Pretentious schlock, poorly crafted story and pacing, and shallow characterizations that miss the point

Rating: 4/10 (16 April 2016)

As someone who loves Superman, I wanted to like this movie. Unfortunately, despite a few positive traits and powerful scenes, overall this movie felt misguided and poorly put together. Multiple times, as I was watching an action scene, I got a bit of entertainment out of the motion and the action of the same sort a toddler might get from jingling keys in front of his face, but I couldn't bring myself to care about the characters, the story, or what was actually happening. There are so many bad ideas and so much poor execution in this movie that it simply can't come together into something good.
During the beginning portion of the film, it almost felt like a bunch of little disjointed scenes that failed to make sense together. There was nothing resembling a sense of cohesion, nor did the diced-up nature of the narrative seem "artful" in any way. Later on, the film felt more like a single story, but unfortunately it still wasn't a very well-put-together one. There are too many unanswered questions and missed opportunities. I feel like many elements in the film just exist, and not enough of an attempt is made to explain or explore them. Perhaps worst of all, the characters feel this way.
Funnily enough, despite the movie giving you multiple looks into the characters' minds through uncalled-for dream sequences, I still feel like the view we get of who the characters are is very inadequate, which just makes me not care about them, despite them bearing the identities of legendary icons. This is especially apparent with Clark Kent/Superman. At least Bruce Wayne/Batman got a good performance from Ben Affleck to prop him up. Henry Cavill's rather dull acting wasn't much to lean on.
I think this movie failed spectacularly in just making Superman feel like Superman. They were so focused on how powerful and supposedly "godlike" he is that they seemed to forget about his actual character. They also focused on how people responded to him, but unfortunately not in a way that was remotely well-developed or interesting. Even though they said Superman did good deeds and occasionally showed him doing them, I never really FELT Superman had that attitude of compassion, caring and "championing the oppressed" that we know him to have. Doing a few good deeds here and there does not a hero make. I want to actually witness Superman's caring and compassion, but this movie just didn't display that. And really, if you can't even do THAT, what business do you have making a movie featuring Superman?
I probably can't say as much about Batman because I don't know him as well as I do Superman, but if nothing else, it was pretty lame to waste time on a dream sequence that conveys nothing other than his anguish over his parents death. And seriously, what was up with the random bats-bringing-him-to-the-light dream at the beginning? What does it mean? What's the point?
Another one of the worst aspects of this movie was that it was all pretentious and gloomy, but with no real point. At the end of the day, I don't feel this movie has anything meaningful to convey. It's too much of a poorly developed mess to do that, even if it did have a powerful message buried in there somewhere, which I'm not exactly sure of. Despite how "super serious" everything is, it's hard to even take it seriously when there are so many issues with the story's construction.
Yes, there were a few good aspects of this film, but they don't come close to outweighing the negatives. It was just an uninspired, uninspiring film overall. It's not completely worthless, but overall I can't recommend it.