really is just a piece of technical sounding mumbo jumbo and which seems to make mockery of physics. I know I’ve bandied the “deus ex machina” term around a lot just lately in my reviews but, honestly, if Hollywood stops doing it then I’ll stop calling them on it. Sheesh! And for your information, I suspect deliberately creating a black hole over a big city on the planet Earth may actually do even more damage to the planet than Superman, Zod and his crew do. Not just disappear and... oh, don’t get me started.

It’s kind of fitting that a modern incarnation (minus red knickers) of a classic character who made his debut in a 1938 issue of Action Comics should be part of a film where the emphasis is solely on action... unfortunately, and this really surprised me from this particular director, the action sequences are edited together really badly. I couldn’t work out what was going on half the time, I have to admit. It was all going by super-fast and mostly super-incomprehensibly and I so won’t be taking my hard earned super-cash to another screening of this movie if I can help it. Although I’ll probably buy a reference copy on DVD when it hits later in the year (or when it goes in the sales). Seriously, all that over zealous energy was pretty much non-stop caving my brain in on a Friday night and making me go all sleepy. It really is a case of “zeal before nod” as far as this film is concerned.

Which reminds me... I was quite disappointed that Snyder didn’t use the famous line “Kneel before Zod” in this film. Unfortunately,he  didn’t succumb to the same kind of post modern referencing temptation that J. J. Abrams did in his latest Star Trek movie, it would seem (Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!).

There are a few more things that I think this movie could have done without changing. The “mild mannered reporter” incarnation of Clark Kent, for example, is saved for a reveal right at the end of the movie... which bothered me quite a lot actually. It’s also kind of annoying that Lois Lane is right in on the identity of Superman pretty much right from the start of the movie, when she accidentally gets embroiled in an incident in this version's equivalent of The Fortress Of Solitude and then uses all her reporter’s know how to track down her alien rescuer to the Kent’s home in Smallville. I suspect that, at DC, this might also be known as “pulling a Mary Jane/Gwen Stacey” in terms of watching what does and does not work at the box office. Although it seemed to fail on them as a ploy in the much panned but quite good Green Lantern movie from a few years ago (and reviewed here).

The one thing which really killed the movie quite a bit for me, though, was the death of gazillions of millions of bystanders. In Superman movies, innocents tend to not get killed, even during the big street battles with Zod and his crew in Superman II from what I can recall. Kal El would simply not tolerate not being able to rescue someone. It’s just not on and would do a lot of psychological damage to him, I think. During this movie there is a reign of destruction against the Earth which sees literally millions of innocent people dying. In the old Superman The Movie version from 1978, the character even breaks the director’s vision of “verisimilitude” (and annoyed us Superman fans no end) by having the man of steel magically take time backwards and heal the world rather than suffer anyone dying.  In this movie the gloves, and the red pants too, apparently, are off. Millions die and quite often due to the last son of Krypton himself  doing as much structural damage as the main “villains” of the piece. Superman loses his innocence and then compounds that by committing an act of murder at the end of the film when he chooses to end Zod’s reign of terror the only way left open to him. Superman makes the decision to kill and loses his “big boy scout” label in the process.

I think this was all very wrong and, frankly, if they wanted to make another Batman movie then they should have done just that. Superman is a different kind of hero to Batman... this is why they always work so well with each other. They possess strengths of character which fill in each other’s weaknesses. It’s a mistake to make one too much like the other... especially over the simple box office knowledge that bleak and vicious plays better than strength of morality in the cinema these days. It’s a shame but... there it is.

Okay, I’ve said a lot of negative stuff here but I don’t want to come down too hard on this movie. Lots of it was throughly entertaining and I don’t think a younger audience is going to be too concerned over the morality issues of the tale (even if there was a direct biblical analogy thrown into the mix in one scene). If you’re a fan of big budget action films then Man Of Steel might be right up your alley but if you, like me, have a big soft spot for the character, then you might want to have another think at whether you want to see this one. If you do though, and you find yourself wondering how Superman got into such a sorry state of affairs, just keep reminding yourself of one thing... “If he’s not wearing red pants, he’s not Superman."