Man of Steel pumped iron for role.
English actor bulks up for Superman role
LOS ANGELES — In the world of Hollywood opportunism, what goes around doesn’t usually come around again — except for Henry Cavill.
The English actor was attached to play Superman in a McG picture but one thing didn’t lead to another. When McG dropped out of the project, Bryan Singer ended up hiring Brandon Routh to define the comic book hero for 2006’s Superman Returns.
Seven years later, the 30-yearold is back as the headliner in Man of Steel, which opens in theatres on Friday.
“I do feel blessed,” said Cavill, promoting the movie at Warner Bros. Studios Stage 23 in the San Fernando Valley.
Time will tell if the film is blessed. Certainly, there’s a great deal riding on the blockbuster reimagined by The Dark Knight’s Christopher Nolan, who produced the project by reteaming with his writer David S. Goyer and hiring Watchmen director Zack Snyder.
Indeed, early indications are positive enough for the studio to give the green light for a second Superman based on the DC Comics crime fighter, which in turn might lead to an all-star Justice League extravaganza.
In the latest redo, Clark Kent (Cavill) is a vagabond loner refusing to reveal himself until an aggressive General Zod (Michael Shannon) arrives on Earth to use it as a replacement for his extinct planet Krypton.
Fellow countryman Superman will have nothing to do with the invasion, but before massive battles erupt we find out through flashbacks that Clark grew up in Smallville, Kansas, raised by rural parents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane).
In the very beginning, the end of Krypton is depicted just as Superman’s father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) launches his baby Kal-El into space and bound for Earth. Other familiar faces include Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and her feisty editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne).
But there’s no question the tone is grittier than previous Superman film versions in the 1970s and 1980s and the 2006 movie.
It didn’t take long for Cavill to embrace the new look and the new attitude.
Ironically, he used his actor’s life to inform his portrayal of Clark Kent as an isolated wanderer.
“I just thought of applying my own existence as an actor because it’s quite a lonely existence,” he said.
On a movie set, “you become a new family but when the movie is over you might never see them again, so I just applied that to the (Man of Steel) character, who experiences new groups of people then disappears.”
Naturally, Snyder required the six-foot-one Cavill to pack on muscle in the gym, which took months of dedicated pre-production training and workouts during the long and involved shoot.
His extra strength came in handy for the Superman flying sequences, which were depicted using new computer-generated technology and old-fashioned wire work.
“It was incredibly complex,” said Cavill of his wire activities. “I was 40 feet up in the air and sometimes I was completely out of control.”
He felt more in charge of his definition of Clark Kent and his iconic alter ego despite having screened all of the Christopher Reeve movies and the Brandon Routh film.
“I did not take anything from the other actors,” he said. “The way I do it, and the way I viewed it, is that it’s their interpretation of the source material, with the source material being the comic books.
“I wanted to have my interpretation, not out of a sense of ego, but a sense of the fact that it might be a disjointed performance if I have someone else’s personality and their influence affecting the interpretation of the character.”
So Cavill, “went straight to the comic books” for inspiration. Especially notable for him were the more modern takes on the adventures; from 1992’s controversial The Death of Superman and 1993’s The Return of Superman to Superman/Batman: The Search for Kryptonite in 2008.
From the island of Jersey off the coast of England, Cavill never dreamt of playing Superman. He made his movie debut in 2002’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Assorted TV projects followed and a few more films, some as different as 2005’s Hellraiser: Hellworld and 2006’s Tristan & Isolde.
In 2007, he started to turn heads with his Duke of Suffolk in the acclaimed series, The Tudors, while receiving modest praise for his Immortals performance in 2011.
Soon, he’ll be back as Superman, which is just fine with him. His plan is to keep it simple all the way.
Once upon a time Superman was the cheeriest of superheroes, a clean-cut dogooder with a clean-cut conscience. That was back when you could believe truth, justice and the American way were not only possible, they were synonymous.
Now there’s a new Superman for a new world: darker, anguished, beset by the responsibilities of his great powers. In Man of Steel, the reboot of the Superman franchise, he’s not exactly a bulletproof Batman, but he’s torn between loyalties to his native planet and the strange earthlings who torment him here.
It starts on the planet Krypton, a dark place of spaceships and flying monsters that is about to be destroyed because it has greedily mined the energy in its own core, a sort of intergalactic anti-fracking message. Top scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) puts his newborn baby Kal-El in a rocket ship and sends him to safety on Earth, a step ahead of the evil General Zod (Michael Shannon), who is against babies or something.
Then Jor-El is killed and Zod is banished from the planet. However, both will return later in the movie — and at these prices, they’d better.
We next see the boy — now called Clark Kent — as a bearded seaman who must rescue workers on an exploding ocean oil rig. He has grown up to be Henry Cavill, an absurdly be muscled British actor who moreover has the most bankable dimple since Kirk Douglas. Clark is moving from town to town, or rather from disaster to disaster, disappearing after his heroic feats in order to remain anonymous. This isn’t easy because, in moments of high stress, laser beams come out of his eyes.
Nevertheless, as we learn in one of several flashbacks, his adoptive Earth father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), has told him he must keep his superpowers a secret. “When the world finds out what you can do, it’s going to change everything,” he says.
It’s an intriguing notion, developed by director Zack Snyder, a veteran of this kind of 3-D abs-over-matter legend-making (300, Watchmen) in the picture’s more grounded first half.
The Superman story has always served as a sort of Christian parable, the tale of an only son sent to the world to save mankind, and Man of Steel underlines the notion: “They’ll kill him,” his mother says as they prepare the infant to go to Earth. “He’ll be a god to them,” his father says.
Jonathan’s concern adds a note of ontological interest, creating a more realistic approach: Learning there’s a flying alien in our midst could alter our understanding of the universe.
However, in the end, when the world does learn of the man of steel, it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Everyone just accepts him as a saviour in a red cape.
As often happens in bigbudget Hollywood films, the philosophical danger turns out to have been exaggerated.
Of course, by then everyone has been battered senseless by the never-ending final hour of Man of Steel, a battle on land, sea and air among flying creatures, U.S. air force bombers, long metallic tentacles that come from a spaceship that looks like a flying clam, and the sadly inevitable trope of airplanes flying into buildings, sending glass and concrete tumbling.
Snyder seems more interested in the spectacle of the thing. It feels like something from Transformers, and it lacks any sense of tragedy that you might expect from such a conflicted hero in a post-9/11 world.
The battle takes place because Zod has escaped and come to Earth to retrieve a “Codex” that has information that could revive Krypton (for a while, I thought he was looking for a jet-powered sanitary napkin.) The dead Jor-El also arrives as a sort of posthumous hologram to advise the good earthlings how to vanquish this new peril.
Fortunately, although Kryptonians seem to have a different alphabet — the S on Superman’s suit is their symbol for “hope” — they all talk perfect English.
The chief good earthling is Lois Lane (Amy Adams), an investigative reporter who uses her journalistic skills to discover Kal is really Clark Kent, and then names him Superman, which is more descriptive and fits better into newspaper headlines. She becomes his companion and requisite damsel in distress, which is tough work but probably easier than investigative reporting.
Man of Steel is a huge production, and the money is splashed across the screen in endless special effects and lots of action.
What are missing are the moments of surprise and humour: the joys of seeing the superhero making everyday magic.
Cavill is an appealing hunk, but there’s no joy in his feats. Anyone can throw spaceships around. Superman needs to come down to earth and cheer up a bit.