Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Man of Steel
2013 · Zack Snyder · Man of Steel on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera lose focus and hunt for Superman in flight. (camera)
Amir Mokri shoots handheld and reactive. The frame whip-pans late, racks focus after he has already moved, and lets flares drag across the lens as if an operator were scrambling to keep him in shot.
Payoff: You feel a fallible human eye trying to hold a body that should be impossible to film. In the reading: the dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: an image where you feel the camera itself perceiving, limited and caught off guard.
Watch for blue and steel gray where you expect red and blue. (light)
Mokri desaturates nearly everything: overcast Kansas, muted steels, dust in the air. The film saves warm golden light for a handful of farm and childhood scenes, so warmth arrives as punctuation instead of a default.
Payoff: The palette tells you this Superman is being handled as weight and gravity rather than as bright, easy pleasure.
Notice when a Kansas childhood scene cuts into the present. (structure)
Editor David Brenner threads Clark's boyhood through the adult story as flashes instead of a straight line. Each one surfaces when the grown man reaches for an answer about where he came from.
Payoff: The past arrives in dated pieces, so the origin becomes something he searches through rather than something you are simply told. In the reading: recollection-image (mnemosign / image-souvenir). The reading calls these recollection-images: leaps back into a former present, the past held up as past.
Watch Cavill hold still and keep his hands down. (performance)
Cavill plays a man suppressing himself. He absorbs insults, lets his arms hang slack, and gives his face almost nothing to do. The physical size is there and the release is withheld.
Payoff: Restraint is the character, so any moment he lets go registers as a break rather than a routine display.
Listen for the drums under Zimmer's rising string figure. (sound)
Hans Zimmer refuses any quotation of the 1978 fanfare. He builds a simple ascending motif on strings and stacks a wall of percussion beneath it, recorded with a large ensemble of drummers.
Payoff: The new sound announces a Superman with no inherited warmth, and it carries the lift the images deliberately hold back.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the camera chase him. Mokri points a handheld, war-reportage eye at an invulnerable body and keeps losing it.