Pan of Steel

Superman defeated by arch-enemy, Zack Snyder

Prometheus, you promised so much, delivered so little, and yet had moments that remain in the mind.  The auto-C-section 3000; the greatest scientific minds on Earth doing the dumbest things in space; running in the same vector as a following object of greater velocity. On watching Man of Steel, it's clear now that a moronically memorable film is preferable to an instantly forgettable lightshow.

Man of Steel, how I hate thee.  Let me count the ways.

1. O Continuity, Where Art Thou?  It's rare to watch a film that so brazenly disregards the need to have scenes coalesce together to form a single narrative thread.  Man of Steel lurches from one vignette to the next, with each bearing only a scant thematic or emotional connection to the next.  Krypton civil war!  Men on a boat.  Lois Lane being bolshy to military types in the snow!  Boy talks to father.  Bad guys arrive and threaten genocide!  Something about a tornado.  It's like Memento, where scenes are purposefully relayed out of sequence, but handled by an imbecile.  
2. We haz ACTORZ!  Look, it's future Academy Award winner Michael Shannon, with actual Academy Award winners Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner.  Amy Adams is sassy, and Diane Lane is classy - we chose our women for substance, not show.  Guys you love from TV - there's him from CSI and Hannibal being Perry White, and isn't that Toby Zeigler?!  Henry Cavill: broody yet lovable, with a body you only see in Zack Snyder movies.  Ok actors, read these ham-fisted lines I wrote on the back of a beer mat ("RELEASE THE WORLD ENGINE!") and fuck off.  I have an effects budget to burn.
3. Rated U for Mild Peril.  Whole metropolitan skyscrapers collapsing, roads being shredded, Kryptonians with the density of titanum cannonballs being hurled in every direction, and seemingly this is only going to affect 4 people that work in the Daily Planet.  Later, the entire planet is about to be destroyed, 6 and a half billion men, women and children - not to mention all the other sentient and non-sentient life - crushed by the biggest environmental disaster the world has ever known.  Same 4 people affected.  Right at the end, a small family are nearly incinerated by the big bad, forcing Superman to kill (sorry, spoiler alert).  I guess the several thousand that are already dead in Metropolis, plus the hundred of thousands being rushed to emergency rooms, they weren't worth getting angry for because they were off-screen.  I've felt more tension and threat crossing the road in front of my office.  And it's a quiet road.
4. Christopher Nolan, I presume?  Spoiler alert, but this has to be a "The Prestige" type trick, where a Christopher Nolan clone is running around pretending to be the real Christopher Nolan, except this clone Nolan left the incubator a DNA helix short of a brain.  Everything that the Dark Knight trilogy did well, Man of Steel eschews.  The trailer hinted at a movie that walks the same line as BB, TDK, TDKR, one which asks the question "what would it be like if Batman/Superman" were real.  And then the movie goes in the exact opposite direction - "what would it be like if Superman were a live-action cartoon?"   This is not Nolan's take on Superman, this is most definitely a Zack Snyder Superman.  Nolan wouldn't be capable of making a film so vacuous.
5. Iconic?  Moronic.  Superman isn't just his powers.  He is Truth, Justice, and The American Way (this was a while ago and probably needs some revision: Truth, Justice, and The Humanist Way?).  He isn't special because he's got the super-this, and the super-that, he's special because he has the moral fibre and certitude of a divine and just being, and he is the best of us.  The movie even goes so far as to say that.  And yet, show me one scene where the film presents this - not SAYS it, but SHOWS it.  Show me that we are in the presence of greatness, not just power.  The scene where Superman dons the cape for the first time, Snyder throws it away like he's just come out of the toilet.  Learning to fly, not just leap?  It's fun and exciting, like finding money under the sofa.  Pivotal moments in the Superman mythos are given the same weight as a random cutaway, all because the movie doesn't know how to do them, and can't wait to get to the next CG section.

Bryan Singer's Superman Returns had its flaws.  Maybe it clung too desperately to Richard Donner's sentimental vision.  Maybe Routh just wasn't conventionally good looking enough to be the Superman we want (although he was a flawless Christopher Reeve Clark Kent).  Maybe it was even a little stalker/creepy.  But seeing that Superman save one aircraft from being hurled into outer space held immeasurable more thrills and excitement than watching 4 or 5 Kryptonians at full power destroy an entire city.  It also knew what Superman meant to us, and how to connect him to us mere mortals.  Man of Steel however, is a cold, noisy, mechanical film, lacking wit and wisdom in equal measure.  It treats its audience as bad parents treat their children, feeding us with sugary drinks and popcorn over a nourishing meal and cool refreshing water.  And perhaps most aptly, rather than letting us bathe in the warm, nurturing, yellow sun of Superman Returns, it instead transports us emotionally to Krypton: a planet distant, alien, and dead.