Before Man of Steel was released there was a lot of speculation over whether this would be a Zack Snyder picture or whether it would seem very much like a Christopher Nolan movie. Most seem to agree that the story and tone are similar to Nolan’s work on the Dark Knight trilogy, but the movie feels like something else entirely, a progression from the work that Snyder had previously directed perhaps, a maturation in understated style and absolutely devastating action sequences. It would be easy to cite the quality of the movie’s action, which is possibly the most gripping set of high-stakes sequences I’ve ever witnessed in a movie before. If Tom Hardy’s line from Inception, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” was ever appropriate to a movie’s ambition of scale of intensity and scope of cosmic action, this is the movie.
But there’s also a simplicity about the first two thirds of the movie that is a relative departure for Snyder, and a welcome one. The Tarantino comparison holds up here—a director known for his (perhaps overly) stylized dialogue and tone composing scenes that are beautifully sparse and quietly compelling. For Tarantino, the opening of Inglourious Basterds was the arrival of this new maturity. For Snyder, it’s the North Pole scenes in Man of Steel, or the moments with Jonathan and Martha Kent, most notably the Kevin Costner line that had plenty of viewers with lumps in their throats, assuring Clark, “You are my son.” It’s a movie with a keen sense of the epic but can also focus in on the little details when it can block on the rest of the world: something Kal-El has to learn, and something it appears Zack Snyder may have picked up as well.
Continue reading on the next page…
