Man of Steel DVD: All About Visual Effects

The DVD and Blu-ray of Man of Steel is out this week, and though it isn’t jam packed with features, there are a few nice little extras on there. The main featurette is Krypton Decoded, where the kid who plays a young Clark Kent speaks to the guy in charge of visual effects about how you make a planet explode and other such things. There is a rather inexplicable feature advertising The Hobbit, which is slightly shameless but they do also have an animated feature looking back at 75 years of Superman.

My review of the film remains unchanged – it looks great but it is too long in places and Superman is far too unapologetic about all the careless destruction of an entire city just to stop one bad guy. But hey, that’s what the DVD is for, so buy it, skip past the bits that drag and enjoy two hours of unapologetic super genocide.

This aside, if we can tell anything from the DVD it’s that their Oscar campaign will be built almost entirely around a Visual Effects push, with maybe some emphasis on the score for John Williams, though The Book Thief will likely push him for a nomination more than Man of Steel. The last superhero movie to be nominated for its score was the original Superman, so whether this works for or against Man of Steel is hard to say.

But if you really couldn’t care less about the Oscars it makes a lovely generic Christmas present for someone who probably wouldn’t go out of their way to buy it for themselves.

Man of Steel is out on DVD and Blu-ray NOW.