A loud, brutal slugfest

Rating: 6/10 (19 June 2013)

Man of Steel is a merciless bludgeoning, and nothing more. Superman keeps getting told that he's conflicted and torn between two worlds, but the plot provides no moral dilemmas for him other than "bash things." He is humanity's Jesus of punching.
The action is staged beautifully and looks great, and this from someone who hated Watchmen for every reason there is. Zack Snyder came through! If you haven't seen Man of Steel, you've never seen someone throw a person through a skyscraper and believed it. There are some moments that approach awe, such as the austere architecture and landscape of Krypton (where we spend about half an hour but which we never see not blowing up) and the famous shot of Superman breaking the sound barrier. The only problem is that it's followed by 5 more shots of Superman breaking the sound barrier. This applies to every stunt and action set-piece in the movie.
Production design is outstanding, my favorite being the Pinscreen-inspired alien computer interface. Sounds silly, but the history of Krypton told in gunmetal and graphite pixels is an inventive and lovely visual.
Unfortunately, the things that aren't alien ships, fistfights or explosions aren't interesting or good.
The music is standard Zimmerklang: brass and drums. It's monotonous and obnoxious.
The writing is... You know how trailers chop in snippets of dialogue between the cool music? "Welcome to the FBI. - His methods are... a little unconventional. - Bank of Luxembourg - twenty million dollars - stolen. - He hasn't been the same since - killed his wife." Imagine a whole movie done this way. I can barely think of an actual conversation in this movie - everything is either an order, an instruction or a threat.
The plot is easy to follow and hard to get invested in. The Badass General Zod comes to Earth from Krypton because the phantom dimension gate was disrupted by the codex DNA which became unstable when the planet core was mined for energy that was transcribed in the cellular matrix of the genesis probe that the supreme council rejected after the coup attempt which caused the distress beacon to go off in the consciousness hologram - basically, to give Superman something to chew on. Zod has henchpeople, and they all get into loud, massive fights with Superman while Earth soldiers surround them and shoot impotent blanks.
That's the common problem to watching godlike aliens fight - humanity comes off as totally useless. Lois Lane is briefly relevant once, when she plugs in an alien flash drive. And in the end, the movie gets humans to deliver a thing to a place, like a mother letting her idiot child carry a bag of chips so he can feel like he's helping.
Naturally, aside from crouching victims, the Superman canon has use for earthlings as teachers, parents, colleagues and love interests, none of which comes through in this movie. Clark Kent's entire earthly backstory comes down to: being told how historic he is by Ma and Pa, and saving people from disasters in flashbacks. All this happens in short, out-of-order clips that play like a badly-organized family slideshow. The romance with Lois Lane is non-existent, since about the only time they're on screen together is when he's catching her in mid-air.
Positive characters who die do it with such serenity that they almost look bored.
A huge battle takes place in Metropolis and results in several dozen 9/11s. Nobody dies on screen, because PG-13.
General Zod and his people could probably achieve their goals on Mars or Venus with equal success and don't have to try and kill everybody, but they can't be reasoned with because they're genetically like that.
So there it is. See this movie if you want to see Superman and his enemies punch things, punch through things, punch people, punch things through people, punch people through things and punch things through other things. But who punches the punchmen?