Superman, Grounded

To save the Man of Steel, a new movie brings him down to earth

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Courtesy Warner Bros.

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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While the story is familiar, Man of Steel looks different from other superhero movies. It has some of the gritty physical authenticity one associates with documentaries. The whole movie is shot with a handheld camera--the point of view shifts and staggers when things explode or superhumans fly by. What's more, the camera had film in it. "A lot of these big summer movies are shot on digital cameras and recorded digitally," Snyder says, "so they have a clean, superslick look. I was really adamant that the movie have a filmic, cinematic feeling." Snyder's lens was mercilessly unfogged: even Amy Adams' peerless complexion looks bumpy, and Diane Lane, as Mrs. Kent, has the sunbaked skin of one of Walker Evans' Dust Bowl Okies.

When Snyder made 300, he did it almost entirely in an empty warehouse, filling in the settings with computers after the fact--he shot exactly one scene outside, and that was because it had horses in it. But Man of Steel was made in the real world as much as humanly possible. When Clark Kent gets a job on a fishing boat, en route to that burning oil rig, Snyder took a film crew out on a boat in 30-ft. (9 m) waves. (Cavill says he held out till the third day before throwing up.) For scenes that take place in space, Snyder carved massive spaceships out of Styrofoam. "I really appreciated how many sets they built--it could have just been a big green screen all the time," says Shannon. "It feels very much like it could actually happen, what happens in this movie." For Clark's childhood home in Kansas, Snyder's crew not only built a farmhouse but also planted about 170 acres (69 hectares) of corn around it.

Snyder also did a lot of hard thinking about the physics of superpowered people punching each other. What would a fight really look like if everybody in it could lift a truck and move at supersonic speed? The answer: not like tai chi. "I'm an action dork," he says. "I wanted every punch, every impact, all of the kind of half-flight half-jump tangling and wrestling in the air to feel real." The blows are rough and brutal and come almost too fast to follow, and every time one lands it's like a mortar going off. "Because I'd done Immortals, I'd had a modicum of fight training," Cavill says. "They wanted to drive that out of me. Superman has never actually fought, because he'd just destroy someone. So it's more of a brawler-type technique."

The film's most startling shots are those in which Snyder reimagines the iconic image of Superman in flight. Snyder gives him a vapor trail, like a de-orbiting space shuttle, and makes the camera appear to have a hard time keeping Superman in focus. "Flight's hard to photograph," Snyder explains. "I really wanted to make you feel like getting those images was not easy, so the camera is constantly struggling to hold him in frame." It's as if he just happened to be standing there when Superman zipped by--parts of Man of Steel seem like YouTube footage of the meteors that fell to earth in Russia in February. "The ironic part of this movie," Snyder says, "is that the most realistic movie I've ever made is a movie about Superman."

Heart of Steel

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