Man of Steel Criticisms

I'm going to take a break from my series on the goals of Turbadiesel Movies to point out the exemplary work of Huffington Post's Jeff Sorensen.  It seems that there has been quite a bit of complaints about Zach Snyder's Superman reboot - Man of Steel (which happens to be my favorite film of the year thus far).  Sorensen not only has the fortitude to stand up to those ridiculous complaints, but he does it in a manner that (I'm assuming) will make anybody who has used any of those arguments feel like they put their foots in their mouths.

I would like to add another item to the list that always irks me.  It isn't as much one complaint as much as it's the root of many complaints.  People will make comments such as: "the music was more intense/less heroic than John Williams' score," "his suit looks completely different than ever before," "it wasn't Christopher Reeve" (I'm not making any of those up).  What these complaints boil down to is this: it isn't the same as it's always been.  This is an incredibly stupid argument for a very, very simple reason - it's a reboot.  Why would it make sense for a film maker to literally remake a movie shot by shot?  I've seen all the old Superman movies, so why would I shell out $6 more to see them remade?  I went to see Jurassic Park in 3D a few months ago, but that's different, because Jurassic Park has dinosaurs.  Superman has not been doing well lately. Modern audiences have been spoiled by decent film making, and they no longer want to pay to see a guy in tights put on real clothes and glasses and suddenly appear to be a completely different person to everybody else in the movie.  We want something real, gritty, and slightly dark... something that we didn't even necessarily know that we wanted until Christopher Nolan blew our collective minds in 2005 with Batman Begins.  We also saw the same thing with Spider-man.  We traded Tobey Maguire's goofy grin in for a more serious Spider-man, and suddenly it didn't completely suck (Emma Stone may have helped as well though).  The point is that change was needed for the franchise to succeed.  It's ignorant to go into a reboot of a movie/series you loved, and walk out of it complaining about all of the changes.  Even when the change isn't necessary to keep the movie from sucking, it's necessary for the film maker to not beat a dead horse.

You can read Jeff Sorensen's brilliant article here: http://tinyurl.com/ptsh2et