I should have waited to post my super hero movie list. I took my son to see Man of Steel yesterday. It is the new Superman reboot from Zack Snyder, and it is one of the best of the bunch. It makes the 2006 Superman Returns even more irrelevant than it already is.
There is plenty of capes and x-ray vision and Lois Lane in this new telling, but this is a human movie, about fathers and sons and mothers and teenagers and everyday heroes. It is in quiet moments when the power of this film are manifest, moments when a mother weeps for the child she will never see again but willingly surrenders or when she fears her son will be out of her reach if everyone knows what he can do or when fathers protect their sons with the shield of their own lives. And even in the cringing, 9/11 collapsing skyscrapers of the movie’s final battle scenes there are little human moments that save the ending from being swamped in CGI, scenes of cops shepherding people to safety as the city falls down on them or a hand to hold when fear has gripped the heart.
But I wax poetic, to my shame. It is only a movie about someone who does not exist. Perhaps, though, we would all be better off if a bit of the Man of Steel stayed here with us.
| Title | Director |
| Batman Begins (2005) | Christopher Nolan |
| Iron Man (2008) | Jon Favreau |
| The Incredibles (2004) | Brad Bird |
| Man of Steel (2013) | Zack Snyder |
| Unbreakable (2000) | M. Night Shyamalan |
| The Avengers (2012) | Joss Whedon |
| Hancock (2008) | Peter Berg |
| X-Men: First Class (2011) | Matthew Vaughn |
| Thor (2011) | Kenneth Branagh |
| Constantine (2005) | Francis Lawrence |
The point is, the revisions we see in Zack Snyder’s 2013 film The Man of Steel (written by David S. Goyer and The Dark Knight‘s producer-director Christopher Nolan), although many are unique to this movie, are not peculiar in the multimedia world of Big Blue. Released to coincide almost exactly with Superman’s 75th birthday, many changes and revisions have both boosted and plagued the granddaddy of all superheroes for generations now and every new generation reinvents Superman on the page and beyond for their own zeitgeist. That said, a comparison between the latest version and the collective and popular history of the character is most certainly warranted, especially with some of the more surprising aspects of Zack Snyder’s “reboot to the headâ€.