I though it was a pretty good movie.
(I'd like to point out that everything "spoiler worthy" has been tagged and you can read everything else safely. It mostly constitutes opinions on things you already know. Otherwise, please beware of the spoiler tags.)
Henry Cavill doesn't have much of a personality in the title role but at least he is allowed to show more emotion than Routh ever did in that other attempted revival. So he's much more palatable as the main character. Don't get me wrong, he's still playing Sups like the square boy scout that he is, but he gets to tap a wider emotional range (as opposed to Routh's one-note melancholy stare). Amy Adams is a bit more action-y as the new Lois Lane and even gets to
Michael Shannon is good as the villain Zod, though I missed some of Terence Stamp's mysticism and hamminess from Superman II. Shannon's Zod is pretty straightforward as a villain. I love the casting of the secondary characters - Morpheus as Perry White, Maximus as Sup's dad, and the Kevin Costner/Diane Lane couple as the Kents are all spot-on.
And now about the plot...
All in all, it's a pretty good movie. Snyder is known for his visual excesses but here he spreads himself thin and does a sober job in presenting the action. You can tell producer/"story by" Nolan had a LOT of hand in the script, since it mirrors Batman Begins' so much. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.
Closing thoughts? It's a good movie. Not wonderfully good, not eminently memorable. The inventiveness comes and goes. The guiding point for the making of this movie seems to have been "let's not take any risks with anything". So yeah, awfully predictable as well. But it's also fun, the 3D pays off in spades around the finale, the casting is top notch and it's a decent foundation for an even better sequel.
EDIT: Also I'd like to point out that after hearing the line "This is madness!" I was fully expecting someone to reply "This. Is. Krypton!". Alas, we are not so lucky. But seriously though, that took me off from the movie for a sec. Good thing it happens near the beginning. Is it true Snyder likes to reference his other movies at the beginning of the following ones?
EDIT: Also, what's everybody's problem with Superman doing you know what to Zod? Dude made the same thing in Superman II!
(I'd like to point out that everything "spoiler worthy" has been tagged and you can read everything else safely. It mostly constitutes opinions on things you already know. Otherwise, please beware of the spoiler tags.)
Henry Cavill doesn't have much of a personality in the title role but at least he is allowed to show more emotion than Routh ever did in that other attempted revival. So he's much more palatable as the main character. Don't get me wrong, he's still playing Sups like the square boy scout that he is, but he gets to tap a wider emotional range (as opposed to Routh's one-note melancholy stare). Amy Adams is a bit more action-y as the new Lois Lane and even gets to
a) fight off actual Kryptonians and b) escape for herself, or at least get halfway through an escape attempt, before Sups rescues his damsel in distress.
And now about the plot...
The first act is essentially one big self-destructing sequence, as we hang around Krypton for about 20 mins while the planet is literally crumbling to pieces. It's both gripping and awesome, and we get to see Jor-El (Sup's dad) in full-fledged action against Zod and his minions. The mythos we all know plays out as usual - Kal-El gets ejected towards Earth, and the bad guys are imprisoned after a failed coup. The script makes it so that Zod kills Jor himself, which adds up to the inevitable confrontation later on. And the one thing that didn't quite make sense - why is Zod staging a military coup while the world literally explodes? What was he trying to gain by that?
The weaker link of the movie, I think. We're constantly cutting between two time frames:
1) Kal's existentialist looking-for-myself walkabout as he roams the Earth (i.e. the US) while averting disaster and being a nice guy in general. Tell me he doesn't look remarkably like Wolverine at a distance - he's introduced as bearded, muscular, frumpy adult who is shirtless and has something that looks like dog tags hanging against his chest. Around now we're also introduced to the Daily Planet staff, etc.
2) Kal's childhood, which is so much more interesting than his dreary adult quest for whatever. Here's a fun thing that never occurred to me about Superman - he grows up unable to control his powers, so that his X-Ray vision forces him to watch his school classmates and the sweet teacher as monstrous skeletons, for example; and his Super Hearing forces him to hear everything nasty the skeletons say about him. I thought that was a nifty take.
The reason I find this so weak is that the whole walkabout is so bland, it feels like a device to lengthen the movie and make you root for the other half of the 2nd act: Clark's childhood. I wish the movie had been more straightforward about Clark's "road to becoming Superman", because the road itself is so straightforward: Clark grows up with the right kind of values, daddy Kent dies (an incredibly idiot death involving the family dog, by the way) so that Clark ciments those values, and the road is complete when he finds the fortress of solitude (a spaceship) and learns from holo-Jor about Krypton and such. It's a very, very linear highway of one-tack notes and elementary character development. And here I would like to politely suggest that the reason this scrambled timeline structure worked so well in Batman Begins is because Bruce goes through a lot of "states of mind" in his journey to become Batman (fear, guilt, confusion, revenge, shame and eventual moral upper-hand by refusing one hero's call - the League of Shadows - by accepting a different, more personal kind of call - Batman. Clark's "road to Superman" is a follow-the-dotted-line affair, and as such scrambling around the 2nd act's chronology into two or three timelines feels forced and unnecessary.
1) Kal's existentialist looking-for-myself walkabout as he roams the Earth (i.e. the US) while averting disaster and being a nice guy in general. Tell me he doesn't look remarkably like Wolverine at a distance - he's introduced as bearded, muscular, frumpy adult who is shirtless and has something that looks like dog tags hanging against his chest. Around now we're also introduced to the Daily Planet staff, etc.
2) Kal's childhood, which is so much more interesting than his dreary adult quest for whatever. Here's a fun thing that never occurred to me about Superman - he grows up unable to control his powers, so that his X-Ray vision forces him to watch his school classmates and the sweet teacher as monstrous skeletons, for example; and his Super Hearing forces him to hear everything nasty the skeletons say about him. I thought that was a nifty take.
The reason I find this so weak is that the whole walkabout is so bland, it feels like a device to lengthen the movie and make you root for the other half of the 2nd act: Clark's childhood. I wish the movie had been more straightforward about Clark's "road to becoming Superman", because the road itself is so straightforward: Clark grows up with the right kind of values, daddy Kent dies (an incredibly idiot death involving the family dog, by the way) so that Clark ciments those values, and the road is complete when he finds the fortress of solitude (a spaceship) and learns from holo-Jor about Krypton and such. It's a very, very linear highway of one-tack notes and elementary character development. And here I would like to politely suggest that the reason this scrambled timeline structure worked so well in Batman Begins is because Bruce goes through a lot of "states of mind" in his journey to become Batman (fear, guilt, confusion, revenge, shame and eventual moral upper-hand by refusing one hero's call - the League of Shadows - by accepting a different, more personal kind of call - Batman. Clark's "road to Superman" is a follow-the-dotted-line affair, and as such scrambling around the 2nd act's chronology into two or three timelines feels forced and unnecessary.
The big finale involves Zod's return, obviously, and the lengthy, lengthy fight sequence/s that make up a whole act. It works and we're interested in Superman because a) he's never actually fought before, so he's still in the learning process, b) it's against other Kryptonians, so the stakes are even and c) there isn't much action going on anywhere else in this movie, save the first 20 mins and some obligatory feats of strength, so it feels appropriately climactic.
All in all, it's a pretty good movie. Snyder is known for his visual excesses but here he spreads himself thin and does a sober job in presenting the action. You can tell producer/"story by" Nolan had a LOT of hand in the script, since it mirrors Batman Begins' so much. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.
-We see a couple of "Lexcorp" ads, so you can expect Luthor to play Joker in the following movie.
-Fishburne as Perry White is severely underused. We see him twice in some throaway scenes before he transforms into just another random extra in the fleeing crowd. I wish they could've given the guy something more interesting to do.
-There was some flaming about Jimmy Olsen becoming "Jenny Olsen". There is one character called Jenny in the movie that sticks around Perry in her scenes, but not once are we given her surname or any indication she's there to replace Jimmy as a photographer or future character.
-No Kriptonite. It'll probably show up when Lex does, since he needs some sort of upper hand on Superman.
-Fishburne as Perry White is severely underused. We see him twice in some throaway scenes before he transforms into just another random extra in the fleeing crowd. I wish they could've given the guy something more interesting to do.
-There was some flaming about Jimmy Olsen becoming "Jenny Olsen". There is one character called Jenny in the movie that sticks around Perry in her scenes, but not once are we given her surname or any indication she's there to replace Jimmy as a photographer or future character.
-No Kriptonite. It'll probably show up when Lex does, since he needs some sort of upper hand on Superman.
Closing thoughts? It's a good movie. Not wonderfully good, not eminently memorable. The inventiveness comes and goes. The guiding point for the making of this movie seems to have been "let's not take any risks with anything". So yeah, awfully predictable as well. But it's also fun, the 3D pays off in spades around the finale, the casting is top notch and it's a decent foundation for an even better sequel.
EDIT: Also I'd like to point out that after hearing the line "This is madness!" I was fully expecting someone to reply "This. Is. Krypton!". Alas, we are not so lucky. But seriously though, that took me off from the movie for a sec. Good thing it happens near the beginning. Is it true Snyder likes to reference his other movies at the beginning of the following ones?
EDIT: Also, what's everybody's problem with Superman doing you know what to Zod? Dude made the same thing in Superman II!
