There’s very good buzz out there for Man of Steel, and Michael Shannon is absolutely one of the reasons we’ll go see it, good, bad or indifferent.
Shannon, who most of you probably know from Boardwalk Empire, is one of the best character actors around today, and we’re dying to see how he’ll portray General Zod. Not to mention that even with a strong cast that includes Russell Crowe, Amy Adams, and Laurence Fishburne, Shannon absolutely has the potential to steal the movie with this performance.
There have been reports that Superman’s cape in Man of Steel is mostly going to be CGI. While we’re not nuts about movies that rely too much on CG, we do find this an interesting approach to Superman’s costume, and apparently General Zod’s costume is motion capture CG as well.
As Shannon told Collider, if the suit was really made of armor, it would clearly be “very heavy – like in Iron Man…I know the guy who was the Iron Man double who had to wear that freakin suit and he said it was a freakin nightmare, it’s so freakin heavy.” This actually makes a lot of sense, because director Zack Snyder and producer Christopher Nolan wanted Shannon to be free to move around, which would have been very difficult in a suit that heavy.
Shannon also told Collider he took on playing Zod because the script for Man of Steel “was just very sophisticated for the genre. It was as sophisticated as scripts for other movies I’ve done that have been considered more highfalutin, or whatever. It has a lot of deep themes in it, and the way they deal with Kal-El’s journey is really fascinating.”
The screenplay for Man of Steel was written by David S. Goyer, and Nolan has a story credit. As we’ve previously reported on TG, Goyer and Nolan were working on The Dark Knight Rises together when Goyer came up with the idea of rebooting Superman, and a meeting was set up with Warner Brothers in a phone call. In addition to screenwriting and story credits on the Nolan Batman movies, Goyer is also the creator of the new show Da Vinci’s Demons, and he also wrote the script for the gazillion selling game Call of Duty Black Ops 2.
However Man of Steel turns out, they absolutely cast the villain right, and we’re dying to see Shannon tear it up as Zod. So far, the word of mouth on Man of Steel is good, and we’ll see if the rumors of a super blockbuster are true when Man of Steel is released on June 14.
