5 Reasons Man Of Steel Is Dividing Viewers

Superman is a symbol of an ideal. He is an embodiment of virtue. He is Jesus Christ in superhero form, as many have pointed out through the years (Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns lays the religious imagery on even heavier than this version). Ideals and virtues by their nature are abstract, ethereal, spiritual, disembodied; thus, any attempt to make them concrete renders them imperfect. If Superman is supposed to be perfect, and people equate him in their minds with perfection, anything less than a perfect representation of their own personal imagining of him will be a disappointment, and since that is virtually impossible save for the artist that is responsible for representing him, perhaps he’s just a character that can’t be portrayed in a way that is satisfactory for all viewers. Division over ideals is inevitable.

Then again, anything is unfilmable until someone successfully films it. While Zack Snyder’s retelling of the Superman story worked wonders for me and many others, its interest in spectacle and mood did not align with the desires of a lot of people. And that’s fine. The only objection I have to people writing about how much they didn’t care for Man of Steel is when they contend that the movie is somehow objectively bad because it didn’t correspond with the movie they were hoping for, the Superman they wanted to see, or the experience they had craved. The nature of the character seems to expose people’s notion of an ideal movie, and maybe ideals in general, and the more specific a person is in their ideals, the more they set themselves up to fall short. To me, Superman is the embodiment of people’s projections of perfection, and in that respect, Man of Steel soars. It’s really unlike any movie anyone has made before; the argument seems to be over whether that’s a good or a bad thing.