Move over, Star Trek Into Darkness. Your time, or at least your final trailer’s time, as the center of our attention lasted less than 24 hours because Warner Bros. just surprised us with a new trailer for Man of Steel:
Let’s not get too excited. Remember that the Superman Returns trailer was pretty awesome. They, too, were selling a story about a mythical figure bringing hope back to a weary people. It ended up only being okay. However, I’m going to ignore everything I just said because Christopher Nolan > Bryan Singer, and the trailer looks great. Did you notice the random shot of the LexCorp building?
Man of Steel will feature an entirely original musical score from Hans Zimmer (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Pirates of the Caribbean). Is the music featured in the new Man of Steel trailer our first hint of his attempt at making us forget the iconic John Williams horns from the original Christopher Reeve films? If so, I quite like it, thought maybe not enough to fly around as Superman in a video game for 5 minutes just to hear the musical score.
Overall, quite a bit of what we see in the trailer lines up with the new information revealed in last week’s Entertainment Weekly’s cover story about Man of Steel. The following is a break-down of some of what we learned from EW, equipped with quotes from the referenced issue, and how this new information is or is not reflected in the new trailer:
Tweaked origin story:
“In this version of Krypton, children are not born – they’re engineered [...] Kal-El is unique among Kryptonian babies because he’s a natural conception, free from genetic manipulation to choose his own course in life – which also makes his existence highly illegal.”
We don’t see any of this, but the trailer does open with our first real look thus far at the destruction of Krypton.
Clark the Nomad & Lois the Hunter:
“Clark leads a nomadic life as a young man, since he occasionally loses his restraint and saves a person in need – or unleashes his power on a deserving thug [...] Lois Lane, the intrepid Daily Planet journalist [...] is chasing down reports of a wandering stranger who is capable of superhuman feats of strength.”
The first half of the trailer is devoted to establishing how Clark will voluntarily make an outcast of himself so as not to reveal his powers to humanity for fear of their likely scared reaction. In other word, the classic origin story of him heading straight to Metropolis University after high school and graduating early with a degree in journalism seems unlikely to happen here.
One of the bigger mysteries of the movie to this point has been exactly how Amy Adams’ version of Lois Lane will fit in. However, now we know she spends her initial time attempting to track Clark down, who in his Bruce Banner-esque journeys has used his powers for good on multiple occasions thus leaving her a trail. Adams is heard in the trailer speaking about Clark, ”For some, he was a guardian angel, for others a ghost who never quite fit in.”
Clark does not go by the moniker ‘Superman’:
“[Screenwriter David S. Goyer] said to Chris, ‘It’s one thing to grow up realizing that you’re different or you might have these superpowers, but it’s another thing entirely to step before the world and say, I’m going to put on a costume and say I’m Superman. Why would he do that? So we’ve come up with a reason for why he did that, but he wrestles for a long time with whether or not he can-or should.”
The button of the trailer is the moment at the end where Amy Adams’ Lois Lane discovers the “S” on Clark’s costume is actually the Kryptonian symbol for hope. In response, she suggests he should go by, “Super,” before getting cut off. This is a nod to the origin of the name in the comics, wherein Clark’s most significant usage of his powers in public was to prevent the crash of a NASA space-plane (re-enacted here in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns). Thereafter, Jonathan Kent devised a new costumed persona for Clark to use in any future public displays of his powers. This persona was to be named “Superman,” thus officially adopting the nickname assigned to Clark by Lois Lane, who had been aboard the space-plane. Of course, maybe Lois never does get to finish that thought in the movie, and this turns into a quasi-homage, ala the nod to then instant denial of the classic Two-Face origin story in The Dark Knight (the scene where Harvey is confronted by a witness in court, but disarms the witness with utter ease).
Further details revealed in the EW story, though not reflected in the new trailer, are that literal kryptonite will not be featured in Man of Steel, and the costume Superman wears will have a kryptonian origin of its own.
Man of Steel hits cinemas in the USA and UK, among others, on June 14th, with a slightly later release date for different regions of the world.
