A whole new category of bad

Rating: 1/10 (23 April 2014)

On the plus side Henry Cavill did a decent job as Superman and I liked Laurence Fishburne as Perry White.
As for the rest of the cast they were either miscast or forgettable; usually both. Even Kevin Costner was wasted. Despite his sterling Jonathan Kent, the interpretation was the same as John Schneider's in Smallville. I believe Amy Adams was once in the Muppets but I think Miss Piggy would have made a better job of playing Lois Lane.
Now for a few notes on the negative aspects of the movie:
1 My tip for beginning screenwriters is that it's a good idea to have a story and then to write some original dialogue. Mashing together plots from previous films and using dialogue rejected by Arnold Wesker does not count. I flatly refuse to believe Christopher Nolan had anything to do with the storyline as alleged in the credits.
2 Generally supervillains who can be knocked through walls, dropped from great heights and command vast forces cannot generally be killed by breaking their necks following a battle that lasts longer than the running time of the movie. (How did they do that by the way?)
3 The visuals. Oh dear, where to start? Perhaps by noting that CGI and special effects cannot be substituted for storyline but if attempting this tricky route then the visuals had better be the best. In this film good effects have been replaced by blurry CGI, composites that are less convincing than the backgrounds painted on glass in films of the 1950s and whirly things that make no sense either visually or dramatically. I might have mentioned previously that the special effects section of the film is longer than the film itself. I believe the running time of the movie is just less than a week whilst the battle scenes go on for at least a year. (How did they do that by the way?)
I'm generally a fan of superhero movies despite being in my 60s and I hate the way that "serious" critics automatically dismiss films in this genre. I also liked what Zack Snyder did with Watchmen and 300 but this film belongs to an entirely new category of bad. Man of the Steel is the epitome of the film that might impress a ten year old boy but is incomprehensible to a sentient adult. It's that film the critics imagine to be bad by definition before it's even been viewed. It's that film your sceptical friends, who don't believe you when you say superhero movies can be good, will point to and say "See, I told you it was all rubbish." In this case I couldn't even begin to argue with them.