Man of Steel kinda sucked but not painfully so.

[POS Industries]

So I went to see an early showing of Man of Steel tonight since my store was selling them for less than a regular movie ticket due to no one wanting to buy them, and since no one was buying them I wouldn't have to deal with a full theater which is pretty much the best way to see movies. It was not horrible.

I actually really liked the first act, which explored Clark's early life and motivations via a series of disjointed flashbacks. Going back and forth between his childhood and his adult life worked a lot better visually than simply progressing through his life chronologically, at least in terms of not feeling cheesy. It then all works to come back around later, since it leads to Lois discovering Clark's identity in what was sort of a hilariously easy manner. The fanboy in me reacted negatively to this at first, but on the other hand it makes more sense given that Lois is supposed to be the greatest investigative journalist ever and it was always pretty stupid that she couldn't figure out that Superman was the big dork in the glasses sitting next to her every day for years.

Of course, Clark does a shitty job keeping his identity a secret through the whole movie anyway, so it's no surprise that he thought putting on a pair of nerd specs would fool people. Son of Krypton's greatest genius, indeed.

Otherwise, the movie was just a mess of Michael Bay-esque explosions, destroyed buildings, product placement, and authoritarian military dicksucking thinly hidden behind a veneer of high-minded introspection and washed-out broodiness that I've come to expect from the team of Christopher Nolan and David Goyer. In fact, the plot was very much along the same vein as Transformers: Our heroes in the US military battle an invading alien menace while the good guy alien punches them throughout a destroyed urban sprawl, ultimately creating more destruction and death than they stop.

At least a hundred thousand people had to have died during this movie, but Superman managed to catch a falling Lois a couple times so he saved the day enough to satisfy the audience, apparently.

Speaking of, this movie has not one, not two, but THREE damsels in distress. Lois Lane (naturally), Martha Kent, and a Daily Planet intern trapped under a pile of rubble. Superman also manages to snag a couple male soldiers out of harm's way, but none of them are played for the same degree of emotional impact as the women in need of rescue. It's a cheap dramatic tactic employed to appeal to the presumably mostly male audience a superhero movie would draw, and its overuse here is disappointing.

Kevin Costner's performance as Jonathan Kent is excellent--in fact, the acting from everyone here was great--but I feel that the writing was often confused about his motivations, though that may have simply been because the character himself was just as confused about what to do. He dies, of course, but the way he dies was changed from how it's typically presented in other media and didn't feel right to me. He's killed by a tornado as Clark and Martha watch, and while I get what they were trying to convey here, I feel it loses the lesson that Clark learns in other stories where Jonathan dies from a heart attack, because that's a thing Clark can't save people from. That inevitable, unstoppable fact of human mortality, a thing Clark may never have to experience himself but will inexorably have to suffer the pain of losing everyone around him, is something that has motivated him to make the most of being there for every loved one in his own life and to make the world a better place for the comparatively short time that everyone else on Earth gets to experience it. Jonathan dying in a way that Clark could have stopped, but didn't at his father's behest, robs Clark of this part of his personality, and merely transplants the "with great power comes great responsibility" lesson from Spider-Man. It's not a bad lesson, either, but it's not Superman's. The whole rest of the movie taught him that already.

Overall, I appreciate that this movie at least tries to explore Superman as a person more than previous movies have done, but I feel like it still ultimately failed to get a lot about the character than it could have, all while kinda rehashing a third act already done in the Avengers without any of the fun that Avengers had. Like the recent Batman movies before it, Man of Steel manages to deliver in everything but the writing, and I'm really hoping that people start catching on sooner than later that David Goyer is the worst part of every recent movie he's been a part of.