Make the leap

Rating: 7/10 (1 September 2013)

The updated feel brings together the new version of the old storyline - Superman's coming of age. Christopher Nolan's influence is felt from costumes to credits, which is good considering his success with The Dark Knight. This is not however, wholly a Christopher Nolan movie because Zack Snyder does a fine job as the director.
The pre-production buzz for this movie must have been out of this world. The big names start from the beginning of the movie and just keep coming - Russell Crowe, Diane Lane, Christopher Meloni, Kevin Costner, Laurence Fishburne, among others, and of course the stars Amy Adams and Henry Cavill. Amy Adams as Lois Lane was solid, but not stellar. I liked her Lois Lane, but I didn't really feel as empathetic for her as I thought I should. Disappointing? Yes, but give the woman a break. She can't be expected to perform with the charisma of Giselle, her character in Enchanted, every time. No actress is that good. As for Henry Cavill as Superman, if you like bulked up, powerful, potent men, his performance won't matter after seeing him shirtless. (At least one of the two ladies that saw it with us prefers Thor, but that is a debate for someone else to moderate.) If you are like me, you want acting chops, which he proved he had in the Tudors and by his transformation here into our flying friend. His strength is as the quiet transient who moves from town to town trying to find himself and his way, and he pulls off the superpowers with the confidence one would want. The weakest of the main characters was Russell Crowe as Superman's father. I can't decide if this is the fault of the Academy Award winning actor or the writers, but either way some of his conversations felt so tedious that I thought more how flat the lines were, rather than how they were changing the plot.
The film is listed at 2 hours and 23 minutes and while it doesn't move faster than a speeding bullet, it moves quickly enough to maintain the viewers attention thanks to the plot and the special effects. The flashback scenes to Superman's childhood are informative, interesting and not overdone as they easily could be. They are also spread out enough to be unobtrusive. I felt like some of the scenes on Krypton were a little too much, as if the artists were trying too hard to be visually spectacular and to create something different from Earth. I felt that way also in the "Fortress of Solitude." That said, the special effects have added a realism here that is not seen in previous iterations. The audience is bombarded, as they should be, with visual and audio cues for the power Superman and the other characters from his native Krypton exert compared to, as the Hulk would say, "puny humans." My issue with the length of the movie is that the last fight scene seemed wholly unnecessary, creating continuity questions rather than closure.
A few of the themes are not handled well, like the idea of people not accepting others as they are, the struggle to find oneself and the raping of the natural resources of the planet. I don't need to be punched in the chest to notice them. In this case, though, that can be forgiven because with a PG-13 rating the repetition is probably for the younger audience.
While I would not go so far as to say this version is leaps and bounds better than earlier ones, this, like The Dark Knight, stands as it's own worthy interpretation. If you like action movies, see it on the big screen; don't wait to watch at home.