I have a habit of watching movies/tv shows long after they came out (I still have never seen Breaking Bad even though I bet I would love it). So I decided to do something constructive with it by reviewing stuff that I came to late. So here is a review of Man of Steel.

Man of Steel’s first half is by far the most interesting Superman story that I have ever seen. In a lot of ways it is similar to the Batman Begins. An origin story that is told through flashbacks. We start with the destruction of Krypton and how Kal-El/Clark Kent gets sent from the dying planet to the planet of Earth for safe haven. He lands in a space pod and is found by the couple of Jonathan and Martha Kent. They adopt him as if he was one of their own and raise him to be just like any other boy. But he is not like any other kid. He has supernatural abilities like super strength and heat vision and cold breath and blah blah blah you get it by now don’t you. Most people know Superman’s origin story by now that it almost serves no purpose rehashing to you guys again.

There is a lot to like about this movie. I for one really enjoyed how they made Clark Kent an introvert trying to find his place on the planet earth. He keeps going from one job to another but somehow manages to mess it up because of using his power to save people. Using his powers forces him into hiding because his earth father tells him that he is worried that the people of Earth won’t accept him for his abilities. So he wanders from place to place hoping to find his place in the world. But that is the internal conflict that is present to him. He can’t live like a normal human being because he isn’t one. So he is trapped in this eternal struggle to be a regular person who has a decent job. Thats what normal people want right? But again he isn’t normal person so he can’t. This is a far more interesting take than the goody two shoes superman we came to expect from the Christopher Reeves Superman movies.

Where this movie goes wrong is in the second half. Where the producers of the film decided to give Zack Snyder free reign to do all sorts of Zack Snyder things. By Zack Snyder things I mean an insane amount of CGI effects. I’m not against CGI at all and while the effects do look real good in this film, it ultimately makes the movie run out of steam. I enjoyed the parts of the film where Superman was trying to find his place in society and obviously I want to see Superman punch stuff. But in a way the action scenes didn’t hit hard enough for me to enjoy them. Sure we get General Zod going nuts and destroying a building (which we now know is Wayne Financial Tower, as in Bruce Wayne). But the rest of the fight didn’t seem that impactful to me.

Speaking of that final encounter let’s talk about my biggest problem with the movie which is the complete and utter devastation of Metropolis as a result of Superman and Zod fighting. This entire fight was very out of character for Superman. If anyone has watched the Christopher Reeves Superman movies or even the Superman animated series, they would know that Superman is very aware of his surrounding and uses his powers carefully as to not completely decimate Earth’s population. It seemed like Zack Snyder just threw that concept out the window for this version of Superman but it even seems out of character for this Superman as well. In the flashback sequences for Clark Kent we see a sense of wanting to protect innocent people much to his father’s chagrin. But they completely ignore and have Superman ram through buildings with reckless abandon whilst causing an immense amount of collateral damage. What makes it worse is that they don’t even address the complete destruction of Metropolis. It all seemed very over the top.

I think that Man of Steel has a lot of problems in an otherwise good direction for the Superman character. I really did enjoy the first half of the movie a lot but it eventually became kind of boring and didn’t help that movie was over 2 hours long. I feel like if there was someone on the sideline telling Zack Snyder to reel it back in, it would have been a damn good movie. But with these shortcomings I feel that movie fell short of its promising start.

I’ll give it 3 ½ stars out of 5

edit: grammer