Isn't so SUPER now...

Rating: 5/10 (18 March 2014)

hings go BOOM a lot in this film. Buildings collapse. Spaceships explode. There are fistfights between interplanetary beings that threaten to destroy the entire planet. It's wall to wall noise, destruction, devastation... a brilliant spectacle of cutting edge special effects.
But I emerged from the experience utterly disappointed. True, Superman was never my favourite hero. He was too powerful... and seemed to have none of the character quirks like say, Batman. I saw the first Christopher Reeve movie, many eons ago. I did enjoy the Superman Returns reboot that came out a few years before this... but it tanked, and so they're starting AGAIN from scratch. Just like they've done with Spiderman, The Hulk and will do with The Fantastic Four in the future. There are no original ideas for superhero movies any longer... when they feel a series has run it's course, they simply begin again. If only everything in life was so easy.
What they've done here is removed a lot of the human elements that made Returns so watchable and replaced them with expensive CGI. This turns the whole enterprise into one hell of a white knuckle ride, so it's diverting... to a point. But there is something missing under the bonnet of this revved up machine, and that is called soul. You can send as many objects flying through the sky as you want, fill the entire screen with action that pushes your budget to the max. But the story is so fragmented, and the characters so sketchily written, whatever goodwill that was generated by the pandemonium soon dissipated, and I was left with people I didn't care about in a film that went on for WWAAYY too long.
In the words of Martin Riggs, Maybe I'm getting too old for this ****. Or perhaps, if they'd focused as much on the script as they did the effects, I would feel far more happy with it. I know which reason my money's on... 5/10