Clark / Kal, cannot allow Zod to execute this plan to destroy his adopted home to create New Krypton, even though the Earth and its citizenry really hasn’t been all that great to Clark, but the fact is Zod and his minions are about as powerful as he is, plus they’ve been bred to do exactly this sort of thing, also engineered without morality, where Clark was bred to hide and suppress his abilities and is a bleeding heart.  What chance does he have?  We are confident that he has a pretty good chance, and we are confident that things are going blow up real good in the process.

So… there’s a scene in 1981’s ‘Superman II’ where Zod and his minions are doing battle with Superman and completely wrecking Metropolis.  Superman looks left, then right, observes the carnage then realizes that this is totally not cool and gets out of there.  I mean they’re destroying the city and killing people, right?  Not this Superman.  If there was building that could be destroyed or toppled or a tanker that could be blown up, Superman and Zod made sure that happened, and thousands would die in the process, because the Citizens of Metropolis did not believe in running away until it was way too late.  I’m pretty sure some of the differences we mention here are the function of the times and cost.  In 1981 destroying a city would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming since it would have to be done largely with miniatures.  In 2013, computers can do anything that you can imagine.  And the computers in ‘Man of Steel’ were awesome.  Planets explode, people ride flying wasps or whatever those things were, jets blow up, planets are terraformed, buildings collapse, buildings collapse, buildings collapse… ‘Man of Steel’ is truly something to see.   Unless you have some kind of aversion to watching buildings collapse. 

The movie itself?  Well… it was a strangely detached, very dark, oddly violent, almost completely humorless affair bookended by a pair of pretty amazing action sequences.  Though the last one did go on for an awful long time.   Henry Cavill certainly made for a good looking Superman, tall, built, solid chin, and a tendency to profile in front of the camera… just how we like our Superman.  Maybe a little stiff and he did have two emotions, those being serious and super serious, but then this Superman is going through some serious stuff. 

I guess therein lies our issue with ‘Man of Steel’ in that it is so darn… serious.  Heaven forbid we introduce some of the buffoonery of the some of those Christopher Reeve Superman movies, I mean thank goodness we didn’t have to deal with that, and I get that ‘Dark’ is the color of the day for the modern superhero movie, but even the ‘Dark Knight’ movies had more levity than this one.  Even the color palette that director Zack Snyder went for was drab and depressing.  Plus this is Superman we’re talking about, a character not defined by darkness, brooding and inner conflict… that would be Batman… but one who gets by on positivity and self confidence that leans on the edge of over confidence.  Oh well.  Go Dark or Go Home I guess.

In addition to Cavill, the performances were solid enough, Russell Crowe doing a fine job as Jor-El and we thoroughly enjoyed watching actress Antje Traue wreck scenery and kill people as the particularly psycho Super Model Minion of Zod, Faora.  Kevin Costner and Laurence Fishburn as Perry White seemed somewhat underused, however.   And we also have to admit the romance that was supposed to be occurring between Superman and Lois was undercooked, at best.  A two and half hour movie probably should’ve done a better job of building a relationship between our two leads, so when they start necking at the end of the movie, it actually seems plausible.  As an example, if Kirk and Spock started making out at the end of ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’… not that we’d be happy with that… but THAT relationship was developed and that would’ve made sense.