This will be a short review of Man of Steel.  I find myself not having an awful lot to say about the movie.  Further down in the spoilers section I have a few specific items I’ll go into.

No Spoilers

Man of Steel reboots Superman.  This is a difficult thing to do, because you can really only make so many changes to Superman’s origin story.  They did a decent job though.  It’s no Iron Man 3 or Avengers (or almost any other Marvel movie) but it’s pretty good.

This movie is well acted, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane, and Russell Crowe all give excellent performances.  Wonderful supporting performances were given by Harry Lennix, Richard Schiff, Christopher Meloni, Kevin Costner, and Lawrence Fishburne, though I think Fishburne was under utilized as Perry White.  I would think he might have a larger role in the sequel, which has already been talked about, but has not been given the official green light as far as I’ve heard.

The special effects were decent for the most part, but I wasn’t hugely impressed.  I think Avengers and Iron Man 3 had far superior effects.  Mainly it was the fight scenes when they were moving at super speed looked a little bit cartoony to me.

It’s clear that while MoS will ultimately due well, after 9 days it made approximately $181 million domestically.  However, in Iron Man 3’s first nine days it made $264 million domestically.  I’m sure there is all kinds of technical analysis to be done (IM3 opened on Friday, MoS on Thursday, etc) but at the end of the day, Marvel wins.  I assume the MoS sequel that has been talked about will happen, but I’m not holding my breath for Justice League.  It honestly won’t bother me if that never happens.  We have the Marvel cinematic universe.  What more do we really need?

Spoilers

There were elements added to his origin that, from what I’ve heard, were added into the comics in recent years.  The long and the short of these is that embedded in Superman’s genetic code are the genetic codes for all the as yet unborn Kryptonians.  This gives Zod a reason to come to earth to capture Superman.  I liked that Zod has a reason, but this seems a little thin to me.  Not to mention that if Superman is the first Kryptonian to be naturally born in a very long time, some reason this happened would have been nice.

The way the story unfolded was quite a bit different to the original.  Once we see his ship get to Earth, we jump to 33 years later.  Clark is working on a fishing boat, when an oil rig gets in trouble and he saves the day.  What happened when he was a boy is then told in flashbacks, which I really liked.

One of my favorite things in the movie is the change to the death of Clark’s father.  Instead of dropping dead of a heart attack, Jonathan Kent dies in a tornado.  Clark could have saved him, but Jonathan didn’t want him to risk revealing himself.  This makes perfect sense.  Failing to save his father makes him become a hero.  In the Christopher Reeve movies Clark decides to become a hero because he couldn’t save his father from a heart attack.  Nothing in Superman’s array of powers makes him able to save someone from a heart attack.  I understand the initial reaction in grief, but logic and reality has to win out.  I loved this change.

The first time Clark and Lois meet, he saves her life and she realizes he has powers and that he is an alien.  This is long before he puts on the glasses and goes to work wt the Daily Planet at the end of the movie.  I liked that we skipped over the whole secret identity thing with Clark and Lois.  She knows who he is at the end of the movie.

Well, that’s really all I have.  I really enjoyed this movie, but it just doesn’t match what Marvel’s been doing.  While most people would say that Superman would beat Iron Man is a fight, at the box office, Iron Man rules supreme.  Apparently it’s true what they say.  Nice guys really do finish last. 🙂

Thanks for reading!