Ashes and Soot...

Rating: 4/10 (6 December 2013)

The best thing I can say about "The Man of Steel" is that it is, well deeply imaginable. But is that always a good thing? Is this what the director of "300" dove the waters of his spirit deep to find, a darkening and almost inaccessible alienation of the Superman dynamic, until it is almost unrecognizable as the "Man of Steel?" These are iconic characters submerged into the depths of a graphic novelist's imagination, where beauty is transformed to ugliness, where divinity is transformed to the demonic, where a heavenly vision is turned hellish, in the name of a realism that exists only in this gifted filmmaker's mind. Yes, he is extremely talented, but at what cost to the moviegoer, who sits in naïve desperation at his dark, alien vision, reaching into the gloomy gray of it to grope for some earthbound substance, to find a character named Clark Kent, and another one named Superman. Somewhere in this gray, clouded vision of ashes, they are lost.