There may be some minor spoilers below - especially if you don't know anything at all about the character (in which case it's spoiler HEAVY - and what the hell are you doing here?), but I'll try to keep any specific plot points and reveals out of it, or at least highlight particularly spoilery parts. I've tried to avoid specific "I really enjoyed the scene where..." type of thing, but generally go for an overview of tone, performances and generalities whenever possible, along with a bit of commentary on the character, the criticisms made against the film, and the general direction of this new take.
First, forget any previous iterations you may be familiar with. This film honours the mythology, but it is an entirely new, modern take on the story with no reference to anything else that came before. In other words, if you're expecting Donneresque bright, shiny, happy, rescuing cats from trees, olde-worlde, cheese and corn Superman with goofy villains with even goofier sidekicks carrying out real estate scams, then you're going to be disappointed - or pleasantly surprised - or thoroughly bored, depending on your tastes.
If you check out any of the aggregate sites on-line (e.g. Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic), you'll see the film is quite divisive, with a lot of critics hating its "joylessness", "excessive cgi" and overlong, cgi heavy, noisy, ultra-destructive finale, while others praise the way it modernises a seemingly out-of-date anachronism of a character and its all-action superheroics. Strangely, the audience ratings on imdb, RT and so on tell a very different story from the critics with most in the high 80s. So what does this tell us? The critics are boring, jaded and dead inside and real people aren't. So a warning - there are no subtitles, it isn't in French and there are no musings on the endless search for spiritual fulfilment while smoking a cigarette in a bombed out Serbian cafe. Nor does he do any stalking, become a dead-beat dad, or get outsmarted by any real-estate conmen. Let's get that out the way up front. Yes, he actually [frick]ing punches something this time. And then some.
We get a complete retelling of his origin - the whole Krypton go bang, baby go bye bye thing - but in much greater detail, depth and oomf than ever before. It's all-out in-your-face right from the start, with warships blowing the shit out of each other, and all sorts of craziness going on - and introduces us to the state of Kryptonian civilisation and politics and basically all the whys of what follows. Crowe as Jor-El has a lot more to do than Brando did (and I don't think he was reading from cue cards either) - the scenes between him and Lara-El were really powerful and sets the tone of performances throughout - excellent across the board. We also get introduced to Michael Shannon's Zod here. Again, no spoilers of what part he plays in the overall plot, but remove all thoughts of Terrence Stamp from your mind. This isn't your grandfather's General Zod. If you've ever seen him in anything, imagine him beefed up to [frick], off his meds, and with the powers of Superman. Yeah. Plus he gets to say "Release the World Engine!". Awesome. He's also surprisingly sympathetic when you find out what motivates him to do the things he does.
An interesting departure from the past here is that once the baby Kal arrives on earth, instead of the usual linear telling of how he grows up, learns his powers and becomes Superman, we skip forward and pick up with him when he's already an adult, wandering the world, going from place to place, job to job, helping people out wherever and whenever he can. Not as a superhero or anything, just as a guy, all beardy and shit. Hoboman, if you will.
Then as we go on, we get flashbacks to his childhood when we need to learn something about him, in between his wanderings and reporter Lois Lane's investigations into stories about some anonymous "angel" saving people all over the place without ever sticking around to be thanked...
Some of these flashbacks contain some of the most emotionally powerful moments in the film. Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are perfect as Ma and Pa Kent and have some of the best lines and some of the most beautiful scenes. Some will have a problem with Pa's over-protectiveness of his son - he does still encourage him to be the best man he can be and that he believes he's here for a reason, to do something great, but mainly, "don't be special, act normal, hide who you really are" seems to be his overriding message to young Clark. But his is a realistic view of what might happen to Clark if the world finds out there's an alien with strange powers on the planet, so his fears of what would happen to Clark and desire to protect him is entirely believable. I liked the way this non-linear storytelling kept it fresh and avoided the 'not another retelling of the same story' feeling you get with remakes if you've seen the original.
Amy Adams is Lois Lane, and she's definitely a modern woman in this retelling. Smart, pro-active and in control. She gets saved once or twice of course, but she's no damsel in distress. One of the criticisms I've heard about the film is that the Lois and Clark relationship wasn't really developed enough and she wasn't given enough to do. It wasn't a major focus of the film, no. Because this isn't [frick]ing Lois and Clark, it's Man of Steel. What we see is the
start of a relationship. Meeting, mutual shared experience, a degree of trust established, life saving, bonding, attraction... it's all there and it all seems just fine to me. They did not want the 'love story' dominating this first film. Having said that, it probably would have benefited from a few more intimate interactions between them (and maybe we'll find them on the extended cut - it's a long film already), but I think what we see is a believable and quite touching blossoming of their relationship. Also, what they most definitely did right was...
Spoiler (highlight to read)
the whole 'Lois is so dumb she can't see that Clark and Superman are the same guy' thing? Gone. Thank [frick]. That whole artificial Superman-Clark-Lois 'love triangle' thing was an albatross around the character's neck. It's a silly tradition only adhered to because it was tradition, but which required increasingly excruciating silly story fudges to maintain it, while never being remotely convincing anyway. It's passe, trite, dumb and it makes Lois look stupid and her main function being the butt of a joke. Superman's joke. Now we can move forward. Very happy with that decision. End Spoiler The first half of the film is mainly set-up (although never slow), and where most of the 'character' stuff gets done. Then we get to see Cavill suit up (nails it, is Superman), and get to see him learning how to fly (brilliantly done) and whatnot...
This is where I disagree with another one of the common criticisms - joylessness. Bollocks. They are, more like. Make no mistake, this is a 'serious' post-Dark Knight take on the character, but it's not all grim, brooding and angsty either. It explores the idea of the isolation a kid (and then man) from another planet (but not knowing it initially) would feel having these strange experiences - being treated as a freak by the other kids, not being allowed to play with them and growing up not knowing who he really is, where he's from or what his place in the world is - and treats it dramatically seriously. So, no, it's not particularly cheery for that part of the story. And they generally treat the whole thing as an alien contact story pretty straight faced and 'realistic' in a science fictiony way.
But when he puts on the suit and first starts learning to fly, his seriousness lifts, he breaks into a joyous smile, and you feel the burden lift with him. And the tone of the film too. Now we can have some fun! It never goes Avengers funny on us - the same straight tone is there throughout, although we do get a few one-liners here and there, but the mood of the film does go up a gear and starts having some fun with its premise.
The second half of the film is all-out, wham bang, Emmerich-levels-of-destruction, Bay-esque explosions, fighting, punching action. You want Superman to punch something bitches? We'll give you more punching than you can handle mother[frick]ers! Eat it! :metallica: With a few pauses to catch your breath. Take a deep breath though. Again, you'll hear complaints about how 'relentless' it all is, but, whether you like it or not, we
are living in the video game generation and a 10 minute scuffle with a bus and a couple of lamposts just isn't going to cut it any more. So it might be overkill for some. Not me though. Bring it on. Spend more money. Make an extended version with 2 more hours of smacking the shit out of each other and I'll lap it up, if done this well (with provisos - see some of my minor gripes below).
Some minor spoilers - skip to avoid.
During the climactic battle scenes, it could have done with a few pauses to break it up a bit, and show some of the human consequences of the battle (the collateral human damage must have been phenomenal, but this isn't really highlighted at all) - there are scenes where we see some of that, but not in proportion to the scale of the destruction. Some of the city destruction might well have been happening on a construction site for all the human consequences we were shown.
It could also have done with at least one shot of Superman trying to save people from all this destruction he's partly responsible for (albeit in trying to save the whole damn world), but in fairness, he was rather busy, and he'd never had a fight before in his entire life, or even thrown a punch, so some slack might be cut - as I said in a comment to someone arguing he should have done more:
Get into a fight. With someone who can kick your ass. And his friends. Try not to break anything or bump into anyone else. Now put out a fire your fight has started, save everyone in the building and make sure everyone outside it is safe too. All while you're still fighting for your own life, when you've never been in a fight before and with no training...
That's about the equivalent of what Superman was having to do (and then some). He did ok for a rookie, I'd say. World got saved, didn't it? Lay off my boy.
/minor spoilers
Possibly Big Spoiler (highlight to read - I don't say exactly what happens, but you might easily guess and it might ruin a key scene, so at your own risk...)
Superman does something towards the end of the film that has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in how he deals with the villain. But not only are they mostly stupid and wrong (because it's not the first time this kind of thing has come up and the character has answered in exactly the same way), but part of the criticism seems to be that he is expected to behave like a paragon from the word go. But being a paragon by default is no achievement. He needs to earn it the hard way, like we would; through experience and by making mistakes. For this reason, the scene is necessary as part of his character arc too, in helping him form the limits and 'whys' of his moral code. Plus he had no choice. Or only a Hobson's one - and he made it. It establishes just how far he'll go to protect the innocent if he has to, and it underlies and finalises his choice between Earth and Krypton End Spoiler The ending brings us to where most are already familiar with the character - again I'll try not to spoil too much, but they dealt with the biggest elephant in the Superman room very well and are now ideally poised for the inevitable sequel. And there are a few 'easter eggs' in the film which might give us some hints. Luthorcorp. STAR Labs. Wayne Enterprises...
How many heads would explode if they announced Bruce Wayne as a cast member in the sequel?
It's beautifully shot, magnificently scored and distinctly lacking in an excess of Zack Snyder's trademark slo-fast-slo-mo shots (I actually can't remember any). If you're averse to shaky-cam though, you'll still have plenty to bitch about, so don't worry about that too much. Performances are excellent throughout, cgi is generally spectacular, the suit looks great and Henry Cavill absolutely nails the part. They don't even try to 'outcharm' the Chris Reeve version - smartly they've stayed away from that ideal completely and instead we have a guy who just looks like Superman if he was for reals and plays it that way. He does have some of that charm necessary to the character, the warm smile and reassuring eyes (mancrush!), but they wisely stay away from any kind of Reeve impersonations. Not 'better' then, but different.
But as a 'proper' Superman film though, it is better. I loved the original Donner version back in '78 and Reeve's performance of that iteration of the character will never be bettered, but I had issues with some of the corniness and cheese even back then at the age of 12, and it's dated like buggery now (even though I still love it in nostalgic terms), but Man of Steel is much more like the Superman I always wanted to see. It respects the character's history, but isn't afraid to 'fix' some of the sillier aspects of him too - and for the most part they've done an excellent job of it.
If you're not a fan of the genre at all, you'll hate it. If you're not a fan of excess cgi, you'll hate it. If you think all comicbook films should be comical, you'll hate it. If you don't like people being punched through walls, buildings, mountains, into orbit, and into the ground, a lot, for a very long time, you'll hate it. If you're expecting an homage to Donner and Reeve, you'll hate it. It isn't Smallville and it isn't Lois and Clark, so if you expect more of that, you'll hate it.
But if you like a well made, action-packed, science fiction superhero blockbuster for the modern age, with great performances, stunning over-the-top action, proper superhero levels of destruction, and lashings of punching people in the face, you might just like it.
I absolutely loved it. Bring on the sequel.
9/10