Superman come back to life

Man of Steel is as divisive a comic book film as The King of Limbs is a Radiohead album. Whether it’s wonton destruction (the death toll in those fight scenes must’ve been astounding) or the fact that Superman isn’t supposed to kill (because Superman would rather snap a neck than poke someone in the eye?), there are plenty of non-Super moments that left an uneasy taste in people’s mouths. In a new video, VideoLab tries to fix at least one of director Zack Snyder’s errors: the color palette.

The techs at VideoLab went ahead and brought the brightness back to the dark and dingy film, and it’s quite a thing to behold. As the clip points out, Superman was always the bright blue-and-red symbol of peace in the DC Universe, but Man of Steel took a color grading scheme from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and made Supes all dark and broody looking. While the heavy desaturation might work for parts of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the video notes that even the comic that film is heavily borrowing from, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, painted Clark Kent in warm, welcoming tones. (Though there’s a whole other reason the Justice League lead-in doesn’t quite feel right.)