Movie Review: Man of Steel

If you enjoy seeing things blown up and massive amounts of collateral damage, then Man of Steel is the movie for you.  I have not seen that much collateral damage in a while – maybe The Avengers could rival it.  But the visuals in Man of Steel were very stimulating.

As far as the story of Superman: I grew up watching Lois and Clark on TV with Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher.  That’s the superman I know.  I didn’t ever see the original superman movies with Christopher Reeve.  And I haven’t even seen the entire Superman Returns movie from 2006 with Brandon Routh.  Though, I heard that Superman Returns actually didn’t do well at all at the theaters and actually lost money on the movie.  I only watched the first season or 2 of Smallville before it started getting really weird.  I haven’t read the comics either.  So with that said, Man of Steel is very different from the version of Superman I know.

But I liked it.  It is actually a little more sci-fi than I was expecting. There was a lot of time spent on Krypton, and the Kryptonians played a big role.  There were spaceships involved.  Very sci-fi. I wasn’t really expecting that because most of the superman I knew from Lois and Clark took place on Earth and was mostly against Lex Luther.

Well, obviously the bad guy wasn’t Lex Luther – but also the story of Clark Kent was different than what I knew.  I won’t spoil the major difference for anyone – you’ll just have to go see it.  But it shocked me to actually gasping in the theater out loud.  Lois and Clark’s relationship is also different from what I’m used to: Lois not knowing that Clark was superman.  So that was a hard adjustment.  But one of my favorite lines was from Lois when she was asking about the “S” on his suit.

And I know there was some outcry about the ending – something that happens in this movie that the diehard superman fans were outraged over.   And sure – I’m obviously not a diehard fan.  But I do love my Superman.  But I actually thought that they handled it pretty well in the movie.  If it was going to happen, I think the tension was high, the emotion true, and the situation was accurate.  I think they handled it very well.  But at the same time, I understand that they broke the rules with Superman….but in this modern time, honestly, I think they had to do it.  Though, I won’t lie, I was also looking forward to a different outcome to see how they’d handle it the other way also.

But the story itself was decent.  I wish it was a little less sci-fi than it was.  There was a lot of camera movement that made me want to close my eyes a few times because it might make me nauseous and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  But overall, I liked the acting – there were some BIG names in this like Amy Adams, Russell Crow, Christopher Meloni, Kevin Costner, Laurence Fishburne, Diane Lane.  Some of them had pretty small parts to be such a big name.  But my thought is that they are probably expecting to make a sequel – which I hope they do!

I had no idea who Henry Cavill was before this movie.  He is about the buffest guy I’ve ever seen!  One of the first scenes is of him without a shirt, and holy moly!  If you want to see some man meat, you should go see this.  His chest and arms are huge, but he still has a small waist and legs.  It was crazy. And he’s actually much cuter than I thought he was when I saw the previews.

I don’t really like Russell Crow, so I could have placed someone else in the role of Jor-El.  But I don’t think he was bad…I just don’t really like him. I know a lot of other people love him though, so hopefully they like him in his role as well.

Overall though, I thought it was good and very entertaining.  If you go in expecting a superhero movie, I think you’ll enjoy yourself.  If you go in expecting a drama with an intense plot line, you’ll be disappointed.  But I enjoyed it, and I hope they make a sequel.  I really liked the last 5 minutes of this movie.  More like the Lois and Clark I know so well.