Forget the popcorn, bring some Dramamine

Rating: 5/10 (6 July 2013)

Let's face it - nobody watches a superhero movie for the quality of the acting, so some slightly wooden performances can be forgiven if the rest of the movie compensates for that in other ways.
This film spends a bit more time on the origins of Superman with the initial scenes on Krypton and some of Clark Kent's upbringing in the form of "flash-back" memories.
There's actually quite a bit more that could have been done there, especially with regard to piecing together the movements of a mysterious, nomadic individual as Kent roams the country as an itinerant young adult, drifting from job to job. This, combined with the discovery of alien technology under the ice, could have made for an "X-Files" type of movie. However, the risk is that this would bore many fans, so we get into the action pretty swiftly.
The Director's urge to "get on with the action" does mean that the plot feels a bit rushed. We trot through the sub-plot of an alien superman living amongst us, without really focusing on how the world would really react, so that we can get to the main theme of the movie, which is General Zod vs Superman with humanity enduring all the collateral damage.
Personally, I found the almost Gothic design of the Kryptonian armour and vessels to be rather reminiscent of the "Necromongers" from "The Chronicles of Riddick". This is not a problem, however, and is a nice change from the "ice crystal" Superman technology of old.
All that said, there is one huge problem with the movie in particular: the cinematography.
The cinematic cliché of using a hand-held "shaky-cam" technique, together with fast pan & zoom and quick cut editing in action sequences has been done to death. Not only that but when it's overused, it turns the movie into a blurred, nausea-inducing mess.
And that's the problem here. Almost incessant queasy-cam techniques, fast two-stage zooms, rapid pan...all with the CGI "light bloom" dial cranked over to 11. I quite literally had a dull headache by the end of the movie.
We saw this in the cinema and we were unanimous in our opinion that the queasy-cam and pan-blur made the film almost unwatchable. Perhaps it was made worse by the projection (as projections on screens tend to exacerbate pan-blur) and a good Blu-Ray print would be better? Anyway, the overall premise is good and it's definitely one of the better Superman movies. However, the occasionally mediocre acting and, in particular, the disorientating overuse of queasy-cam ruined the movie for us.