K-SCORE: 43
Director: Zack Snyder
Story: David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan
Starring: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner
Spoiler Level: Minor
“thirty to forty thousand undepicted casualties”
Superman does not lend itself to good stories, especially for comics. In fact, it lends itself to some of the worst stories out there. You can’t have an invincible good guy fighting evil and still have meaningful conflict. The only thing there is to care about when your hero is immune to everything and can do anything is the amount of collateral damage. In this film there was a ton. I’d guess thirty to forty thousand undepicted casualties and a couple hundred billion dollars of property damage as a result of the conflict between Superman and the other beings from Krypton.
This film managed to have an exceptionally awful plot hole that affected the entire narrative. General Zod was guilty of some heinous crime back on his home world, which, by coincidence, was also blowing up at that time. Naturally a council convened to decide his fate. They “punished” him by exiling him in space, thereby allowing him, a super-powered terrorist, to be basically the only one who survived the destruction of the planet. Great choice! This also meant I was a little confused about his motivations around Superman and the Earthlings. Really this was just one highlight of a movie that was stupid in its very essence, only pretending to sell an artistic and smart product to the comic-slurping public.
My absolute favorite moment though was when all of the meaningless characters working at The Daily Planet sat around watching breaking news in their city of Metropolis. Reporter Lois Lane and co. getting their news the one way they know how - watching it on TV.
Some kind of cool action was peppered throughout and it was periodically pretty, but far too poorly written for it to be any of the following: high-quality filmic art, a turn-around for the Superman brand, enjoyable, rewatchable.