Tuesday’s Top Trailer: Man of Steel

Welcome to a weekly feature here at Movies with Abe, Tuesday's Top Trailer. One of my favorite parts about going to see movies is the series of trailers that airs beforehand and, more often than not, the trailer is far better than the actual film. Each week, I'll be sharing a trailer I've recently seen. Please chime in with comments on what you think of the trailer and how you think the movie is going to be.

Man of Steel – Opening June 20, 2012

I hadn’t yet written about what is likely to be this summer’s biggest blockbuster, and I heard such great things about the third official trailer that I decided it was finally worthwhile for me to take a look. I have mixed feelings about the seemingly never-ending series of superhero reboots that exists, and especially when it comes to this particular character. My feelings on the Christopher Nolan Batman films don’t quite jive with everyone else’s, but I think most agree that “Superman Returns,” from a proven genre director, Bryan Singer, was a disappointment. Yet what “Man of Steel” represents is a complete reinvention of the saga, as seen through the very distinctly individualistic eyes of Zack Snyder. I loved “Watchmen” and hated “300,” and it looks like this is a more visually astonishing, epic-scale production like the former. Casting a relative unknown in the lead seems to be the thing to do these days, and, just like Batman and Spider-Man before him, the actor can never be American. Yet Superman need not be a showy thespian, and the recent Batman films showed that he was almost a supporting character in his own story. Michael Shannon as General Zod is perhaps the most fantastic piece of casting, though I’m sure that Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Russell Crowe as Jor-El, and Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent will do just fine too. I like the notion of starting from scratch in a way that it is infinitely more epic than “Smallville,” a show that I’ll admit I enjoyed greatly in its first couple seasons. I think that this should be the superhero film of the year, untethered to a greater cinematic world like “Thor 2” and “Iron Man 3” will be, and fully capable of making its own mark as a standalone Superman movie. I’ll get in line.