As a fan of films not comics I liked it a lot

Rating: 9/10 (30 December 2013)

Making a movie based on a comic book is a double edged sword. On the one hand a ready made canon offers ideas and plots already tested against an audience, on the other hand if you mess with this mythology you may face the ire of a million or more angry keyboards. The Superman franchise has the added problem of an already iconic movie series in its past that will always draw comparisons.(see Bryan Singer)But I am not a comic book fan, and while I love the Donner/Reeve films recent viewings have highlighted the fact that film tech and acting styles for comic book adaptations have moved on significantly since the 1970's, the Dark knight trilogy has set the new gold standard. Superman's reboot had a false start a few years ago with Superman Returns, which suffered because Bryan Singer seemed to hold the previous films in such reverence he didn't seem to be able to cut enough of the cord to make a fresh film and we ended up with a quasi sequel that had serious third act and casting problems. Mr Snyder has opted to start again and we are offered an origin story. Almost everyone (well everyone I know) could tell you something of Superman's origins so a great deal of the accepted mythology must and does appear in the film and technically this is handled with the style and panache audiences have come to expect from film budgets larger than some G.D.Ps, and some scenes are handled quite well as homages to previous efforts rather than parodies, but not much is especially new and in some of the action sequences you really could be watching any of the really muscular guy in tight suit films we have been treated to since Sam Raimi's Spiderman. Plot holes and inconsistencies are fairly minor but I'm sure will annoy a great many,my view is that for all the talk of hyper realism in comic book films these days we are watching a film about an impossibly good looking alien who can fly and shoot lasers from his dreamy eyes so a few bending of the laws of physics and idiotic moves by main characters can be forgiven for rolling the story along. Where Man of Steel really shines is in it's superior casting. Fine actors like Laurence Fishburne, Christopher Meloni and Diane Lane flesh out big characters with small roles with obvious quality,Russell Crowe manages to step out of a Brando shaped shadow and posses Jor El, (a task that even Maximus must have found tough)and Kevin Costner, well he's Kevin Costner and I don't find much wrong with that. At first I was put off a bit by Michael Shannon's rather maniacal turn as Zod but I realised I was comparing him to the quiet menace of Terrence Stamp and taken in context his shouty wild eyed performance is well suited as the foil of Henry Cavill's somewhat reserved Superman. Cavill himself worked incredibly hard to sculpt the body of a Greek god on to a lad from Jersey and he should be commended for it, but aside from the aesthetics he does awfully well to hold his own as a relative newcomer in a film bursting with stars. Finally Amy Adams continues her ever so quiet rise as one of the most dependable and likable female leads in Hollywood. It won't please everyone but I found Man of Steel to be enormous fun and in possession of much more heart than the exalted Dark Knight trilogy.