Michael Shannon is Awesome and Man of Steel Sucks

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2013)

**Spoilers** Nothing too specific, but if that sort of thing ruffles your panties, just read the title, move along, and just know I was disappointed. Without further ado:
I went to see MoS last night, and it was underwhelming in all of the ways that Batman Begins wasn't. The film had the tall order of fitting in all of this mythos and still delivering on being a comic book action movie. It was too much to fit into the running time to see Jor-El deal with Krypton and Zod, send Kal to Earth, watch Clark grow up and deal with super puberty, find his special purpose, and then have all of the consequences manifest themselves in some serious Michael Bay explosion action in one go. No one person really brings this movie to a screeching halt, it simply drags this millstone of a backstory along the whole way and tries to distract you from the lack of character development with explosions for the final third of the movie.
I give the writers some credit for having the balls to give Lois the grit and intelligence a fictional Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter should have, she isn't a damsel in distress, and a pair of glasses isn't going to fool her for decades. I also give the writers the credit to have this chain of events end in the only option left to Superman. The problem from here is that you've taken two very archetypal Superman story dynamics and flushed them for no real reason. And at the end, after they've made Superman's identity the worst kept secret in the solar system, they put the hornrims on the 6'4" crossfit superbeast whose hometown was just leveled by aliens, and hope that no one noticed.
It's annoying to see Batman done so well, and see Superman and Green Lantern handled to death while Marvel hits all of their stories on the mark, even with a crossover story. Maybe Warner Brothers should take a cue from Disney and let DC handle some of these IPs in house.