I must preface this review of 'Man of Steel', the new Superman film, by saying that this review will contain spoilers about the film, so if you haven't seen it and are planning to, best to bookmark this review and read it when you've watched the movie.
Like many kids born in the mid to late 70s, I grew up with Superman as 'my' superhero. Clean-cut and comically-bumbling (a point I'll return to later) Christopher Reeve was the man in the red cape who wowed me over four movies (yes, I even liked Superman IV, but then I was 11 at the time).
The 2006 film "Superman Returns" was a mis-step for many, but I saw a lot of the charm of the original movie franchise in this, not least in Brandon Routh's portrayal of Clark Kent, the ham-fisted Daily Planet reporter.
But with the name of Christopher Nolan attached to "Man of Steel" like a toe tag on a bloated corpse, the 'promise' of a 'darker' Batma.... sorry, Superman, shone brighter than Lex Luthor's bald head. Or it would have done, had Luthor been the villain of this particular piece.
Instead, Nolan and director Zack Snyder bypassed the very human Luthor, Superman's first nemesis in the original and the 2006 film, and went straight for General Zod. And, instead of having two minions (as he did in Superman 2), Zod had at his disposal an indeterminate number of loyal troops, all blessed with the same superhuman abilities as our boy from Smallville.
Right there was the first mistake. Oh, of course, it would make for great spectacle to have Superman take on not just one of his own kind, but a veritable squad of metal-clad warriors (those last three words were mistake No. 2).
But how does Superman, who is practically invincible, save for Kryptonite as we all know, defeat an army of these superheroes. Well, the short answer is he doesn't. By my reckoning, the only enemy to die is Zod himself. The rest are banished into a very loosely explained black hole vortex created by a phantom drivzzzzzzzzz! Sorry, sorry. Nodded off there for a second.
Zod meets his end after a fight sequence which wouldn't look out of place on a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Having been smashed through buildings, steel structures and even a well-placed construction site, Superman ends up snapping Zod's neck. The notion being that Superman could have killed him at any stage, but did not want to, because it diminished his own humanity to kill a person, even one as 'evil' as Zod.
To this end, let's disregard the fact that in battling through the buildings of Metropolis, Superman and Zod had probably directly lead to the death of hundreds, if not thousands of individuals.
The second error stems from all this fighting. The opening act of the play features a fight scene between an armour-clad Zod and Dur El, Superman's father, played with hammy aplomb by Russell Crowe. It is all clanging metal and shaky camera (Jason Bourne has a lot to answer for) and you don't quite know who is hitting whom.
Does that last sentence remind anyone of Transformers? Well it gets worse. Once on Earth and clad in the same armour, Zod and his minions proceed to bring down helicopter gunships and A10 Warthogs with all the leaping ability of a man-sized Decepticon, and frankly, just as much believability.
The CGI is glaringly intrusive in places. While modern Hollywood effects have allowed guys on computers to beautifully render robots (or in this case, aliens in armoured suits) it struggles once those suits come off, as they do in the final fight scene.
The reason for these cartoon renderings is probably because the CGI geeks have been perfecting the art of making a building fall. It must be said that the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 changed our perception of what is real and what is unreal.
You just have a sickening notion that, as the towers were falling, some budding computer graphics expert was drooling in front of his TV monitor at the prospect of rendering such collapses in glorious virtual reality.
And a lot of buildings fall in "Man of Steel". The ultimate goal of Zod is to turn Earth into a new Krypton, which involves changing the Earth's atmosphere by means of two giant colonising machines, with the side effect of destroying most of downtown Metropolis in the process.
To achieve a 12 certificate, none of this death and destruction is graphic however. In fact, aside from Superman coughing a bit of blood, Zod getting a nasty scar on his temple and Lois Lane (the utterly banal Amy Adams) getting a flesh wound that Superman cauterises with his laser vision, there is a distinct lack of gore or sense of mortality in this film.
A lack of blood and broken bones was evident in both the original Superman series and the 2006 film, but neither of these films had the same virtual loss of life. In the colonising sequence which kick-starts the final act, the death of tens of thousands would have been unavoidable.
The greatest natural disaster of our generation, the Indian Ocean tsunami, is also hinted at but not shown in this final scene, as another massive ship lands on an unnamed island and begins generating tidal waves. Again, the loss of life is not something the movie's makers want you to consider. The humans are unimportant. Concentrate on the aliens.
But I don't want this review to end on a wholly negative note, because there are moments in the opening act of this film which lead you to believe that it could be.... well... super.
Unlike the original 1978 film, Clark Kent's transition from baby to man is not covered in chronological order. We get to see certain pivotal moments in flashback: Clark's first overwhelming experience of his super senses, which makes him freak out in a classroom; his first act of bravery, saving his schoolmates when their bus plunges off a bridge into a river; the subsequent reaction of his father (played with perfect gravitas by Kevin Costner) to his rescue; his reluctance to fight back when being picked on by bullies.
They deal in a more genuine applied reality to the problems Clark would face as a kid. The death of Costner in the film, in particular, sets the tone for a film which could, and in the end should, have been more about Superman 'the man' as opposed the Superman the irresistible force.
And therein lies the biggest disappointment for me in this film. The time it invests in introducing you to Clark Kent is much smaller than all the crashing and banging and explosions and thumps and earth-altering pseudo-astronomical mumbo jumbo.
There is no humour in this film. There is no clutzy Clark, the big oaf that belies the Man of Steel underneath. There is no humour and worse still, there is no heart.
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