Man of Steel is just awful. It’s a busy, loud, incoherent and unsatisfying mess of incomplete ideas, smugly self-referential homilies, bombastic (but dull) set pieces and too, too big a budget. The story is pathetically shallow: General Zod, banished from the planet Klingon, arrives in Kansas to reclaim an ancient codex that’s been stored in Superman’s DNA, and with which he can colonise Earth. That’s it. That’s all. Really.
So we get sit through two turgid hours of extrapolated back story of Superman’s Dad (Russell Crowe playing Marlon Brando playing Jor-el) and environmental collapse of the home planet. And flashbacked tales of how the young Clark struggled to fit in as a child without belting the big boys. We get another metropolis destroyed by rampant aliens (imagine Avengers flashbacks. Only Avengers did it better.) We get Amy Adams as a reporter who’s more whiny than awesome. We also get lots and lots of scenes of warring protagonists charging each other, shouting. Why do they do that in movies? Its just too dreadful. Henry Cavill (Henry Freakin Cavill) is gorgeous as usual, but there’s zippety spark between him and Lois, or him and anyone actually. Man of Steel is really just boring, bloated, joyless, insincere and completely lacking in novelty or imagination. I hated it.