NON-SPOILER
Before reading this review you have to understand that I'm not going to give you a sugarcoated opinion. I am going to be as blunt and honest with my words as I possibly can. My review will be free from personal baggage and hopefully objective. I am not a troll or a fanboy of the film, its creators, or anything of the sort. You can disagree with what I have to say, but I would just ask that you read the entire review objectively before expressing your thoughts. This is a non-spoiler review so I will be vague and not address any plot point errors
As it stands right now “Man of Steel” is receiving mixed reviews from both fans and film critics alike. The online frenzy of arguments across the internet both pros and cons are clashing and leaving nothing but confusion. This is because “Man of Steel” is itself a mixed up film. It is a movie comprised of isolated moments and can be broken down into two halves. The first half is the character portion which attempts to set up relationships and develop the inhabitants of the world. The second half is the action side which provides the thrills of the movie. These two things should coexist but instead they are disjointed and one prevails over the other.
-CONFLICT-
So here is what is going on with "Man of Steel". The movie rushes through all the character stuff so you get all the lines and exposition, but it never stays long enough with any of them to make you care. It's constantly pushing forward to the latter half of the movie where all the fighting takes place. Now don't get me wrong the reason to watch this movie is the grand scale fighting, but the problem is that it shouldn't be the only reason to watch the film. The kind of atmosphere from the trailers just isn't present in the movie. The story is supposed to be Superman finding himself, but instead of that journey the movie just winds up skipping through it removing any emotional investment. This is one of the main problems people have with this movie.
-SPECIFICS-
Direction:
Zack Snyder does an alright job directing this movie. He excels at directing visually and creating the amazing action sequences found within this film. However, where he excels with the visual excitement he falls short in nuance. I can't tell if he just follows the script while shooting the character focused scenes, but it definitely feels like he is using the first take. He never allows his characters to breathe or his actors to develop their roles. Instead every scene feels like the actor is in a rush to get out their lines. What should be a quiet little moment is instead a stiff and quick reading, he pushes the movie to jump to the next scene as fast as possible. Although, I don't know how much of this is Snyder's fault as he usually just translates what is on paper directly into reality.
Acting:
From what I saw the main cast did what they could with what they were given. However, as previously mentioned their performances came off as a little stiff and they felt rushed. It appears they are never given enough screen time to develop their roles, or allowed to make changes to the dialog. Despite that the major actors still give strong performances, with the exception of a few supporting characters most notably Laura-El. To say Henry or Russell embodied the role is a bit of an overstatement because we hardly got to see any emotion or real characterization.
Screenwriting:
The biggest problem of the movie by far, is the screenplay. The screenwriter David Goyer, who has been attached to all the recent batman films, was given the task to write this film. I assume the WB executives and others believed that because the Batman films were successful, hiring him as the primary writer was a no-brainer. However, this was a mistake because Goyer is an idea-man. He cannot write a decent script to save his life. He has good ideas which you can find throughout the movie, but stringing bits of good ideas together instead of creating a cohesive story creates an incoherent mess. The first half of the movie is by far the weakest link and is arguably supposed to be the most important part of the film. He completely drops the ball, utilizing painful dialog and poor plotting. Instead of staying with characters you jump around frequently as if he got bored with watching one person so he changes the channel to see what someone else is doing. This includes jumping randomly through different periods of Clark's life. It completely subtracts from the main story, destroys the pacing, and makes the movie hard to follow.
Music:
The Music in this film is one of the best parts, it's hard to go wrong with Hanz Zimmer. The only problem is they misuse a lot of the music to try to add false emotion to scenes.
Why should you see this film? What does "Man of Steel" do right? Strictly speaking the film does action right, it's the side of the movie that really shines through. It's the reason why the movie is so conflicted, because this portion of the movie is so entertaining and visually stunning to watch that it forgives some of the mistakes from the first half. For some that's enough to redeem it, but for others the movie will only fall short.
So what does MOS deserve?
I would give it a 3/5 stars it suffers from poor character development, pacing, and poor screenwriting especially in the first half.
It killed me to give this score, I wanted nothing else than for MOS to surpass everyone's expectations. What we got was something a little more unfocussed, but fun none the less.