Man of Steel

As I’m continuing this near-endless journey through DC films, I’m finally making my way towards the more recent Superman entries. Man of Steel is the last Superman film I’ve already seen, but it is a different experience as the 6th Superman film I’ve seen in the last few weeks. The only other Superman film I had seen, Superman Returns, was much more enjoyable after wading through the first four disasters, so I was hopeful that I would like Man of Steel more as well. I was, once again, disappointed.

Man of Steel has its strengths. It is the first movie to have an enjoyable Superman action scene, but unfortunately that scene lasts for almost an hour. There’s only so many ways you can have guys fly around and punch each other real hard before it stops being interesting to watch. The actors are solid, if under used. Most of the characters are significantly less interesting than they were in Superman Returns, except Superman himself who continues to be a fine, if not particularly engaging character. This film tried to dig deeper in his relationship with his father on Earth to flesh out Superman, which added some of the more interesting scenes but didn’t really change the fact that Superman is a boring hero.

Man of Steel also has a fairly lengthy, bizarre opening scene on Krypton, which now has spaceships and dragons and all other sorts of fantasies that I’ll talk about more in the Spoilers section. The short version is that the set up to the plot is pretty dumb. Then, there are a variety of Superman making his way in the world scenes, flashback scenes to his Earth father, interactions with his Krypton father… there’s a lot going on. Add that to the incredibly long fight scene, and there’s not a lot of room for any of the characters to shine.

Overall, there’s some potential here, but the movie turns out to just be fine. I give it a 5, and am back to being on the more negative side of IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.