The reviews are coming in and while not perfect, it is getting very strong reviews. I’m looking forward to this one, but probably won’t see it for a little bit, still.
Has anyone seen it yet? Thoughts?
I guess we can spoiler-box spoilers for awhile, but I’m marking the thread open spoilers to warn anyone who wants to avoid spoilers entirely.
Haven’t seen it yet, but even the negative reviews are mostly ‘This isn’t grinning Christopher Reeve in 1978’. That and there’s too much action at times, which is actually my bigger concern.
Non-critic word of mouth suggests it’s pretty awesome, though.
Actually, the reviews are kind of all over the place. I’ve read that it is an amazing comic book movie and other reviews that dislike it.
I’m still hoping it is good.
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My lovely wife managed to score three free tickets to Man of Steel last night, so we took my step son to go see it. The trailers looked pretty good, but I wasn’t convinced from them that I would like Henry Cavill as Superman. That said, he was an excellent choice, and definitely looked the part. In fact, I think all of the casting was excellent - everyone did awesome jobs. I even teared up a bit at the point where Kevin Costner as John Kent chokes up slightly and says “You are my son” to a doubting young Clark - but that could just be the sappy step daddy in me. 
So, on to the good. As mentioned, the casting was excellent. I liked that Louis Lane was far more like a modern journalist than the glorified interviewer that previous incarnations were. I liked how Jor El and Zod were portrayed as friends who often disagreed, before Zod went power mad. I liked the idea that Krypton had been a race that had long since colonized the stars, but had collapsed into an isolationist state. I liked how Clark, attempting to find his way in the world, found it consistently hard not to be a hero, and for that reason had to keep vanishing into new identities. I liked how Johnathon Kent was willing to sacrifice his life to keep his son from becoming an outsider and a freak.
All that said, I found some aspects of the movie to be less then great. The battle scenes, while spectacular to behold, were often confusing and done in something just shy of “shaky” cam. It made them quite hard to follow. More vexing was the fact that they pretty much all took place in heavily populated areas, and while I truly appreciate the realistic portrayal of the amount of damage a handful of battling titans would do to an environment, I couldn’t help but think of how many people died “off screen” in those fights, how much incredible damage Superman was directly responsible for. The Superman of the comics would have done something to draw these fights away from the public, from innocent lives, and this Superman did not. Perhaps its because he’s still new to the hero business…
That also leads to the one big problem I had with the film, and that was the resolution of the conflict with Zod. I really, REALLY dislike that Superman killed Zod, especially in such a violent manner (bare hands snapping of his neck). I understand that the movie was trying to imply that this was his only choice, but I really don’t think it was. Why were the three people that Zod was about to zap any less important than the dozens, maybe even hundreds that were killed while they were smashing around and destroying buildings? Or the hundreds probably killed when Superman disabled a starship, causing it to crash into the ground and through dozens of skyscrapers, while he left it to crash to rescue Louis Lane? I just really feel that killling Zod went against everything Superman has always stood for, and that once you open the door where it’s ok to kill a villain who is a big threat, it becomes ok to kill any one who becomes a big threat, and that’s just not the way Supes operates. It just felt like lazy writing that this was the “only way.”
All that said, I did enjoy the movie, and feel it was a good relaunch of the series, and miles beyond Superman Returns, which I didn’t like at all.
Damned, Mahaloth, you beat me to it. Just posted my review in an open spoilers thread. I’ll report it to a mod to see if it can be combined.
That’s not a very impressive argument.
Ha, wrote the review before coffee…that should be any more important not any less.
Dangit, you really got my hopes up about Louis Lane.
My big question: the opening scenes apparently have Clark with a full beard. How does he shave it off?
They don’t show him shaving in the film, but in the comics, he uses a mirror to direct his heat vision to shave.
This film was two and a half hours of relentless HOLY FUCK. It was “you sure you really want Superman? Well here’s your god damned Superman. Hope you’re happy now.”
There were a few parts of the script that didn’t make sense, and they didn’t really bother having a lot of character relationship building. But that was besides the point. This movie was all about: if a superhuman alien really grew up in our world, what would that look like? As a raw visual portrayal of that awesome power, the film just blows you away. Definitely a film worth going the IMAX 3D route.
It has decent casting for the side characters, and they are treated respectfully, but they exist only in service to the perspective of Superman himself and the story of his emergence onto the world stage. And there are some clever nods to past Superman stories as well as other movies and tropes - there is in particular a lot of similarities with Prometheus both in themes and aesthetics.
But if you are looking for a really cohesive story, or a compelling drama beyond the core theme of the burden, responsibility, and joy of having super powers, you won’t find it here. The film just isn’t about anything more than that. But if you want a realistic visceral experience of being super, you’ll get more than you could ever hope for.
I’m posting this without reading the thread, as I have tickets to go see the movie on Tuesday night. Hopefully I’ll remember to post again after I see it.
Based on the trailer, I was intrigued and hopeful that the movie would be good. I really liked the tone and look of the trailer.
The last couple days I’ve looked at rottentomatoes. I don’t want to read any spoilers, but I was disappointed that the critic score is not so good (56% right now). But I have noted that the audience score is 82%. And most of the general criticisms I’ve heard are that it’s too depressing and dark (emotionally, and visual appearance), and that there’s no humor or levity (which many reviewers seem to think is essential for their vision of Superman). Now maybe because I’m only in my early thirties, and I’ve never seen the Christopher Reeves movies all the way through, I don’t have any expectation that Superman must be light and humorous so this isn’t a problem for me. I’ve caught snippets here and there of Reeves’ movies, but I’ve never watched them all the way through. I did watch the regrettable reboot a few years ago. I’ve also heard that some critics don’t like how sci-fi the movie is, as they would prefer it was more a regular superhero story. But I love sci-fi, so I don’t think this will be something that will bother me.
Today I read a review from a movie critic that I agree with about 95% of the time (FlickFilosopher), and who doesn’t post plot spoilers in her reviews. She quite likes the movie, so now I’m much more hopeful that I’ll enjoy it as well. I’ve heard some reviewers saying it’s too much non-stop action, but I think this must be a matter of personal taste, as that reviewer says “this isn’t a movie about spectacle and it’s barely an action movie”.
Open spoilers here…
Saw it, liked it. (More than Superman Returns, at any rate. I just couldn’t seem to get up to liking ANYBODY in that movie.)
To qualify that a bit, though, I missed the leavening humor that was a factor in the first Superman movie and the Marvel movies. I like to see superhero movies taken seriously, but they run into trouble when they start taking THEMSELVES too seriously. (And this is supposed to be Superman, which was always supposed to be more lighthearted than Batman.)
But I loved the way they presented Lois in this. I’ve always loved Amy Adams and I like the way her character was written–especially the angle that she ALWAYS knew who Clark was. Shakes up the formula a bit and lets us look at the relationship in a new light.
One thing I especially liked was that while they showed plenty of Supe’s heroism, they also showed the heroism of ordinary people as well (like Colonel Hardy–and it’s wonderful to see Christopher Meloni in a high-profile movie like this), which ties in nicely to Jor-El’s pronouncement that his son can prove an inspiration to the people of Earth.
I really really liked it. I am a big fan of Superman and the character is tough to nail and I feel they did a really good job. If I have gripes it was the fighting scenes went on a bit too long, Zack Snyder really really likes cutting away to insert shots too much and the crumbling building porn was a little much.
Also likes someone above I am not sold on Superman killing Zod and as a fan of the 90s Animated series I was disappointed that Dr. Hamilton is either dead or trapped in the Phantom Zone.
Minor gripes though. The casting was excellent. Cavill is a really good Clark Kent and Superman. I also felt the device of inter-cutting his childhood and his adulthood was inspired and much better then just setting the first hour in Smallville.
If it was missing something, I think I would have liked more scenes of him saving people and possibly fighting crime and they could have condensed the big brawl at the end to make up the time.
The Lexcorp logo they made a point to show makes me itching for the sequel already.
I liked it a lot.
But the thing I don’t get is this movies version of “kryptonite”. The native air of Krypton takes away his powers. But he can travel in outer space without breathing, and with no signs of holding his breath, so why does the air from Krypton take away his powers?
Also the part where Jor-El tells him that the sun combined with the low gravity and Earths air gave him his powers. I understood that the sun was the main factor. But I was expecting the fact that he lived for 33 years breathing Earths air to have made him a little stronger than Zod. And for that to be a factor in the fight (but superman did win, so maybe it was).
Good stuff : Great cast, good plot, visually stunning and with some superb action sequences, it had a lot going for it
Bad stuff : I think Zack Snyder has a lot of potential as a director, but he really has to learn that less is more sometimes. He really doesn’t allow his story time to breath, and the film has the feel of an overlong trailer. By the time Supes and Lois kiss at the end, it didn’t feel like they’d had any time at all to build up some sort of rapport.
The film was too loud. Every scene either had explosions or ridiculously loud music on it. Don’t know if it was just the cinema I went to, but it was really distracting for the first half an hour. It had the sort of bassline that you feel vibrating in your chest
I’m quite a fan of shakycam, but it works best on the small screen. The larger the screen, the more distracting it is. I wish Hollywood would start toning it down for the Imax versions, because some scenes become unfollowable.
Overall, I’ll give it 3/5. Lots to enjoy here, but doesn’t have the charm of the Avengers, for example.
My personal fanwank, maybe the Kryptonian air contains some type of gaseous kryptonite.
Which makes you really, really question the wisdom of the “multi-millennium old” Kryptonian civilization.
Twenty thousand years of colonizing space, and they never figured out that they’d gain super powers if they stopped breathing their homeworld’s air? They should have terraformed Krypton to have an Earthlike atmosphere millennia ago.
Especially since they had colonists on Earth at one point (hence the reason Jor El knew to send his son there).
Since this thread mentions spoilers, Lex Luthor does not appear in this movie.
But blink and you will miss it: One of the trucks thrown around by General Zod was a Lexcorp truck and one of the buildings had that name.
I liked the movie, but I do think this shaky cam business only makes fights hard to follow.