It amazes me how many people are stuck on a 34 year old movie that aged poorly based on an outdated version of the character. Singer tried to make a pseudo sequel to it and it sucked.
This review is an example of the idiocy. How can professional reviewers rail against updating a character? Going into a new movie, an origin story, worried about "changes" seems strange to me.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/man-of-steel-movie-review/
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It’s really hard to make a good Superman movie. The bar is high, and well-established: Richard Donner’s 1979 Superman the Movie and its 1981 follow-up have, thus far, proven timelessly definitive in a way no other Superman film has been able to touch.
But the biggest problem with tackling such an iconic character–especially when he’s been around for almost a century in countless iterations–is that you will never ever be able to capture everything that makes him resonate with your audience, because my definitive Superman is not necessarily your definitive Superman. Still, there are consistent threads that have defined the character throughout that time, things Superman represents in the larger superhero landscape that matter.
And the overwhelming impression I get from Man of Steel, the latest cinematic reboot of Superman’s origin story that opens in theaters tomorrow, is that someone, somewhere along the line, thought that the core concept of Superman needed to be souped up: made edgier, darker, grittier, more violent, more explosive. Every change in Man of Steel serves that end rather than the story, or even a plausible reboot of the character and continuity.
I’m not saying that superheroes—however iconic—are inviolate, or that it’s never worth shaking up an established character’s defining traits, but when you’re rebooting a character as thoroughly embedded in cultural myth and collective consciousness as Superman, the ends have to justify the means.
That’s the question Man of Steel demands: What do its changes to the character of Superman give us that was missing before? What value does this add?