There’s a hot new video going viral that looks at the super ugly color saturation in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel.
VideoLab attempts to turn back time and restore the natural color and brightness in shots from Warner Bros. and DC’s Man of Steel. “Would Man of Steel have been more successful at the box office if it wasn’t colored like Schindler’s List?,” they joke.
In the said video they compare Man of Steel to Batman Begins, and how the two are similar colorless, even though Superman has always been interpreted in a colorful palette (even in Frank Miller’s “Dark Knight Returns”).
While I do find this video impressive, and Superman does looks way better flying through beautiful blue skies, bringing the color up a notch won’t even save Man of Steel from the absolute trash that it is. Not only can Snyder not tell a story to save his life (James Gunn wrote Dawn of the Dead), but he clearly can’t do anything beyond his stylized ripoff of Frank Miller (300 was nearly a decade ago, let’s leave the look there, too, with Sin City and all the other green screen crap).
I’m standing firm on my hatred of this movie, which suffers (ironically) from superhero syndrome. What’s more boring than watching Superman lift a giant rock into space? How about watching him punch another dude for 20 minutes, and it doesn’t hurt either of them. Yawn.