Henry Cavill is the right choice

Rating: 8/10 (1 July 2017)

When I was a kid I read Superman comics especially. I liked Superman, but I had no interest at all in Batman. After all, Batman was just a guy with a lot of gadgets and a lot of money. If you were going to follow superheros then that meant people with actual superpowers. (And I never liked the heros' kid sidekicks either -- Robin, Speedy, and the others. Thankfully Superman never had one.) But nowadays, Batman is the one who fits the zeitgeist: he matches up better with our angst-ridden, dystopian age where darkness and menace seem to be everywhere. Director Zack Snyder suits that style very well. Unfortunately he's the wrong fit for Man of Steel. Superman *must* embody everything good and optimistic about the world -- he's the product not just of Krypton but of sunny Kansas wheatfields and a morality of simple truth and justice. He needs to be the best of us.
I wish that Snyder and his writers had been able to buy into that; we'd have been given a much truer Superman movie that way. Instead, Henry Cavill (who, really, looks the part every inch as much as the classic Christopher Reeve) has to wade through a script full of 'problems' put on the shoulders of the Man of Steel including a tortured, secretive childhood, self-doubts and insecurities, and years as a young man spent in the shadows trying to avoid public recognition. Credit to the team that this all does work, sort of. But it's an awkward fit.
Nevertheless, I (mostly) had a good time watching this in the theater. The special effects are excellent as are all the supporting cast of big-name actors. The final half-hour or so of huge action scenes where Supes has to stop the alien invasion from the Kryptonians is big, all right. The sheer scale of the action didn't bother me at all -- this is Superman! It SHOULD be big. For example, I loved the fistfight-in-the-air with Zod and his minions: it's visually imaginative and it fit beautifully what superstrong characters ought to be able to do. But it just got too complicated and went on too long.
Killing Zod caused a big flap in the media, but frankly I wasn't bothered by that. The plain fact of the script is that Zod earned that reward many times over and essentially forced S into doing it, in order to save the lives of more humans about to be killed. Was he supposed to find some other way out of it?
Bottom line: very worth seeing as the start to the DC Extended Universe, and well done by Henry Cavill. We couldn't foresee, though, that just 4 years later, Wonder Woman would come along -- with a different director! -- and raise the bar much higher for quality superhero movies.