I enjoyed Man of Steel, but I was also disappointed. Director Zack Snyder does a great job of making the evolving young Kal-El into a character we feel for - Henry Cavill is well cast and brings a lot of compassion and heart to the character. Cavill - (along with spectacular young actors Dylan Sprayberrry and Cooper Timberline, both great as young Clark) is a great choice and his best scenes are those where he's relating to people - his parents (Costner is terrific as Pa Kent) and Amy Adams as Lois Lane. It's when Kal has to mix it up with arch foe General Zod that the audience starts to tune out.
The film's more character-driven small-scale moments are without a doubt its most pleasing - but when the film rips loose on a big canvas, things start to become numbing. We begin with an enormous opening sequence on planet Krypton with Kal's father Jor-El (Russel Crowe) warning the planetary rulers of imminent doom. Krypton is a gigantic heavily-designed place - Clad in thick, bristly armor, General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his band of cronies feel a lot like the Harkonnens in David Lynch's Dune. Shannon is a charismatic presence, but his work feels less like a performance and more like a series of him erupting into increasingly wide-eyed, clenched-jawed fury outbursts, that feel like the result of one take too many. I found myself quickly longing for the icy control and depth of Terence Stamp's Zod - whose place in history remains secure.
The first half of Man of Steel is pretty entertaining and scenes of vagabond Kal/Clark roaming the world and helping people are superb - a rescue involving an oil rig at sea is amazing - and Cavill's chemistry with Amy Adams is really nice.
But once Zod comes to Earth, despite my strong desire to love this movie, I began to check out. We just saw New York under pretty epic seige in Joss Whedon's The Avengers, and that was a completely enthralling and visceral, easy-to-follow action extravaganza. Man of Steel gives us endless Metropolis attacks, with Supe battling Zod and his armored henchfolk, with lots of high-speed hurling of bodies through buildings and such. Some scenes feel like they're alternate edits of the Destroyer street fights from Thor. After a while, it just seems too generic and annoying - particularly when rather than leave my jaw hanging at images I'd never seen before, the fights and effects are pretty blurry CGI and seem to have been hastily rendered. The Kryptonian spaceships don't evoke awe and seem to have popped over from Skyline or Battle: Los Angeles. The repetitive, middling CGI really disengages and fight after fight with Zod never thrills or catches fire. Many moments feel like the third act of The Matrix Revolutions.
I have to give Man of Steel a B-minus. It's fun a lot of the time and certainly entertaining - but would I want to own it? See it again...? Probably not, and that's always been my litmus for a movie being a great movie.
The final moments of Man of Steel are fun and certainly made me smile - if we get a sequel, I'd strongly encourage Snyder not to retell the same story we've already seen - let's get Superman in a new story - and be sure to let Cavill and Adams have a lot more time together - their energy as characters is what keeps the movie aloft - not the overwrought airborne debris.
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