Rebooting the Man of Steel

There was quite a bit of news earlier this week regarding the selection of Zack Snyder as the director of the upcoming reboot of the Superman franchise. What is more interesting is the selection of Christopher Nolan as an executive producer, who weeded out a list of potential directors down to Snyder. The placement of both men has me interested in Superman again, because I think that they have the beginnings of something that could work. However, a successful Superman project will need to reinvent itself compared to Superman Returns.

Christopher Nolan's takes on the Caped Crusader with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight was a major departure from the prior Batman films, focusing not only on action, but delving into the motivations and psyche of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego. The Dark Knight went further, placing Batman into a philosophical context, pushing the characters to their ideological extremes: the Batman as an avatar for law and order, with the Joker representing absolute chaos, existing only to counterbalance the influence of The Batman.

The approach worked, and Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have successfully brought the Batman franchise back from its darker moments. Clearly, Warner Brothers is seeking to do much of the same with Superman, and I believe that a similar approach will work. The people helming the project are ones are very safe choices. Nolan, obviously, has the creative vision that has brought back Batman, but also other films, such as this past summer's Inception and The Prestige, amongst others, while Snyder is well known for his prior comic book adaptations: Frank Miller's 300, and Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, as well as Dawn of the Dead and his upcoming film, Sucker Punk, due out next year.

A successful Superman reboot will have to do more than look back towards the Christopher Reeves years, as was done in 2006's Superman Returns, which likewise sought to insert itself into the existing chronology. Watching that film, I was impressed with the technical execution and feel of the film, but came away underwhelmed: the film was there for the visuals, rather than the story and it should have been the other way around.

Already, there has been much written about what would need to be done to avoid another flop, ranging over characters, villains, storylines and so forth, but main element has been missed: Superman is powerful allegory, and as Nolan has revitalized the image of Batman by examining the impact and allegory behind such a character.

The approach shouldn't be interpreted as moving Superman into a Dark Knight grade of darkness, and I think that a dark and gritty Clark Kent would be a bad move. However, an idealized, light Superman amongst a realistic, gritty environment might be an interesting move, especially if they can frame a character story against it.

Superman is an invincible being (with his single issue with Kryptonite) and seeing him get shot or something is a bit of a neat trick, once, and while action will no doubt be part of the film, what they should be doing is what they did with The Dark Knight: put Superman up against an equal and opposite, not necessarily physically, but philosophically. This was the greatest strength of Nolan's revitalization of the franchise, because it gave the film an incredible amount of depth and realization that put it far above and beyond the typical summer blockbuster.

Furthermore, Nolan’s The Dark Knight touched on contemporary issues and fears that emanate from life today, things such as terrorism, corruption, and society’s ability to latch onto a hero. Heath Ledger’s Joker could be easily seen as the unpredictable nature of religious extremism, or something along those lines. In a big way, Snyder’s Superman would have to do something similar: link the plot to something that is far more relatable than a crazy scheme to build another continent and to gain a lot of prime real estate. I don’t know what form something like this would take, but any sort of look at the headlines should provide a wide range of things for the Man of Steel to tackle.

One thing is for sure though, Snyder's addition to the team will be an interesting one. He's yet to make a movie that's truly mind blowing - 300 was overblown visual CGI porn, while Watchman was an excellent translation, but it didn't quite capture everything in the comic - but he knows comics, loves them and if anything, the end result will be a fun take on the franchise. I'll certainly line up to see it.

Inception

Christopher Nolan's latest film, Inception, is one of the best films that I've ever seen, combining an original story with a compelling future, providing a cerebral science fiction thriller that represents the very best of what the genre is supposed to do: provide a compelling and entertaining narrative.

Inception is an event that is a beginning, and describes the goal of the characters of the film. As the film opens, Leonardo DeCaprio's character, Cobb, is caught while trying to break into a businessman's (Saito, played by Ken Watanabe) dreams, and is offered a job to plant an idea into someone's head. Cobb specializes in a particular form of theft: entering a person's mind during their dream state, and stealing particular secrets in a form of corporate espionage. Cobb is a haunted character, who's own guilt and demons have been coming back to haunt him. Exiled from the United States, his new job, to plant the idea of breaking up a corporate empire in the mind of an heir Robert Fischer (Played by Cillian Murphy), is the only thing that will allow him to return home to his children, after being forced away from the U.S. after the death of his wife: her suicide had appeared to be at his hands. Assembling a team of specialists: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, the point man, Tom Hardy as Eames, the forger, Ellen Page, Ariadne the Architect, and Dileep Rao as Yusuf, the Chemist. They go to work building a complicated dream state for their target, with the plan to plant an idea deep inside his consciousness, where it would take form and provide the target with the motives to break apart his inheritance.

Inception is a complicated, fantastic and brainy film, and is unequivocally a brilliant work of fiction, tying together different story elements: the job at hand, placing the idea into Fischer's head, and looking at what makes up an idea, all within several different worlds that have been created within the minds of the characters. While viewers are generally used to any number of time jumps to help tell the story: flashbacks, jumps forward and so forth, this is the first story that I've seen tell several stories within concentric time spans (i.e., one within the other), with each running at a different speed. The story moves forward in a fairly straightforward fashion as the team moves deeper and deeper into Fisher's unconscious mind to plant their own inception: Fischer must break apart his business.

One of the things that works the best with this film is the subtle, science fiction elements that are placed in the film throughout. There is unnamed technology that allows for the shared consciousness, referred to as a military project for training soldiers, but something that seems to have branched out into the larger world. In one particular scene, Cobb and Saito visit Yusuf, the Chemist, who demonstrates his drugs by revealing a sort of opium den of dreamers, people who have spent too much time in the dream world. The scene, lit by bare bulbs and dim shadows, is as hauntingly beautiful as another demonstration scene in The Prestige, one of Nolan’s prior films. The soft touches here show restraint, but at the same time, reveal a near future world that has elements of science fiction and cyberpunk, but in a way that is far less radical, and in my mind, more realistic than other stories.

At the story progresses, Cobb is haunted by his wife, who died after remaining in the dream state for far too long. Cobb noted that she has been causing problems with some of his work, sabotaging his efforts, and as Ariadne prepares for building the heist, she learns the very real dangers of the dream state, and of inception in the first place: Mal and Cobb had entered a deep dream state, one where they remained together, building and rebuilding their own world, and eventually, losing their grasp on reality. As Cobb worked to get her to leave the dream world, he planted the idea that if she were to kill herself, she would awaken. Upon returning to the real world, she continued to believe that she was in the dream state, and once again, killed herself. This plot element is one that grows alongside the heist, and proves to be one of the most interesting elements of the film: what is reality?

This question is something that has long been asked from the science fiction medium, from films such as The Matrix, and television shows such as Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes. The film takes an interesting look at what the perceptions of one's reality are. Within the dream state, people tend to operate within that context, and accept that reality for what it was. Inception does an interesting job with this line of thought, and it does look at this question in a different manner than some of the other works. Here, the characters know full well that they are operating within a different world, but even then, there are real risks in what they are doing. This is assuming one of two possible endings for the film: that Cobb returns safely to his home, reunites with his children and the story closes off normally. The alternative is that Cobb himself has remained in the dream world, and that the entire film had become a reality that he’s unable to escape from, and essentially, he is lost within his own mind. The ending itself brings the film from a good one to a truly great one, something that is sure to keep people thinking and talking about the movie for years to come.

Despite the film's obvious strengths, there are some weak points in the film. The chief among these is the characters, who get very little in the way of the essential back-story that allows them to become relatable characters. Most of the team, while they get some time, are just fixtures against the background, where they operate simply to fulfill plot elements. Cobb is really the only character who has any sort of treatment towards this, and then, it is really only along the lines of putting major plot elements into place.

Secondly, for a film about dreams, the internal mechanics of the dream world seemed to be fairly well in order. While this can be argued away as some sort of side effect of having someone create the world in the first place, there is very little surrealism that is generally experienced with dreams. Certainly, with my own, I have a feeling of confusion, followed by: "I thought that was really happening?", given how strange some of them can be.

At the end of the day, despite some of the drawbacks to this film, it falls under the same list of films that I love for many of the same reasons: they are original, intelligently written, acted and conceived of; movies such as Moon, District 9, The Fountain, Pans Labyrinth, Minority Report, and a couple of others. Inception easily meets the same requirements of those films, and I have no doubt in my mind that Inception will be just as highly regarded as these films are.