Why I won't be Seeing Man of Steel.

Weaponized handsome.

A lot of people I know loved this movie and I think the vast majority of negative reviews stem from a political agenda against comic book movies in general. At least I thought they were in Iron man 3's case. But I'm not going to see it. I do not want to prove my preconceptions wrong. I am a coward, I own that. But I am a very well reasoned coward, as I will explain.

My frigidity towards MOS came a lot earlier than the reviews and I'll get to that; but the most interesting thing about movies that appear polarizing on RT is how positive the positive reviews are. Because it can tell you a lot. Usually there will be loud proselytizing from at least a quarter of the positive reviews while the negatives will just come off as grumpy and indifferent. That's the best case scenario for a 50% movie.

This is not the case on MOS's page. Yeah there are about 10% that love it, but even the b-'s and the 3.4's sound browbeaten and bored. That's bad, not Phantom Menace bad, but remember when critics didn't hate it at first? A chilling effect like that could put this movie on a really dusty shelf if you know what I mean.

Don't be like that, Zach. All I'm doing is attacking your art and livelihood.

But again, the critic's opinions aren't close to the strongest reason I do not want to drop twelve bucks on this movie, its the director.

 Zach Snyder bores the living hell out of me and he has for years. He's not...bad, he's actually pretty good. But he never addresses his bigger faults as a film maker, in fact, given the chance he exacerbates them.

When 300 came out on DVD I didn't get a chance to see it and had heard virtually all of the lines shouted ad naseum by classmates for a good four months. I was pumped. So my sister and I sat down to watch it and aside from chuckling at how the only ethnic character we'd seen yet had been kicked down a well and all the prophet licking, we were having a good time. But about twenty minutes from the end we decided that 40 of the 80 some odd minutes we'd seen were in slow motion. You know what 40 minutes of slow motion is on a small screen (that isn't showing Dredd*)? It's boring. It's...really boring.

After a couple minutes of "I thought you wanted to watch this."
"No, I thought you did" We cut it off. A few years later his Watchman adaptation was looking really good; and while I'll defend that as his best film, I can't say I love it and I know plenty of fans of the source material that go into a mouth frothing rage when I bring up Nite Owl.

Which brings me to MOS and Superman. He's a hero I've never really got into, except that animated series theme is incredible, I should do something on Shirley Walker... but uh, I'm getting sidetracked. You ask me if I want to see the most boring action director tackle one of the most historically boring superheros? No. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna pass.



*the last two minutes of that clip is the end of Dredd. So, SPOILER.