Reeve Still Rules

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 2013)

One of the first images seen in 'Man of Steel' is a Kryptonian 3-D X-ray of the baby Kal- El's heart. This looks like it contains a heart but is really just a melange of special computer effects that briefly dazzles but doesn't truly contain any heart at all - and no more fitting mission statement could be provided for Zach Snyder and Chris Nolan's 'Man of Steel.
The prologue on Krypton is far more fleshed out than in any previous versions. Russell Crowe plays a vastly more kinetic Jor-El than Brando - hopping from a showdown in a council chamber to a race on a giant bi-winged bat - yet so begins the difficulties with the film. Richard Donner's 1978 motion picture showed only mini-models and plaster sets to denote Krypton while Snyder's film gives vistas of Kryptonian flora and fauna and a planet wide civil war - and Donner's Krypton still trumps it. One should not be asking why Jor-El now looks and acts like British TV star Noel Edmonds - as happened here - while Brando's chiselled countenance and glowing white hair seem subtle by comparison.
Henry Cavill plays Clark Kent by way of David Bruce Banner from the 1970s 'Incredible Hulk' series. In this version, his childhood and upbringing in Smallville was - appropriately for an alien-on-Earth story but wandering from canonical story lines - harrowing and alien.
The young Kent takes off on the road to work in a variety of the bluest of blue-collar jobs like a Calvin Klein littlest Hobo, solving the odd industrial accident here and the odd sexual harassment case there.
This self-exiling Odyssey through every job on the Discovery Channel's "Extreme Careers" list brings him to an Arctic military outpost. A millenia-old Kryptonian colonising vessel has been found by the US government and is about to be excavated. Clark Kent is set to reach it first but not before Lois Lane (Amy Adams) follows him.
Adams is problematic and, again, one cannot help but compare her to Margot Kidder and the final obstacle to 'Man of Steel' truly winning the hearts of audiences is revealed. Donner's films realised that, like Clark, Lane was still an innocent under her posturing. Reeve and Kidder had chemistry that we saw grow in front of an audience. Cavill and Adams, mouths too crammed full of expositionary gobbets, fail, ironically, to lift their relationship from the ground.
'Man of Steel's effects are truly special. It does not fail as a comic book movie because it delivers the bang, crunch and pop that Bryan Singer's strangely elegaic version lacked. Michael Shannon's Zod is an amalgam of almost all despotic super villains from Kal-El's rogues gallery - two parts Darkseid to one part Armageddon and a backstory and motivation cribbed from that of Brainiac. So there are enjoyable set pieces and moments of tension caused by the uber-destruction of Zod and his crew's arrival.
Donner and Reeve's films remain untouched, at the top of the tree, because relationships and plot were shown to us, not told to us. We see so many more wondrous CGI confections in Snyder's films yet shown so much less than Donner showed.