This looked pretty good in the trailers, and I was excited.
I liked the start on Krypton, with Russell Crowe as Jor-El. It's a pretty strange, almost incomprehensible place, and looked great on the big screen. But the super-advanced citizens have been extremely irresponsible in letting their planet go to waste. They've clearly not watched enough Steven Seagal eco-thrillers. In fact they've been so stupid that even though everyone knows the planet is about to explode, only one baby is able to leave, along with some criminals who are 'sentenced' to a space ship outside the blast radius. They must be laughing on the inside.
When Superbaby gets to Earth he has the excellent fortune to be adopted by Kevin Costner. At this point the person next to me in the cinema leant over and informed me that this was Kal-el's second Robin Hood father, an excellent point. The best scenes in the film are the ones with the two Robin Hoods. I think that's because you get lots of juicy revelations about the history and back story, and that's what's interesting. Superboy has a tough time not revealing his powers, as he gets into a surprising amount of tricky situations (I've not seen Smallville, but imagine it happens a lot there too). It's not very convincing though when Jor-El bangs on about how important humans are, and that they must be saved. We all know he only decided to sent the baby to Earth two minutes before he went. For all he knew, it could have been a planet inhabited by two foot tall people.
I enjoyed Superteen's roaming around Alaska, like Christian Bale in Batman Begins. There was a great moment when he's humbly working in a bar and someone insults him, but he decides not to reveal his superpowers and just stands there getting beer thrown at him. He walks away with dignity, a true hero. Unfortunately this is all undone when outside the bar we see he's pushed ten trees through the guy's truck. This destroyed the point of the scene, just for a cheap laugh at the bad guy's expense - criminal. I like to think this addition was the doing of an evil Hollywood executive, who insisted on putting in some lighter moments, and the Director had no choice but to agree.
I liked Lois Lane, and her interplay with Superman was good. She would do anything for a story, including leaking it to Julian Assange, but once she heard about Superman's story she decided not to tell anyone. This was nicely established but not overdone, and there were actually not many scenes of them together. When Lois was in the Arctic two things occurred to me that need explanations, can you help? Firstly, is it just coincidence that Clark Kent is working on the site where the Scout Ship, which has been there for 20,000 years, is finally found? And why does the Scout Ship contain a Superman outfit?
As for General Zod - he's OK. A very serious man, who often looks more sad than angry. I enjoyed it when he whimsically recounted his journey's round the Universe: "once, we even discovered an Earth Engine...", he says nostalgically. There's room for a good spin-off series there. By the end you actually feel a bit sorry for him.
In summary then, the first half was good. The big problem is in the second half, when Zod gets to Earth. His henchman are faithful to the original (Superman 2), with an Eastern European woman and a massive guy. The woman here is rubbish though, and seems to be in a totally different film (a Steven Seagal film). She claims she has no morals, and screams that "Evolution always wins!".
Zod's plan to attack Earth is ridiculous, but that's to be expected. I wish it was a smaller plan though, that didn't involve such huge special effects generating machines. This film was partly written by Christopher Nolan, I thought he was against CGI? By the end so many huge buildings have been toppled with big crunches you're just waiting for the tiresome fight scenes to be over so the story can move on. It's like Transformers 2 mixed with The Incredible Hulk. Everyone knows that bullets don't harm Superman, and that he fights really hard. So I can do without seeing that twenty times. In fact, if we got rid of all the scenes involving the army, and Zod's henchmen, you'd get a much tighter drama between the big actors.
The Earth scientist eagerly keeps up with the alien technology, and is soon able to inform us about countering the threat by combining two mega-devices into a Black Hole. He puts his plan to the army commander, who clearly has no idea what's going on, but nods approval. The only relief in the ensuing action-fest is seeing Laurence Fishburne running. After Zod's ship is destroyed I had no appetite for the final showdown with Zod himself, but got it anyway. I was only curious how they would show that a super-being had died, and was impressed Superman went for a simple neck-breaker. Afterwards he's pretty sad, as he's wiped out the last of his people. Although given the magic codex, and the necessity of a sequel to this remake, I bet he wasn't really the last.
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