THE MAN OF STEEL’s Two Teaser Trailers
It's My Two Dads with Superman.
This weekend Warner Bros debuted the two new teaser trailers for Zack Snyder's The Man Of Steel, the latest Superman reboot (the second expensive Superman film origin in my lifetime! The 1200th retelling of the origin in one medium or another!). The two teasers are differentiated by their voice overs - on one it's Kevin Costner as Pa Kent, giving advice to Clark, while the other has Russell Crowe's Jor-El. Both trailers feature the same evocative imagery - stuff that was very Malickian when we saw it at Comic-Con last week - and the weirdly wrong-headed Lord of the Rings music. The Comic-Con presentation had Hans Zimmer's Thin Red Line score on it; not only did that highlight the Malick influences, the music was also more appropriate and a little less familiar.
I don't know what to make of The Man of Steel yet. The Comic-Con footage was longer, and gave a bit more of a sense of scale. It showed more of Superman, it showed a tiny bit more action and it showed more of the cast. Here's what I hope: that the kid in the teaser trailer isn't a boy who is inspired by Superman but is actually young Clark. What I want from this movie is a Clark Kent who is always a hero, who always strives to do the right thing, but who is trying to understand his personal identity as a Kryptonian living on Earth and as a man who feels human but who has the powers of a god.
Watching the Comic-Con presentation I kept thinking about Jesus Christ. Christ is the easy reference figure for Superman, but what I kept coming to was Christ's lost years, the time between his birth and the beginning of his ministry. What's it like to be a 17 year old who knows he is the son of God? What's it like to be aware that no matter how human you feel, you are fundamentally different from everyone else? That no matter how normal you try to be you are inherently better than everyone else? This is what I want to see in The Man Of Steel, if I'm being forced to relive Superman's origin AGAIN.
