So yeah, cutting to the chase, Man of Steel might be the worst film I've ever seen, it's easily the worst super hero film and an abomination of a Superman film.
When it was in theatres I avoided it because I could tell it would be bad from the previews. Well it just debuted on HBO and I thought "nothing else on tv, this will kill a few hours".
Dear god! How do you get everything, and I do mean everything wrong about superman in a single film? How can a a plot so paper thin and so full of holes be taken seriously by anyone? How much worthless CG do you have to throw at the screen to distract the mouth breathers from realizing as such?
Maybe I should just make a list:
Why is the codex a chunk of a skull? Are all Kryptonians descended from the same guy?
If that is so how do they have family names? Btw they even got that wrong. He's Kalel son of Jorel of the house/family of El. I mean I'm not son of Casto. Even his father corrects this mistake. This seems like a case of a writer trying to be artsy and clever while ending up looking foolish.
So the entire database used to create all children on the planet only has one copy? I guess advanced races have never heard of backups.
Ok so Clark learns his heritage, meets Lois Lane (who immediately discovers his secret), gets his suit and teaches himself to fly all over the course of one day, maybe a couple of days. Then comes Zod. Talk about a busy week!
Ok so basically the whole town of Smallville knows Clark's secret and he's an urban legend like Bigfoot in his adult years, but a alien spaceship full of Kryptonion warriors actively looking for another ship was never noticed? Why were they hiding again? I mean the humans are no match for them.
The aliens with their advanced do-hickeys can't find the ship over the course of 33 year, but a team of earth scientists with regular old sonar can? Not only that but even when the humans find it, they STILL can't find it until Clark turns it on and fires a distress signal. So surveillance devices must not exist on Krypton huh? Oh but they do, we've actually seen them at the beginning of the film, so yeah... bad writing again.
When Zod is talking to Superman in his mind, and he mentions that "we have to build from something" wouldn't the logical response have been... "Ok how about Mars?" Similar orbit, uninhabited, same raw materials, humans can't easily get to mars so they wouldn't bump into each other, problem solved. They all lived happily ever after.... if someone with average intelligence had written the script that is.
Why are all the inhabitants of the scout ships dead? They arrived on earth 20,000 years ago. They would have had a lush earth to harvest food and resources from and only a few proto-humans to contend with. I mean they could have EASILY filled this plot hole by just making the ships wrecks from a crash landing, but nope, they are fully in tact.
Ok the whole Kryptionian atmosphere vs Earth atmosphere is all out of whack. His father (correctly) explains that Earth is pretty much just like Krypton, only with a younger (yellow) sun, less pollutants, lighter gravity and a richer oxygen supply. Yet his mom says he struggled to breathe as a son and Zod's crew say it's painful to breathe ect? Wouldn't an oxygen rich environment make it EASEIR to breathe and even assuming it didn't, considering Clark landed when he was an INFANT that should have killed him right? Oh and even though Zod mentions it would take years to adapt, he manages to do it in a few seconds.
Why would a helmet block X-ray vision, super-hearing and heat vision?
If it does block super powers then how come Zod's soldiers were all super powered anyway?
Anyone else notice that this film is a "Sega Genesis" version of Superman II? By that I mean in a desperate attempt to be cooler than the simple, yet enjoyable because it isn't trying to be anything it's not Superman II, it actually cuts out all the charm and ends up being lamer for it. I mean they even had Zod, the sexy Woman general, and the Giant.
Boy of all the places to put the Ship/Gravity well contraption, one end just happened to be in metropolis eh? Pretty sure they could have put that anywhere, in which case wouldn't it make the most sense to put the axis to fall on two extremely remote locations so the humans would have a hard time reaching it.
So Zod has his little speech about Supes "taking away his soul", but if he is indeed genetically bred to protect the people of Krypton then wouldn't Clark be the last son of Krypton and therefore he would be honor bound to protect him? I'm just sayin.
Wasn't the whole scene with Perry White and the trapped intern completely pointless? I thought it was going to go somewhere but it never did.
Super Superman's ONLY course of action is to snap Zod's neck? Really? You mean he couldn't just turn his neck around slightly without killing him, or kick him in the nards or anything? Really he had to kill him...because...plot... ok. What about those people btw. I wouldn't want them to try and run or anything, just silently cower in the corner.
Why is the military looking for Superman when they know he's Clark Kent and lives in Kansas? He even says so. The ship is gone, that's what Zod was piloting. There isn't a "fortress of solitude" to find in this film.
Dear god the last scene, they even get the last frikkin scene wrong! Clark is running around in a red cape. Why? Superman was literally the first "super hero" in the comics and defined the genre and actually created the pop-culture concept of the Super Hero. Since Superman is a real guy, there wasn't a Superman comic, the genre was never invented, and he wouldn't be running around playing super hero! Take away the super hero comics and the only people in our history running around in capes were rather brutal dictators and emperors, like the Ceasars.
I mean I could go on and on. It's that bad. I've literally gotten tired of listing the bad parts, there is much more. Don't watch it, don't let your children watch it, don't waste your time on it. The only thing it's been good for is practicing my typing skills to write this rant and to get my blood pressure up. I've hated films before but they've never been so bad that they've given me an emotional response, much less generated legitimate rage. I think I need to lie down.