Too pretentious for a superhero movie

Rating: 3/10 (23 June 2013)

I love the new age of superhero movies. Most manage to dance on the border between fun and serious, managing to reach the essence of the superhero and posing great questions about morality, being different in a cruel world, how moral values are affected by great power, etc. All the "man's" like Batman, Spiderman, X-men and others have managed a great mix of character building, action and introspection of what means to be a superhero.
The new Superman doesn't.
It has a good cast, a decent score but it falls straight into the theme of a pure action movie.
The characters have no soul, no personality. Lois Lane for example, is not defined by anything. She is thrown into a story then pushed around by events. Lois looks like just a pawn, with no real reason to be there (why do the aliens want her, why was she even there when superman is handed over? why is she in the plane with superman's former cradle? she's not really needed at all). Al we know is that as a reporter she has no trouble lying (she claims that the military tried to tell her that the Kryptonian survey ship was a submarine but she believes it's alien while in fact she's the one who first said it could be a submarine while the colonel told her it's unlikely).
Superman is not much of a character either. We know that as an adult he has no problem stealing from the poor. We know that as a youngster his adoptive father tried to push him away from saving people, something he is obviously unable to obey. The movie tries to sell the idea that his drive to save people has something to do with daddy issues (he saw his adoptive father die while he was forbidden to help). But that's not needed at all. He always had this drive and his motivation never goes beyond just some inner common sense. There's nothing really defining Superman (he's never known another Kryptionian yet he screams his lungs out when he kills one to protect the people he knows - why? the general was in the end just some alien).
The mighty and advanced Kryptonian civilization doesn't recognize his own doom - that seems to happen to all civilizations so I can let that slide. What I can't let slide is that even when they realize it's too late for their world, they still prefer to send their criminals into space (thus saving them and giving them a boost for finding and exacting revenge on Krypton's last hope) - instead of saving a few more of their own. Does that make sense to anyone?
The bad guys are a joke. Military people who don't seem to use any strategy whatsoever, they just randomly charge Superman and failing (remember, these are military people from an advanced race who are taking on a much younger and inexperienced guy who basically has no military training). There were several of them who could've easily destroy Earth's forces (not just the US, mind you) while Superman was fighting some of them.
Overall, the story is too poor and manages to ignore any consistency that we find in the comics. It's sad really to watch as the movie tries to take itself much too seriously (Zod screaming: "I have no people"! when all I could think of was "well, that happens sometimes" while someone else in the audience said something amounting to: "if he doesn't beat Superman over the head with the Eiffel tower, I wasted my money").
Yes, that's about it.