Man of Wood

I saw the movie SuperJesus Man of Steel on 3D Blu-Ray.  It wasn’t a bad movie, necessarily.  The action was pretty good, although I’m pretty sure it exhausted the ways a superhero can be thrown into (and through) a building.

The movie opens with the debate over Krypton’s impending demise.  Evidently, the Kryptonians had been addressing their energy crisis by drawing energy from “deep in the planet’s core” causing it to eventually, um, explode.  (Don’t think too hard about this; the takeaway is Fracking-Is-Bad.)  To save the Kryptonian race, Jor-El wants access to the “Codex”, apparently the database in which all Kryptonian genetic information is kept.  Zod, the antagonist from Superman II, accepts these premises, but Jor-El accuses him of wanting to “only save the bloodlines you deem worthy” – this in a civilization that had been genetically engineering itself for hundreds of years.  (Don’t think too hard about it; the takeaway is that Eugenics-Is-Raciss’.)  Jor-El and his wife had apparently defied this social norm by secretly conceiving and bearing a child the old fashion way “to reintroduce the element of chance” in procreation – and onto whose DNA they eventually fuse the Codex.  (Don’t think too hard about this; your head will explode.  Like Krypton.  Because Fracking.)

Henry Cavill (Clark Kent / Kal-El / Superman) is 30 years old; Amy Adams (Lois Lane) is 39.  This difference is distracting.  Amy Adams is still lovely, but she may be past the point of holding up well under Blu-Ray’s resolution.  Something about her face looked . . . off.  It could be aging, or it could be the make-up or post-production efforts to hide the aging.  It’s interesting, however, that while Margot Kidder was 30 when Superman came out, Christopher Reeve was only 26.

Watching this reboot made me ponder how impressionable young children are.  I remember upon seeing S’78 that Superman looked exactly like I had imagined a real-life version of Superman would look like based on the TV series.  I never got that feeling with Cavill, even though Cavill’s body is developed to modern standards of fitness.