Man of steel
(She could have her own spinoff - Anchorwoman of Steel.) But without the Clark-Lois banter, the screwball element is gone. No role has given Adams as excellent an outlet for her Katie Couric–like combination of pertness and steel. Lois is Amy Adams, who carries her scenes with single-minded gumption. The delightful contrast between nerd and Samson - the genius element of the Superman myth - will have to wait. Whatever future installments this new saga will bring, the Clark of Man of Steel doesn’t get to play a reporter haplessly trying to woo an impatient Lois. But the fumbling, mild-mannered Clark Kent counterpoint is missing. That makes for some striking, deep-toned images of the lonely savior against the colossal skyscrapers of Metropolis, and Superman’s X-ray eyes have an impressive, unearthly glow. The blue is halfway to black, the cape burgundy. There is no bright pop in the new costume. Though gravity is different on Earth than it is on Krypton, co-producer Christopher Nolan ensures this will be the gravest Superman yet. Preaching the need to coexist harmoniously with other beings, Jor-El dispatches his only son to planet Earth to share the heavenly gospel. Zod also has some crypto-racist (or Krypto-racist) ideas about re-creating the planet on a world of lesser beings with the help of said Kotex. He shares Zod’s conviction that Krypton’s elderly ruling council have made no provisions for the planet’s imminent destruction (thanks to reckless plundering of its natural resources, hint, hint) but not Zod’s impulse to shoot said council members in the head. Hands beatifically clasped in front of him, he gazes sadly at General Zod (Michael Shannon). Supey’s dad Jor-El is played by Russell Crowe in peacenik mode - which guarantees this sometimes-great actor will put nothing of his galvanic true self in the role and instead hide behind faux-Brit diction and a woeful countenance. Before we see him, we spend a long-ish stretch on Krypton, which is now an expensive-looking world of flying beasts and towering cliffs.
His physique is as ripped as any of Snyder’s 300 Spartans - which flies in the face of the notion that Superman, unlike Batman, doesn’t need to spend hours at the gym to maintain his prodigious strength.
The new Supey is a colorless Brit named Henry Cavill with a deep cleft in the middle of his chin and deeper ones where his lats meet his deltoids meet his pecs.
#Man of steel movie
The movie isn’t dead on arrival, like Snyder’s over-reverent Watchmen. You get War of the Worlds and Independence Day and lots of noise and clutter - but never the simple charm of the original comic by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster or the faintly self-abashed handsomeness of Christopher Reeve. You get much ado about Krypton genes and a McGuffin called a Codex - or Kotex, I didn’t get the spelling. So you get spidery machines drilling into the Earth and blasting planes out of the sky and flattening Manhattan as thoroughly as Godzilla, Rodan, and the rest of the Toho gang demolished Tokyo.
Sensibly concluding that the last thing we need is another hour of young Clark Kent gradually discovering his superhuman powers in Smallville while Ma and Pa Kent trade worried looks, director Zack Snyder has relegated most of the Midwest corn to flashbacks and focused (less sensibly) on what matters to him most: Superman as an alien coping with his alienness in the course of a massive outer-space invasion from Krypton avengers. The latest Superman “reboot,” generically titled Man of Steel, is rich in inessentials.
Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “MAN OF STEEL,” a Warner Bros.