'Man of Steel' Review: With Spoilers

 

Man of Steel gives us a great Superman story that is more grounded than any other attempt at telling this story.

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Man of Steel stars eye-candy hunk Henry Cavill as Clark Kent/Kal El, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Michael Shannon as General Zod.

Other cast includes Diane Lane as Martha Kent, Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent, Russell Crowe as Jor El, Ayelet Zurer as Lara Lor-Wan (His Krypton mom).

Harry Lennix, Christopher Meloni, Laurence Fishburne, and others fill out a worthy cast of supporting characters.

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Even though we've seen the origin story of Superman time and time again, we finally have a worthy origin story of Kal El's birth and detailed circumstances on how he got himself shot off into space by his parents.

SPOILERS: 

We get much more info about Krypton's society than we've ever seen before.  And it was well done. 

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In this 143-minute film, it spends the first sixty minutes using a fascinating method of telling the tale, where we start out on Krypton, then flip to present day, then back to his Earth-time youth and such.

This technique kept this movie-goer focused on the story at hand, and what was going on, when.

The tale told is one of Clark Kent's struggles as a child, with his alien origins, and what he should and should not do.  The premise being that once the world knew of his existence, that would change so many things with our humanity and the burden he would have to shoulder after that happens.

But then, Zod shows up.

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Director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) brought his style of visuals to the screen once again.  We had some great visuals of Krypton, the incredible flying scenes, the subtle moments of heroism all felt like they had his signature in them.

The screenplay was drafted by David S. Goyer and the story co-written with Christopher Nolan, had Nolan's fingerprints all over it. 

SPOILERS:

This time around, we had a very mature, down-to-earth, tale of Kal El and his conflicts.  Kal El seemed vulnerable throughout, and unlike any previous chapters of the Superman movie franchise, this battle involved Superman and humans, fighting together against the common foe.

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Cavill was a very different Clark Kent, while for me, Lois Lane could have been played by anyone. But Adams didn't mess it up.  It just wasn't a standout performance for me.

But wow on Michael Shannon, as the best General Zod I've ever seen.  Dang!

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Technically, I should be looking at this movie as a popcorn movie, considering the fantasy subject matter, but as usual, Nolan and company brought it down to Earth and gave us a great story about Kal El's struggles and how he developed his skills and powers.

There were a few annoyances or flaws that detracted a bit for me, but I think pure popcornists won't mind at all. (See the details of those annoyances in the spoilers section below.)

Though I have to say, I might feel sorry for anyone seeing this in 3D.  There's a lot that happens on the screen during many moments and I'm not sure just how that might track in the visual world with 3D glasses on.

I did notice a few kids in the audience, and it seemed, from their reactions during the movie, that this movie might be a bit too mature in details that develop the story along for them.  (If you can define sitting with the heads in their hands, face down, as a sense of pure kid-boredom that is.)

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Man of Steel gets an easy 9 out of 10 on the popcorn movie scale!  I think it's worthy of the box office costs!

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SPOILERS

At first, I was a bit confused about the time frames between the scout ship having been in the ice, and the 30+ years Kal El was on Earth.

When Jonathan Kent died, even though it made a point about Clark hiding his abilities, it made no sense what-so-ever that dad would go get the dog or that he would be so willing to die to hide Clark's talents.

I'm not sure just how Clark and Lois actually connected enough to connect like they do in the movie.  Did anyone see what happened?

Humans willingly facing off against Zod and his minions seemed incredibly pointless.

I found it interesting that some folks discovered who Clark/Kal El/Superman was in the film.  It wasn't a rampant world-discovery, but there seemed to be enough people who knew, to make it interesting.

No other meta-humans were noticed by this movie-goer, but I did catch a few nods to other entities within the DC universe.  There were a few LexCorp and Wayne Enterprises logos to be had for all to see.


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