Loads of potential wasted

Rating: 6/10 (15 November 2013)

The first forty-five minutes of this movie makes it look like we're going somewhere worthwhile, but from there it's a train wreck. The flimsy plot suffers from bad writing, but the occasional scene sneaks in with a snippet of decent story.
The quick version of the plot is: Kal El comes to Earth; we see some back story; General Zod comes to Earth; there's a big fight; the end.
I decided there must be missing scenes cut to make room for pointless fights. The thread of Clark's relationship with Lois Lane is an example. They have no development time between them, then smooch toward the movie end.
The dialog was clunky. Lines from Clark and Zod came out sounding like something a sixth-grader might say. I can't fault the actors entirely for that, either. The lines were just bad.
The science of the film stood out for the wrong reasons. The thing with science fiction is to make the reasoning of the science in the fiction sound believable, even if it is totally fabricated. For example, Clark boarded the Kryptonian ship and the atmosphere weakened him. The atmosphere is just magic that way.
The importance of thought in the science department was traded for fight scenes that resulted in nothing but broken background scenery, and no plot advancement. About forty-percent of the movie was useless pugilism, which took up most of the second half of the film. If it weren't for the CGI environments breaking apart, the characters might as well have been standing around beating each other with Nerf bats for an hour. That might have been more entertaining, I suppose.