Balancing Between a Psychological and An Action-Packed Superman UPDATED

Rating: 5/10 (15 November 2017)

Ever since Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy changed the landscape of the superhero film, Man of Steel focuses on being the Batman Begins for a new Superman franchise. It's a Superman film for the modern ages, removing all the cliché flare and majesty that made the Christopher Reeve Superman franchise so successful and iconic (this includes pseudo-reboot Superman Returns). Man of Steel stands out as a unique Superman film in that it primarily focuses on the psychological division between Superman and Clark Kent.
Man of Steel draws from modern graphic novel iterations of Superman (see Earth One) to depict a Superman divided between either using his powers and bearing a newfound responsibility as protector of the world, or keeping his powers a secret. Told in a nonlinear format, the film explores Kal-El's childhood as Clark Kent, detailing his social isolation and psychological coping with the development of his powers, as well as being raised to suppress them from the world. The result is an emotional, psychological, and realistic portrayal of Superman in a modern society. Instead of the previous films' themes of "What would the world be like with a Superman?", this film asks "How will the world react to a Superman?" When Superman is coerced into revealing himself when General Zod arrives at Earth, what is the right choice? One issue with trying to take on an emotionally-charged script is having Zack Snyder, who, at his best, is a second unit director, take control of the project. Zack Snyder has a cookie cutter approach when it comes to visually depicting a script on film. And with that, he fails to flesh out characters when he needs to. Scenes showing characters from the Daily Planet struggling from the aftermath of the film's climactic fight lack the emotional factor because Zack Snyder didn't take the time to revise the script and flesh out those characters well enough, substituting them with literally close to 40 minutes of unnecessarily long, destructive fight scenes that could have easily been cut down to 10 minutes at most. Man of Steel ends up looking like a film still trying to find its balance between being an emotional and realistic superhero film (a la Batman Begins) or a confusing sci-fi-laden action spectacle (a la The Avengers).
The film has some questionable plot points, almost as if they were written by a high school student. Without spoiling (for those who haven't seen the film), there are events in the film that drive the character's motivations that don't seem to add up (i.e. "the scientist will miraculously figure out to do THIS so that the weird science fiction device can start working" trope). Some of these are minor, one of them is major, in fact, and can polarize critics. But be the judge of that yourself.
Overall, Man of Steel tries to find its footing with being the dark, realistic Superman film we've all been waiting for ever since Christopher Nolan started directing Batman films, but stumbles along when it tries to become a comic book spectacle. The result is a film with all the right ingredients that was overcooked.
UPDATED REVIEW: After another viewing of Man of Steel, I realized how bored I was for the last third of the film. The fighting was completely incessant and it became a predictable alien action film, evolving out of what was a great superhero film depicted with societal realism. For some reason, Snyder wanted to portray two gods fighting on screen, but we really didn't need to see 40 minutes of it with a subpar plot involving skybeams and portals again. If you cut out the last 40 minutes, you get the same movie. Man of Steel was promising for the first 2/3rds, then the action makes the film go downhill.