Henry Cavill Will Make A Great Superman, and Christopher Nolan Will Help Make a Super Movie

Culture

I’m going to go ahead and call it: The new Superman movie, Man of Steel, will be epic. The film will seek to reboot — let’s admit it — a tired franchise, by incorporating new themes, actors, and ideas.

Put simply, Man of Steel will be an epicly awesome movie because of the brains behind the film and the beauties on-screen.

This won’t be your average Superman movie either. The plot gives us some glimpses into what will be more of a character-driven film, a movie which builds cars flying through the air, alien invasions, and flying battle scenes around the character … not vise versa.

Here’s what we know: According to The Henry Ford, Clark Kent is a young 20-something year old journalist who has feelings of alienation (there’s a metaphor for the state of journalism which is just dying to be expanded on, but that’ll have to come another time). "Transported to Earth years ago from Krypton, an advanced alien planet, Clark struggles with the ultimate question: why am I here? Shaped by the Midwestern values of his adoptive parent Martha and Jonathan Kent, Clark soon discovers that having super abilities means making very difficult decisions. When the world needs him the most after coming under attack, will Clark use his abilities to maintain peace, or use his powers to divide and conquer. Clark must become “Superman,” not only to save the world, but also to save the ones he loves."

Not enough to sell you, here are three more reasons: 

It’ll be produced by Christopher Nolan: The Dark Knight director is known for his more introverted, moody film-making. Reoccurring themes in his movies include the main character “finding himself,” or battling and exorcising internal demons. Such fallen hero themes resonate well with audiences, as it shows that even the mightiest of characters have a human side, a past, and real-world issues.

The DC comic universe — of which Superman is a part of — has been criticized as lacking timeless motifs which audiences can relate to. Superman has the perfect life and only Kryptonite will ever get in his way, Batman can do whatever he wants with his billions, and that’ll always win the day. The Marvel superhero universe, it has been argued, is more layered, grappling with stark socio-political issues: the X-Men battle racism and Spider-Man is a geeky teen struggling to find a date. These Marvel characters feel more real. Christopher Nolan, for his part, fleshed out the Batman universe, banking on Batman’s troubled past and his quest to tam his demons as the overriding theme in his movies.

From what we can see in the Man of Steel previews, the real Kryptonite Superman will face will be his own personally problems.

Superman won’t be such a loser: Henry Cavil as Clark Kent kind of looks like a badass in the previews. He wears jeans. He has a beard. He isn’t wearing his dorky glasses. He has to hitch-hike to get around. He works on some sort of lobster fishing boat off the coast of Alaska.

"The big challenge, of course, is if you can make people feel, 'What would you do it you were Superman? How would you feel?'" Director Zack Snyder said to assembled fans at a ComicCon event in July. "How to make it personal, I think that's the thing we went after."

And then there is the suit. Superman won’t be wearing his trademark red underwear, primarily because the costume designers felt it gave the Man of Steel too much of a “human” look. The new suit will try to be more toned-down. The entire idea behind it seems to be that it is not really a superhero suit, but rather a space suit of sorts, straight from Clark's home world of Krypton.

Combine this with the teen-angst themes of the movie, and you got a pretty awesome hero story.

The visual effects will be amazing: Man of Steel director Snyder makes it sound like this movie will put Avatar to shame, explaining, “Let me just say one thing about Superman – he can’t do anything that’s not a visual effect. He can walk around and talk, but if he’s going to do something physical, that’s a visual effect, because he’s Superman.”

Snyder then compared his Superman to previous franchise outings, adding, “I think in the past people have tried to figure out how to do that with strings and putting cars on hydraulics and having him stand under it, but we’re really trying to work on a way of doing this [with visual effects] that really makes that feel real. [We're] trying to understand the actual physics of what would have to happen for those things to happen. It just brings reality to that whole concept of picking up a car or whatever. That’s gotta be completely based on reality.”

One word: IMAX.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to properly cite language that was originally used without attribution to The Henry Ford. We apologize to our readers for this violation of our basic editorial standards. Mic has put in place new mechanisms, including plagiarism detection software, to ensure that this does not happen in the future.