Man of Steel is a confused mess. A decade ago, it took the seemingly easy task of “make a Superman movie” and showed us why it took 50 years of character publication history for the first feature film to be made, and why—with three sequels and two reboots—it was a hard act to follow.
After an uninspiring international box office meant the moderate success of Superman Returns spawned no sequels, Zack Snyder brought plans to reinvent Superman for a darker, edgier world—one that audiences were primed for by the Dark Knight trilogy from Christopher Nolan (who helped produce and write Man of Steel). It was too much and too little all at once, establishing uneven plotting and a grim tone on the ground floor of Warner Bros.’ DCEU project as they tried, like many other studios would, to catch up to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. They staggered out of the gate because Snyder’s vision of an epic meant running quickly through familiar territory to wallow somewhere darker and deeper, a strange new tone which alienated some of its potential audience, making it a poor fit for Warner Brothers’ vision of a money-printing machine.
Snyder said that he “takes these characters and their mythology really serious;” that he wanted to make “difficult” movies, and that there were clashes with the studio during the filming of Justice League when Joss Whedon was asked to come in to punch-up the story comedically. Snyder wanted to make an epic adventure culminating in a war and ending in a time-travel reboot (which sort of ended up happening anyway, even with the program under new direction). The studio was asking, as Snyder put it, “Where are the jokes?”
Snyder only directed three films for WB, while the studio has spent the last six years half-stepping about recompiling the universe with—at the absolute least—two concurrent live-action movie continuities. None of this exactly bodes well for Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans for superhero adaptations, or the patience incoming studio heads James Gunn and Peter Safran will receive in shaping the new “DCU,” primed to start with a decade-long ten-project plan.
Snyder’s attempt to take Superman seriously did not garner universal acclaim, in part because several generations of comic book readers and movie and TV watchers were used to Supermen that had an unambiguous moral compass and were likable in addition to powerful. While Man of Steel’s Clark Kent/Superman (Henry Cavill) speaks with confidence and leaps into action to protect people, his internal conflict about what sort of man he ought to be is poorly defined because it centers on vague, self-contradictory flashback ramblings by his father. Running parallel and intertwined is a space opera about eugenics, immigration and terraforming which dominates the first 20 minutes.
Our Man of Steel means well, but he doesn’t have the opportunity to establish himself as a good guy before he’s engaged in a fight that levels half a city. Honestly, when he returns to the Daily Planet office as a new employee, I can’t figure out how things were rebuilt so quickly; Man of Steel feels like it’s missing a key scene when juxtaposed against the televised grateful citizens at the end of Avengers. Snyder’s vision was shaped by the cynicism and uncertainty of the post-9/11 media environment: Man of Steel is less concerned with hidden bad actors in the government than the Bourne movies and less interested (not totally disinterested) in valorizing the military than Michael Bay’s Transformer films, but it cares about power and responsibility, immigration anxiety, and—more obviously than anything else—mass destruction, and the confusion and stupefaction it creates. These are all compelling background themes for a Superman story, but the variety of ideas are not executed fluidly or seamlessly enough to add to the character without weighing down the film.
And this Superman already had to contend with plenty of unfair weight: Being posed as an otherworldly threat was an attempt to add poignance to the character, which failed because it doubled as a subversion of culturally ambient expectations. The audience knows him as a superhero, yes, but the movie’s characters don’t have a chance to get there. We see shirtless Clark save some people to establish his personal morality, but once the suit’s on, it’s Zod-fighting time; the heroism of the moment is confounded by wreckage and collateral damage.
The denouement after Superman kills Zod is interspersed with a reminder of Snyder’s subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-temple symbolism: A flashback to childhood Clark strapping a cloth to his back. The logical inconsistency of pretending to be Superman in a world without Superman comics notwithstanding, the point is that Superman is fulfilling his destiny. It doesn’t land because, aside from Lois Lane and an enamored Army captain, the people of Earth are mostly scared of him, for good reason. The coinciding storylines create incredible external stakes that don’t leave room for the internal conflict: The neat triumph of the ending and the dark moments leading up to it are simply incompatible, detracting from the finality of the moment.
Tonal changes to Superman aren’t crimes, but thematic and symbolic inconsistencies and failures of pacing and tone make Superman harder to empathize with or relate to than past iterations. Perhaps more important than failing to firmly establish him as a superhero in the eyes of the world, Man of Steel doesn’t define his setting or supporting characters well outside of Lois Lane. That work, to the extent it happens at all, is pushed to a sequel.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is filled to the brim with comic ideas: The Injustice storyline (where Superman becomes a brutal tyrant) and Superman: The Dark Side (where he’s raised by Darkseid on Apokolips) are adapted together as Batman’s revelatory visions; A Death in the Family (where one of the Robins dies) is alluded to in the background; Doomsday and The Death of Superman are the axis the sequel spins on; there’s even an allusion to villainous Kryptonian AI Brainiac that was forgotten by the time of Justice League. Batman v Superman is a movie where everyone is afraid of Superman, but Metropolis still decided to erect a statue in his honor. Setting aside that its design should give away Clark’s secret identity, his reputation as a do-gooder must be backfilled, because—as we’ve seen so far—he’s scary. The fear Superman inspires is central to both these films, but because of later production problems, the tension goes unresolved.
Man of Steel was darker and heavier than most of the live-action Supermen that came before it, but not as well executed—and it was all a rush to set up the Justice League, anyway. When you watch the DCEU films, except perhaps Shazam! and Wonder Woman, it feels like a misadventure of compromise: Overambitious storytelling crammed in to get to a super team, with inconsistent connections between the films and an uncertain release schedule. Who knows if these movies would work narratively if they had real endings instead of serializing cliffhanger ellipses?
Snyder’s vision was essentially scrapped, but the actors and characters he directed carried over into spin-offs and sequels in a confusing chain reaction that led to Henry Cavill showing up in the post-credit scene of 2022’s dead-on-arrival Black Adam and Ben Affleck appearing in the opening five minutes of 2023’s The Flash—rather than more movies of their own. The DCEU continuity is a winding staircase missing steps; a broken, treacherous pathway through a swamp. It rewards knowledge of prior movies, and especially comics, but did less than the MCU to establish its lore or present it coherently.
It all started with Man of Steel, an ambitious but conflicted and frustrated version of Superman that attempted to subvert expectations before setting up its universe, that nodded in the direction of a wider comic world without establishing a connection with a human world. Even Batman v Superman and the two versions of Justice League imply and explicate, respectively, a broader mythos, but offer holes instead of connective tissue.
The DCEU moved forward, but the gravity holding the stories together only weakened further as they left their two biggest characters in the lurch. A softer big blue boy scout might have made for a more approachable first film, but the DCEU’s storytelling condemned it from conception. Taking over for Walter Hamada, James Gunn and Peter Safran may be counting on the public pronouncement of their ten-year plan to save the DCU from a similar fate. The next year or two of projects are supposed to exist as a bridge between the franchises, and rather than completely wipe the slate, projects they don’t want to meddle or collaborate with (like The Batman and Joker) are being grouped into side continuities as “Elseworlds.” Regardless of whether the new heads of DC Studios have bitten off more than they can chew, hopefully they focus on making good movies before anything else; the loftiest goals and flashiest universes will crumble and fall without the basic building blocks. Gunn knows, at least, that it’s better to have a screenplay before you start shooting.
Kevin Fox, Jr. is a freelance writer with an MA in history, who loves videogames, film, TV, and sports, and dreams of liberation. He can be found on Twitter @kevinfoxjr.