by Will Ross
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Spoilers follow.
As many have noted, there is an eerie absence of civilians in Man of Steel’s fight scenes. As Superman and General Zod punch each other through small towns and skyscrapers, the people of Metropolis, who are surely being killed by the hundreds of thousands, are nowhere to be seen. In the earlier Smalville spar with Zod’s henchmen, Superman warns townsfolk to stay in their homes, and then the battle annihilates their homes. People are no more than props.
Perhaps the man of steel is a prop himself. As Andrew O’Hehir points out in his review, Superman is put forth as a saviour in both the Christian and Nietzchean frameworks. Both his biological and adoptive fathers insist that he is destined to achieve an Übermensch ideal for humanity and lead a godless world into righteousness. But he is also an allegory for Jesus Christ: in a church scene, an image of Christ is placed prominently behind him in the frame; when he falls from space, he is in an unmistakable pose of Crucifixion. Superman’s mythos is both secular and spiritual, God’s replacement as well as his extension.
It’s not an accidental pairing of ideas, and not the only flags under which this Superman flies. He is important not for the things he does, but what he “stands for.” That is, Superman is significant primarily as the object to which ideologies are applied. These ideologies needn’t be consistent; as Lois Lane points out, on Krypton the symbol on Superman’s chest may mean “hope,” but on Earth it’s an “S.”
A side effect of this is that whether you call him Superman, Kal-El, or Clark Kent, he is a personality-free cipher who represents ideals to which we are never made privy. He represents as many peoples and creeds as are needed to prop him (and the film’s ticket receipts) up, indulging all without pledging fealty to any.
This permits Superman to commit any deeds and actions that he chooses, and any audience caught in the movie’s net of ideologies is obliged to cheer for the cipher and incapable of questioning him. Superman’s catch-all purpose, to represent an “give the people an ideal to strive towards," is precisely the same undefined ideal peddled by real-world democratic superpowers (e.g. “be the best you can be”), and it mirrors their worst functions.
That’s why the gritty tone of Man of Steel — a marked change from the lighter, more heroic mood typical to the character — is not actually in opposition to this unseen slaughter, but critical to its presentation as a collateral adjunct to ideological objectives. Snyder has explained that the purpose of the film’s “realistic” style (handheld cameras, long lenses, and bleakness being the popular signifiers of the real) was to encourage admiration unvarnished by levity; “Superman is a thing that must be taken seriously and embraced and understood.”
If we perceive Superman as serving our own principles, his decisions are justified. This encourages a value set that accepts calamities so long as they are made invisible to us, and so long as their perpetrators profess to serve our interests. The rumble in Smallville encapsulates this: Superman is responsible for the fight’s locale and the town’s devastation, but civilian casualties are never shown, except when Superman tells them to get inside. Even Zod’s warning to Earth, a global TV hijack, complies with this crowd control tactic: the television will tell us everything we need to know.
There could scarcely be a more decisive statement of power than the film’s penultimate scene, wherein Superman needlessly crashes a $12 million spy satellite in front of a general. “You can’t spy on me,” he says, absolving himself of public accountability or transparency. Is this the ideal to which we should strive? A military master whose methods cannot be reproached, who turns our gaze away from his catastrophes? A chest-beating piece of warmongering where the only building left standing is a Sears?
by Will Ross --- The MoS Review Week continues with a film whose reputation for sheer Bigness has never been equalled. Ben-Hur’s size makes for lofty expectations, which MGM was happy to encourage: as the studio faced financial ruin in the late 50s, it made a major gamble on the film that would command the highest budget a film had ever had. Today, such blockbuster gambles are the ethos of the major film studios, who straightjacket themselves and their audiences to story formulas calculated by their fiscal success, but at the time Ben-Hur was an unprecedented event. The studio’s first choice was King Vidor, who had just directed the 1956 adaptation of War and Peace, but he refused. They next turned to William Wyler, whose reputation as a bankable director of large scale productions and critical clout made him a natural alternative. Wyler, having just finished directing the western epic The Big Country with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, would reach the zenith of production scale with this film. Three years later, he bailed on preproduction of The Sound of Music for the much smaller The Collector; he had nothing left to prove. As the tagline for Monty Python and the Holy Grail observed in 1975, historical cinema in following decades “makes Ben-Hur look like an epic.” Ben-Hur’s size is absolutely essential to its story, which centers on a wealthy Jewish prince, Judah Ben-Hur (Heston) of Jerusalem. His boyhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd) returns to Jerusalem after a long absence as the leader of the city’s Roman occupation. After a joyous reunion, Messala reveals his intent to crush the local Jewish rebellion, and demands that Judah inform on those who count Rome as an enemy. Judah, who opposes both violent rebellion and the occupation, refuses, and so Messala frames him for a crime of rebellion, imprisons his sister and mother, and condemns him to near-certain death as a rower in Roman galley ships. Judah, who begins the story as a pacifist, vows to return to Jerusalem someday to take vengeance against Messala. Much of what remains takes the form of a revenge saga, wherein Judah finds his way back to status and Jerusalem both by cunning and by providence (more on the latter later). That drive for vengeance fuels much of the film’s middle third, rather than the character drama of the former and latter parts. Thankfully, for much of the center stretch the story keeps its human bearings by means of Jack Hawkins, but after he departs the picture, there is an unrewarding sequence when Judah returns to his home in Jerusalem and finds his love interest and former slave Esther waiting for him. The problem is that the love scenes between Judah Ben-Hur and Esther (Haya Harareet) provide virtually nothing of substance to the story or characters. Esther, a completely stock type, does not suffice an emblem of Judah’s former life; that role is better filled by his imprisoned family. Nor does she suffice as an ambassador of time’s passage in Judea; her loyal increasingly decrepit father achieves that with greater poignancy and personality, qualities absent from the stock type that Harareet was saddled with. Admittedly, Judah’s mother and sister are little better, but the script does not place them in scenes that require great complexity of character. Thankfully, Harareet makes a commendable go at her limited material, and is represented by the most gorgeous theme of the musical score. The whole of Miklós Rózsa’s music for Ben-Hur is worthy of adulation, full of emotional and intelligently orchestrated themes and performed with masterful tonal control. Astounding moments abound, from the wrenching violin melody of the love theme (that high note!) to the awe-inspiring synchronization of the galley sequences. Even in its weakest moments (particularly those love scenes), Ben-Hur is always mesmeric at least in part, and that part is very often Rózsa’s score. Rózsa went on to score three more biblical epics, King of Kings, El Cid, and Sodom and Gomorrah, efforts that nearly equal his work on Ben-Hur. As I said, the score rescues some of Ben-Hur’s less successful scenes, but when those scenes are succeeding, and the sometimes-patchy script is working near the level of the production’s other elements, the film packs a tremendous whallop. This is most true of scenes involving Jesus Christ, who, despite his minimal screen time, is the second most important character after Judah. The Christ story is where Ben-Hur derives most of its narrative power; starting with a wordless prologue depicting the Nativity, Christ is mentioned at several points, and in a few key scenes his story intersects with Judah’s. These scenes, which make a conspicuous point to conceal Jesus’s face, are the most emotionally affecting in the picture, putting up the embittered and hopeless Ben-Hur against the charity and peace of Christ. In these moments, Heston is better than I have ever seen him elsewhere, using his face to convey his inner conflict with staggering detail, and without the sheer size of Judah's story behind that fate, those moments wouldn't carry the same impact. Of all the film’s explicitly Christian sequences, the best is the most Christian of them all. The crucifixion sequence is a marvell of reverent filmmaking; it is perhaps a testament to both the film’s failings and successes that the root of that scene’s power is not the healing miracle that occurs, but the dramatic weight of the crucifixion; the ideas embodied by Christ are rendered so vivid that one cannot help but be moved by the closeups of flowing water that cap off the climax. Wyler directs that Christ scene with visual abandon, but provides excellent work throughout the film, using the gigantic 2.76:1 aspect ratio of the MGM Camera 65 process to create lovely horizontal compositions. Wyler displays a subtle but exacting hand in both the blocking and performances of his actors, never allowing the grandeur of the sets and other period ornamentation to distract from the human focal points. But the chariot race, the best and most famous of all of Ben-Hur was not directed by Wyler. It was the work of veteran second-unit action directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, whose camera placement and control over the stunts and choreography is a work of utmost technical proficiency and artistry. The intensity is furthered by the soundtrack, which punctuates the constant thundering of the horses with the higher tones of the roaring crowd, and the editing by John D. Dunning and Ralph E. Winters, which is marvellous throughout the picture, but never moreso than the pulsing energy and incredible spatial clarity on offer in the race. Had Ben-Hur nothing more to offer than this nine-minute sequence, its nearly four hours of running time would have proven worthy of cinematic history; that its moments of sepectacle are matched by moments of intelligence and inspiration make it worthy of enjoyment as a whole.
by Will Ross
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This review focuses exclusively on the score in the context of its soundtrack album’s deluxe edition. Few could set the lynchpin of a discussion on Hans Zimmer’s scoring methodology better than he did. While discussing the orchestra for the Man of Steel Score, he noted that “You can hear the energy and, in a way, the competition between all the players, just to give it their best.” Zimmer thus lets on a quality that is frequently the fatal flaw in his scores (and the films over which they blare): they are in constant competition with themselves. I can appreciate bombast in orchestral music, but Zimmer is completely unaware of the parodic lengths he has taken his arrangements. Zimmer’s irritating tendency to assign too many instruments to the film’s scarce melodies forces every piece to fight over each other, and if any separation or detail in the performances existed, the absurdly bass-juiced production flattens it. Zimmer may well have phoned in his part of an interview from another dimension when he said “Let's not make this Superman bombastic”; I’ve never heard another tentpole score so desperate to impress with a palette of exclusive force. Straining especially hard to that end are the drums, which drop with all the force of bombs, and with their musicality as well. Zimmer assigns them beats that, like the rest of the score, blast out everything they have to offer straight away (a scarce offering) and then never develop or build in any meaningful way. At their most obvious, drums can connote power, but for Zimmer they have only ever connoted their own presence, be it here, in the Batman films, or in any of his other blockbuster scores. There are quieter moments with a more tender and mournful obective, and without volume to hide behind, the Man of Steel score’s melodic failings come into even greater relief. Neither the piano, nor the Stradivarius soloing, nor the formulaic chord changes of the string section come off with any sincere emotionality, largely thanks to the overall composition’s extreme melodic poverty. Neither the lurching two notes of the main theme nor the aimless piano of the Clark Kent theme show any interest in becoming a developing, emotionally alive piece of music. They simply satisfy Zimmer’s fetish for sludge-as-entertainment and lumber through the 90 minutes needed for a tentpole score spread across two Deluxe discs. One could speculate on the fittingness of Zimmer as a creative collaborator on the film — but I made an italicized promise up there, and I intend to keep it.
by Will Ross
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The release of Man of Steel surely marks the Big Movie Event Of The Summer. As I write this, the thing has broken June opening records, and regardless of whether it matches the north-of-billion gross of Man of Iron 3, it is surely the Bigger Big Movie Event, owing to the Bigness of its Names and Characters and Marketing and Music.
I could not let such a momentous Week slip by without writing critically on it. But a single review hardly seems fitting. So, after tearing up my 12,000-word Man of Steel Review manuscript, I devised a week-long Sad Hill Event dedicated to pumping out as many reviews as befits a film of Man of Steel's stature, starting tomorrow with a review of Hans’ Zimmer’s milestone Musical Score.
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