Now that I've had time to digest:
THERE WILL BE SPOILERS, CITIZENS! BE WARNED!
Well, it's possible that it could have been worse, but not worse than that last 45 minutes/hour. I didn't think that a Superman movie could be made without a sense of humor, but once again I'm proved wrong.
The idea behind Man of Steel is quite nice: the Superman saga has always had its touch of science fiction. The big guy in blue is, after all, an extraterrestrial, trying to get by in a world where... he can do pretty much anything he wants. He's trying to do the right thing. He's trying to help. He wouldn't mind a couple of nights alone with Lois Lane. All understandable.
So the idea of starting with a science fiction approach is promising. And Russell Crowe, of all people, does a decent job filling in for Marlon Brando as Jor-El, father of the baby about to be launched into space in order to... not really clear on that. To save him, certainly, but then, you'd think Mr. and Mrs. El would have known Krypton was going to blow up--it's certainly implied that they did--and perhaps employed some birth control. Nope--they're going to send their kid into space instead. It's a choice.
Once on Earth (which takes a while--everything in this movie takes too damn long), young Kal-El (they call him "Kal"; isn't that cute?) is taken in by the inevitable Jonathan and Martha Kent and named Clark because they don't know his real name is "Kal." Apparently, Mrs. El didn't have the foresight to sew a nametag into the kid's blanket. One also wonders how the whole diaper thing went on the trip, but perhaps it's best that the 3-D thing hasn't morphed into a more all-five-senses type of simulation.
The movie starts jumping around in time periods, and after a completely unnecessary episode in which Clark/Kal/Supe (Henry Cavill, and I still have no idea whether he can act, but he does a nice American accent) saves some guys on a blazing oil rig, which has nothing to do with the story, we get the information that his Earth dad (Kevin Costner) has been trying to get him to hush up all the super-stuff because the planet might not deal kindly with an alien from space. It seems Kevin has never heard of Mr. Spock. But don't get me started on THAT movie.
Anyway, next thing you know Lois Lane (Amy Adams, looking more like Lana Lang but maybe that's the point, for all I know) is poking around in a very arctic area because it seems there's a space thing buried way in the ice somewhere and--waddaya know--young Mr. El has shown up because it's from his very own planet and the answers to all his questions (in the form of Russell Crowe, who doesn't stop meddling even 33 years after he's dead) are freeze-dried.
Extremely long story short(er), Lois tracks down Clark in Kansas where his mom (Diane Lane, and the fact that I remember when she was a kid actress just dates me to pieces) is still living, even after Kevin died in a flashback that doesn't make a lick of sense. Still, it makes more sense than the idea that Costner is actually 46 years old (as it reads on Jonathan's tombstone). Kevin, you're older than me, and it's been a while since I saw 46. Seriously. In a movie where people come from another planet (and look exactly like us and speak English), fly around, can see through things and burn stuff with their eyes and a pre-teen can pull a school bus out of a lake with his bare hands, Kevin Costner being 46 might be the limit of disbelief suspension.
Lois is there at a bad time, when General Zod (alas, not Terrence Stamp, but Michael Shannon, who has left no piece of scenery un-gnawed by the end) has arrived from Krypton, or the Phantom Zone (which sounds like a trendy New York club from 1993) or somewhere, pissed off and wanting to find a "codex," to start up a new Krypton on Earth. How? Not clear, but it will destroy all life already here in doing so. Yet another movie this summer leeching off The Wrath of Khan.
Things just degenerate until S. Man and G. Zod are beating the living crap out of each other, knocking over whole office buildings, causing thousands upon thousands of deaths of innocent bystanders, and it all goes on for so long that you want to jump up on the screen, hand Zod his codex and let him take over the damn planet, since there isn't going to be much left anyway. Why he can't take the codex to Mars, where nobody would be displaced, is never discussed.
After a couple of eternities, things get sorted out, one supposes the decades-long reconstruction project begins, and Clark gets himself a job as a stringer at the Daily Planet. A part-time job at a print newspaper? In 2013? And he thinks he can live in the city on that?
Guy must be Superman.
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