Snapping Necks and Cashing Checks

Rating: 6/10 (14 August 2013)

I went in having low expectations for this film due to my low opinion of Hack, I mean Zack, Snyder, and due to Warner Communications' dismal record of Superman film adaptations.
Therefore, when I finally saw MOS at the second run theater, I was pleasantly surprised to find that in many ways this was a decent movie. The actors playing Supes and Lois are good, the shots of Superman flying are good, a lot of the Krypton backstory is good, and Ma and Pa Kent were also good.
I am giving a lot of credit here for the wise casting decisions, since 2006's 'Superman Returns' had the worst Superman and Lois in movie history.
Also, the main storyline about Gen. Zod and his cronies wanting to terraform Earth into a New Krypton was a pretty interesting story idea.
But the movie is marred by a slow, meandering beginning, and by the excessively cluttered and complex fight sequences which characterize this stage of the digital revolution.
Worse, this film simply does not give us enough of Superman/Kal/Clark...the eponymous character is mostly a cipher. We care about him because we learned to like and trust him in previous incarnations, but more than that, we don't know.
Then there is the aspect of Superman killing one of his enemies. For the classic years of the Superman comics, Superman had a self-imposed moral code that prohibited killing, period. This was to balance out the fact that by virtue of his invulnerability, Superman never had to live with the possibility of his own death, the way a human must always live with the possibility that he could on any given day be taken out by a stray bullet, an auto accident, or a medical emergency.
Now, in this film, no such moral code is established, nor is it talked about after the villain is killed by Our Hero. By these omissions, an event of great drama and interest is reduced to mere collateral damage.
If we had earlier seen young Clark and one of his 2 fathers discuss the morality of killing, or if afterwords, Our Hero had become disgusted with himself and vowed never to kill again, that would have been good, dramatic stuff. But no, Superman snuffs out a villain and then utters one obligatory cry of regret, but otherwise he is as detached as a US president snuffing out children in Yemen with his mighty drone bombs.
Another weird thing is that this film spends a lot of time on the streets of Metropolis, as buildings are getting blown up and all heck breaking loose, showing people experiencing the carnage up close. There is miles and miles of this footage...way more than necessary to tell the story.
The way these sequences unfold, you find yourself thinking '9/11.' And for me, I complete the thought this way: '9/11...AGAIN...every year for 12 years and for the next hundred years action movies are going to keep evoking 9/11 for manipulative and jingoistic motives...phooey!!!'
And then I remember the shameful ad campaign earlier this year, with Superman's image being used to entice young people to join the National Guard, to throw their lives away as cannon fodder in the USA's imperial wars of aggression.
So, yes, this Superman is indeed and improvement on the last one. All the same, I'd prefer a more a human version, a Superman less tainted by crimes and excesses our own insanely militaristic and aggressive era. We needed a Man of Steel, instead we have a Man of Depleted Uranium.