Henry Cavill (center) as Superman and Christopher Meloni (far right) as Colonel Hardy in Warner Bros. Pictures' and Legendary Pictures' action adventure Man of Steel, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
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Especially since Superman is something of a tough sell at this point in American cultural history. We like our heroes cool and complicated, and Superman isn't. He's not funny and jaded and cynical like Iron Man, or brooding and tortured like Batman. He's a physically invulnerable, morally incorruptible alien who shoots heat rays out of his eyes. In Man of Steel, his father--played with the gravity of a planetoid by Russell Crowe--hopes that Superman will "give the people an ideal to strive toward." But who the hell wants that? Superman is like the star student who ruins the curve for everybody else.
Snyder, of course, sees it differently: "I just felt like--no disrespect to any other movies--I just felt like there was more to say with that character than was being said." So he set out to make a Superman so realistic, visceral and true to the original that it would shock us into re-embracing him, make him seem fresh and new. With Man of Steel, Snyder is effectively attempting to erase all previous Superman adaptations from our collective memory.
But first he had to find his Superman. There's a fairly small pool of humans who are genetically suited to play the part, so it's not that surprising that Cavill had been up for it once before, for the project that eventually became Superman Returns. Snyder says he looked at "a couple hundred guys," but Cavill--who at that point was best known for a leading role in the Showtime series The Tudors--was the one he was serious about.
"We actually put him in the original Christopher Reeve costume," Snyder says, "which is horrible in real life. It's like spandex, and blue and red and yellow. It's horrible." As Cavill remembers it, he was woefully unprepared. "It was petrifying, mortifying and embarrassing all at the same time," he says. "I was coming off a movie where I had to be out of shape, and then I had gone through Christmas, so I was extra out of shape. I just had to throw on this Lycra-like outfit, and that never looks good when it's basically a sort of sausage casing." But Snyder saw something more than sausage. "When he came out in it," Snyder says, "out of the dressing room, and stood there in front of us, it wasn't funny. It wasn't goofy. All of us just looked at him, and we were like, You look like Superman."
Now all Snyder had to do was make a movie around him. "In my mind, we really had to act as if no films had been made," he says. "It's like we just found this comic book lying on the ground, under our bed, and we were like, This would be a cool movie." Snyder took Superman out of the title: he wanted people to come into his movie without any of the baggage the S word brings with it.
Handheld Heroism
Man of steel retells the superman myth from the beginning. The first 20 minutes of the movie are given over to a lot of rather compressed exposition about Krypton, with the not unexpected outcome that baby Superman gets sent to earth, acquiring superpowers in the process, while his father's nemesis, General Zod (Michael Shannon), rather unfairly survives Krypton's destruction.