Yet another FX fest for immature audiences only...

Rating: 5/10 (27 June 2013)

How sad to see the very art that gave us films such as "Seven Samurai" or "Grand Illusion" has been reduced to a theme park ride level of entertainment. Forget about subtleties, deeper meanings or even a story... in that sense, Man of Steel is not to be blamed; the road was paved a few years ago when Hollywood, unable to write and a produce a good script, turned to cheap thrills. Within that scope of cheap thrills, the Man Of Steel is one non-stop roller-coaster ride filled with explosions and fights for your average testosterone driven adolescent viewer to be excited for quite a while. When people loose sense of important things, they turn to cheap thrills, and this film would be one such thrill. With great cast who all performed quite well, and excellent effects which fill 100% of almost all shots in which characters are not yelling (which is very few), this is one of those "one (film) for me, one for them" kinda deals - do it for the studio so we all make money so we can do what we like later... That's the bad news, and it should be enough to keep a true cinefile well away from the Man Of Steel. The good news is that the script was at least not terrible, it had some resemblance of intelligence in it, although don't expect triple digits IQ, and certainly very little if any wisdom in it. It is a "good vs. evil" story with nothing new brought to the table except - fight force with force (which actually never works, but we would like to believe it does, so we watch movies which feed our illusions). Careful product placements - from I-Hop to Sears and latest Nokia phones, adds to the commercial feel of the film. A few stupidities kinda make one cringe, but in all that chaos, who will notice?
All in all, a decent FX Fest with very good cast, and lot of noise, explosions and fighting. Technically - truly well done. Story-wise? Well, it was never meant to be intellectually stimulating... but it could have been. Even thrill rides can have a clue or two about deeper human values (beyond just love at first sight) and so on, yet this film mostly fails there. A zero in that department, combined with 10 in how it was done, and you get a 5 on 1-10 scale. Watchable, but not the best way to spend your evening. I had to watch it, but otherwise I probably would not, except perhaps out of curiosity.