Not to be confused with Superman!

Rating: 2/10 (15 July 2013)

From producer Christopher Nolan (the Dark Knight saga, Inception) and director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch) comes this re-imagining of the Man of Steel.
Kal El is shipped off from his home world Krypton as the place falls apart, amidst a last-ditch military coup by General Zod (Michael Shannon). With baby Kal El, his father (Russell Crowe) also sends the "codex", Krypton's genetic database. He sends the child to Earth, where hopefully a better life awaits. 30 years later, Kal-El - renamed Clark Kent - faces an existential crisis, just when fellow Kryptonians Zod and co catch up, intent on terraforming Earth and taking back the codex.
If you're coming at this having seen Nolan's epic Dark Knight trilogy, that should give you a good taste of the present film's strengths and failures. What it doesn't prepare you for is an unfortunate mismatch between source material and treatment.
Where the Dark Knight is an inherently troubled character whom you can imagine in a real- world environment, it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to shoehorn Clark Kent and his doppelgänger into a gritty environment. This Snyder, Nolan, Goyer and co attempt admirably in places, and watching young Clark go from one identity to the next every time a crisis forces him to use his powers is an interesting new spin on the character, Superman as a fugitive... sorry, not Superman: the Man of Steel.
This is an important distinction, one very much sought by the creative trio, and one achieved through the deletion of many previous film adaptations' tropes: gone are the red underpants, but gone is also the silliness of the premise (the greatest hero on Earth hides behind a silly grin and glasses), and with it some of the conditioning that might help your suspension of disbelief, for with the ponderous tone and insistence on "realism" - forsaken where convenient - come plot contrivances that grate all the more: Lois Lane is always in the right or wrong place at the right time, something a more light-hearted film would have just presented at face value but this film feels compelled to justify, however flimsy the premise. Young Clark sacrifices a loved one to preserve a secret that, given previous scenes, should already be severely compromised. Etc.
For those of us who know - and have loved - the Dark Knight series, the expected carry- overs from that franchise are all present: naturalistic camera-work, spectacle, and structural issues with the narrative. Unfortunately the latter weighs very heavily in this instance: anyone who's ever heard of Superman knows he comes from a doomed planet. Why force us to sit through a half-hour prologue there? This not only answers questions nobody particularly cared about, but creates a number of bizarre plot holes. Several fundamental character motivations also make very little sense in light of these scenes, such as sending the Man of Steel to save a world his very presence endangers...
Again, these would all be minor niggles in a more light-hearted film, but as the creative trio have insisted and make clear every step of the way, we are meant to take this film very seriously, in all its bloated Christ-allegory glory. For the parallels exist and are layer on pretty thick, and if this doesn't make Clark Kent/Jor El hard to empathize with, then his indestructibility certainly will.
The spectacle is amazing, almost to the point of becoming an experimental light and sound show, but the dramatic stakes are close to inexistent, what with the two main opponents being invincible. This means that by the third time Zod or Kal El get thrown through the supporting structure of a skyscraper, you'll be looking at your watch. Speaking of urban destruction, something Hollywood seems to think we will never have enough of, rather than be targeted to intimidate, as in the Dark Knight Rises, or grandiose and silly, as in the Avengers, the chaos in this film introduces jarring 9/11 parallels that further harm the logic of the story. How are we meant to cheer Kal El for throwing Zod through a building when the director spends ages insisting on the human suffering this creates? So many times, the film's schizophrenic desires to be both an action blockbuster and a serious drama cancel each other out.
This is not Superman as you knew him, but that matters little. Is this "Man of Steel" up to the premise set by his makers, one consolidated by a brilliant, soulful first trailer? Sadly, most of the implicit promises made by the film in those trailers amount to very little: the madness of Michael Shannon's Zod is severely underused, and what few clips showed potential lack punch when played in their context; rather than give Kal El a beautiful home-world to yearn for and a tragic origin, the prologue only creates plot-holes and delays the real drama; the slight humor hinted at by the trailer's end is scarcer than you might imagine...
Many have blasted this film for being so joyless, and that is a perfectly valid gripe, but then grittiness can be a virtue when we care about the characters, which is the film's most crushing shortcoming. This is something Avengers, and at the other end of the spectrum, the Dark Knight, got just right.
Finally, one wonders how Man of Steel will live down mass critical appraisal now that its thunderous opening is behind it, and how well it will stand up to repeat viewing. It is brave and admirable in that it tried to take a cultural icon and transform it into something contemporary and relevant, let alone credible. That in the end it failed so dismally is more baffling than tragic.
But this was all the Man of Steel. Thankfully we will always have the real Superman.