I’m going to spare everybody any obvious Superman references in my opening. No ‘it’s a bird…it’s a plane’ stuff. Nothing about Kryptonite or telling you to ‘look, up in the sky’. This isn’t a time for geeky references. This is a time to hang my head in disappointment that Man of Steel was not the movie I hoped it would be. I had such high expectations for this film, almost all of which were supported and lovingly caressed by a series of awesome trailers. And I’m a huge fan of director Zack Snyder’s previous films. I thought Man of Steel was going to be great. Instead, it’s a mess, from beginning to end.

Your enjoyment of Man of Steel will rest almost entirely, I think, on your tolerance for excessive CGI and fake explosions. Personally, those sorts of movies mean nothing to me anymore. Never once during Man of Steel was my pulse racing, and even Superman Returns managed that much.

Movie Rating: 2.5/5 – Pretty Bad

The worst thing about Man of Steel is the pacing. The film is in love with snap cuts that have no transitional elements whatsoever. One minute Superman is having an important conversation with Lois Lane and some military generals, the next he and Lois are suddenly standing in a desert just staring at one another. Man of Steel never takes any time to cherish a moment or a scene, even when it’s called for. First and foremost, this a Superman movie, but Snyder also tries to make it a movie about first contact with aliens, and that’s fine. It’s a perfectly reasonable plot to give a Superman movie. But the films never fully connects with that theme. You can feel the movie trying to grasp the concept, even flirting with it, but before anything meaningful can happen, it’s straight on to the next CGI explosion or spaceship.

The only thing Man of Steel really has going for it is the acting, which is generally well done all around. Henry Cavill is a generally OK Superman, at least when he’s called upon to act. Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are great as Pa and Ma Kent, though Russell Crowe is pretty much just playing Russell Crowe when it comes to Jor-El, Superman’s alien dad. I think after Les Miserables, I’m only ever going to just see Russell Crowe on screen from now on. I can’t imagine him ever inhabiting a character again. And Crowe shows up far too often in this film.

The standouts of the film are Amy Adams as Lois Lane and Michael Shannon as General Zod, the villain. Adam’s Lois is far more than any sort of damsel in distress, though it’s shocking how much leeway the U.S. Military is willing to give a lowly newspaper reporter. And Shannon is just really villainous, though the attempts to make him more than just an evil, snarling bad guy don’t really work. But that’s fine. He’s good as an evil, snarling bad guy.

Join me after the jump for my full review. There will be some SPOILERS, but probably not many.

Man of Steel is a new origin for Superman, with little to no reference to any of the previous Superman films. For that, I am grateful. I know everybody loves the original movies from the 70s and 80s, but not me. And Superman Returns already tried to tap that old well, which turned Superman Returns into a mushy, crummy love letter instead of its own film. Superhero movies have come a long way since the 70s, and even since Superman Returns, and I had hoped Man of Steel would embrace some of the newer styles and give us a poignant, powerful new beginning for the Man of Steel himself. And I suppose we do get a new beginning, but I’m just not happy with it. Man of Steel is more style than substance, and that style is frantic, cluttered and wreathed in big, boring fire.

This is 75% of the film

Famed film critic Roger Ebert once pointed out that audiences have become numb to CGI. There’s a special part of our brain that can recognize the difference between actual stunts and physical special effects versus something that’s been put together on a computer. Our eyes glaze over and the explosions and action just wash over us with no visceral thrill. That’s what it was like watching Man of Steel. Whether it’s Jor-El flying through a spaceship battle or Superman fighting a pair of giant metal tentacles for no damn reason, the action is boring because it’s just so obviously fake. I can’t stress this enough. And not only that, but the characters involved have very little to do with the action. They don’t connect to it, in part because it looks and feels fake, but also in part because the characters simply aren’t fleshed out enough for the action to matter.

I’m sure everybody remembers the most exciting scene in last year’s The Avengers, when Bruce Banner revealed, “I’m always angry,” and then Hulked out just in time to punch that giant Leviathan snake thing. I remember that the audience in my theater went nuts when they saw that, gasping and cheering in excitement. The scene was amazing, and not just because Hulk punched something. It was amazing because we’d spent the whole movie building up Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and the relationship between the two. We’d also spent several minutes establishing the threat and the scale of the Leviathan, and how it was too much for the other Avengers to handle.

So when Hulk punched the damn thing, we cared. We cared about the character, we cared about the accomplishment, and we cared about what it brought to the movie.

There are no moments like that in Man of Steel. Maybe one, but it’s a stretch.

At least the costume looks nice

I’m fairly certain that most everybody knows Superman’s origin story. He’s the last son of the planet Krypton, which exploded, but there was just enough time for his parents to send him rocketing to Earth. Fueled by our yellow sun and different gravity, Superman developed incredible powers and then used them to help people. The movie pretty much sticks to that basic story, with a few twists here and there. I’m not one of those comic book geeks who demands a slavish translation of comic to film, so I was perfectly fine with most of the changes, even some of the ones that will be very controversial to hardcore Superman fans.

Though there was one scene with Jonathan Kent that pissed me off and made me question whether this was a Superman movie at all.

I mean, he’s in the movie, but that’s about it

There may have been a couple of those scenes, actually. Like the one time in the movie where somebody needed some actual rescuing, Superman was still busy fighting those CGI robo-tentacles. I’m surprised he actually found time to fight the bad guy. There’s no sense of wonder to Superman in this film, no sense that he is anything more than a dude in a fluttering red cape. He’s not larger-than-life, he’s not alien (no matter how much the movie tries to say he is), and he’s not very special. He’s just a typical superhero guy who can zip around really fast and punch people. I think Cavill’s performance is fine, and Superman is definitely the protagonist, but there’s nothing especially ‘super’ about Superman.

Though the movie did get one cheer from the audience when one of the female characters said Superman was hot. The fangirls seemed to enjoy that one.

General Zod works as a villain and as the central conflict that moves the movie along. Like I said, Michael Shannon is pretty great in the role, giving it every ounce of his maniacal acting glee. Unfortunately, everything else around Zod is pretty bogus. He’s got a few henchmen, though none of them rise to any particular height as characters. He’s surrounded by all manner of spacecraft and alien technology, but that just devolves into boring, CGI space junk. The movie tries to play up the idea that Zod is the first real contact Earth has with alien life, and the idea that he’s some kind of opposite to Superman in terms of how humanity views aliens, but neither theme really connects, as far as I’m concerned. And his master plan has one huge plot hole that I won’t spoil here.

You will believe a man can violate your soul with his eyes

As I said, the real problem with this movie is pacing, and that’s at the heart of all other problems. The movie refuses to stay still, whether it’s snap-cutting to the next scene or simply shaking the camera to liven up the action scenes. Take the opening scene on Krypton, for example. One moment we’re watching Kal-el be born. Then suddenly Jor-el is talking to the Krypton High Council about the planet dying. Then suddenly Zod shows up to launch a coup, and it becomes this insane action film of Jor-el vs. Zod. I almost thought Krypton was going to blow up because of Zod’s war.  But then suddenly Zod is captured and we see him sentenced to the Phantom Zone. Then even more suddenly, we cut to Superman’s mom watching out her window as the planet explodes. There is no transition between Zod being zapped to the Phantom Zone and Kal’s mom looking out her window at erupting volcanoes.

When the hell did they find the time to hold a court hearing for Zod when the planet’s surface was about to erupt in lava geysers!?

The pacing doesn’t get any better once the movie switches to Earth. Within like 10 minutes, we go from Clark Kent bumming around Nova Scotia trying to find his place in the world to Lois and Clark both easily sneaking aboard an alien spacecraft buried in the Arctic (which just so happens to be Kryptonian, because I guess they couldn’t find a more elegant way for Clark to learn the history of his people). Then 10 minutes later, Lois has figured out her mystery man is Clark Kent and she tracks him all the way back to Smallville. The movie speeds through everything and barely takes more than a couple of minutes to devote to any scene or character interaction.

This scene? You already saw it all in the trailer

Character, not spectacle, is the key to a good superhero movie. The Iron Man films aren’t successful because people like watching robots beat on other robots. They’re successful because Robert Downey Jr. creates a believable and lovable character in Tony Stark, someone who we can root for and someone who we want to see both in and out of the armor. The movies take time to build up Stark’s personalty, as well as his relationships with both the supporting characters and the villains. We know and understand the stakes of the Iron Man films, and we know where Tony Stark stands in all of them. We care that Tony is having an existential crisis because we care about Tony.

The only thing Man of Steel really cares about is what big CGI stunt can they throw at Superman next.