2. Man Of Steel - Its Meant To Be Different To The Christopher Reeve Movies
The Argument: Russell Crowe riding a dragon, Superman breaking Zod's neck and the unaccounted destruction caused by the Battle of Metropolis may have all been irritating, but the real reason we didn't like Man Of Steel was because it was so boring. The action was the same 'guy gets thrown into a building' over and over, with indestructible combatants making it all white noise, while the characters were across the board totally uninteresting, buckling under their self-sincerity. As the WhatCulture comment section shows, there's plenty of people who don't feel this way, with one of the most common arguments in favour of Zack Snyder's film being its revisionist approach to the Superman mythos; this isn't the bright lights of Christopher Reeve, but a new, more realistic exploration of what being the last son of Krypton actually means. Why It Doesn't Work: The new approach likely comes from the general meh that greeted Bryan Singer's hyper-nostalgic Superman Returns, but just because you're doing the opposite of what people didn't like doesn't mean you'll be doing something good. And Man Of Steel is proof positive of that. Positioning itself as a companion to The Dark Knight, showing how the real world would react to hero (rather than how a hero would emerge from the real world), its exploration ended with "he'll find it tricky". It's different in approach, but a failure to commit makes it just for the sake of it.
