Man-Child of Steel.

This isn't gonna be a review so much as a written depiction of my gradual descent into a nervous breakdown while watching Man of Steel -- an experience I shared with the two five-year-olds sitting in the row in front of me. Definitely introduce your children to Superman via this movie, because it contains all sorts of child-friendly features! Such as a childbirth scene, Superman snapping a dude's neck in the middle of the vaporized ruins of Metropolis, and a complete lack of humour or a sense of fun. (HAHAHA NO SPOILERS THOUGH LOL no.)

Everyone spends the entire time stating the obvious. I'm not joking. 80% of the dialogue in this movie is like a masterclass in how to break the first law of writing: "Show, Don't Tell". Before anyone does anything, they tell everyone what they're about to do. And once they've done it, someone else explains what just happened. Sample scene:

"I'm very strong, and have no morals!" growled Zod. "I don't care about anything except Krypton!"

"But I will stop you," Superman replied. "Because I grew up on Earth. I'm going to defeat you!"

Superman punched Zod. Zod punched Superman. "Oh my god!" screamed a nameless extra. "They just punched each other! They are both aliens!" 

"I hate both of them," said another extra. "Because aliens are a new and confusing thing, and we humans are afraid of things we don't understand."

Then a building fell and crushed all the extras, killing them and everyone they knew. Sadly, Superman did not know or care about this, because he was busy listening to someone explain why Zod was a very dangerous man who needed to be stopped.

The worst part was that it wasn't even expository dialogue. It was completely unnecessary, because even the traumatised five-year-olds in the audience could understand that the bad guys were evil murderers, and the big scary spaceship was dangerous. I'd like to imagine that this was an homage to vintage comics when everyone explained everything in their speech bubbles, to make up for the limitations of having to tell an awesome superhero story in eight pages and three colours. But no. It was just deeply, deeply stupid dialogue. 

Superman has no personality. The two things you need to know about Superman's origins in this movie are as follows:

1. He's the first natural-born Kryptonian in centuries, and therefore the only Kryptonian who isn't genetically engineered to play a specific role in society. In other words, his parents created him as an avatar of free will.
2. On Earth, his purpose is to be a leader and a role-model to humans.

Man of Steel's Superman is even more Jesus-y than usual, to the extent that it gets kind of embarrassing. Like in the scene where he (INEXPLICABLY) goes to a priest for advice, and there's a giant glowing Jesus right behind him. Or when he floats into space in the shape of a Crucifix. Of course, it isn't really a problem for Superman to be Jesus-y, because that's kind of his thing. It's more that they really, really don't need to hammer the point home like that. WE KNOW. WE KNOW HE'S JESUS. HIS FATHER SENT HIM TO EARTH TO SAVE US AND TEACH US A BETTER WAY OF LIVING. PLEASE STOP POINTING IT OUT. Particularly since, while there are a whole bunch of allusions to Jesus, Superman's behaviour isn't terribly godlike. Like that one time he kills a guy. Or obliterates half of Metropolis while needlessly fighting Zod. Or fails to make any life choices for himself, like an adult.

In Man of Steel, Clark Kent is a likeable enough guy, but he really... doesn't... do anything. For a bastion of free will and leadership, he sure doesn't make very many decisions. Or even give the impression of thinking about anything at all. Instead, he passively does what other people tell him to do. As a child he takes Jonathan Kent's advice and as an adult he takes Jor-El's advice, but at no point does he ever formulate his own moral code or mission for life. He's a Super Man-Child.

As an origin story, Man of Steel is total garbage because there is just no character development at all. Instead of actively rebelling against Jonathan Kent -- or, indeed, going the "I don't want to be a hero" route and then changing his mind, like Peter Parker -- his journey from "nice young guy with a secret" to "nice young alien alien superhero with a secret" is smooth and conflict-free. Even his anonymous gap-year (with obligatory cameos from Angst Beard and Blue-Collar Job) is free from the kind of learning experiences we see in the Wolverine and Batman movies. In a film where so much emphasis is put on the role of free will, he comes across as a bizarrely passive protagonist.

Krypton makes no sense. Even taking into account the fact that Krypton is a decaying society run by traditionalist morons, it's still difficult to understand why anything is the way it is. Yeah, the Vulcan high council has mined the planet's core to the extent that it blows up and kills everyone, but how... does all the genetic engineering stuff work? Like, if you're gonna design some people to be worker ants and some to be soldiers, why would you engineer the soldiers to be immoral, psychopathic killing machines? Wouldn't it make more sense for soldiers to be tactical, logical and highly moral, so as to avoid, you know, highly-trained killing sprees? Also, WHY DOES KRYPTON EVEN HAVE A MILITARY? They're ruled by a single government, apparently have no outside enemies, and their empire is shrinking inwards rather than expanding. I DON'T UNDERSTAAAAND.

Genetically engineeried predestination is something that works as a science-fiction thought experiment, but is absolute trash garbage if you try to apply it to a real-world setting -- even if the "real world" is an alien planet. It could probably work if the genetically engineered people were a downtrodden underclass, but if they're leaders, scientists, warriors? THIS COULD NEVER HAPPEN. Not unless you actually removed everyone's free will, which just... wouldn't work. That's not a thing you could do, and still turn out characters like Zod, Jor-El, Lara, and the councillors. Instead you'd have a race of mindless slaves, run by genetically engineered "wise overlords", which is patently not the case here, because all the people in charge are idiots. Man of Steel's Krypton was a poorly-organised, science-phobic Avatar/Vulcan crossover planet that nobody ever wanted or asked for.

Even Kryptonian designs don't make any sense. Lara wears a flowing medieval gown at all times, including during childbirth. Everything everywhere is made from polished marble, and looks about as comfortable as a refrigerator. The only way to access stuff on the space ships is by plugging in a USB stick. And don't even get me started on the Kryptonian military armour, which is covered in about 400 extraneous spines that will catch on literally everything and turn the wearer into one of those deer who get their antlers caught in a tree and then die of starvation.

Most noticeably, the armour has a weird, rigid collar that makes it impossible for anyone to comfortably turn their heads. I'm pretty sure the reason why the Jor-El/Zod fight scene at the beginning had such shaky cinematography was because if they zoomed out and focussed properly, we'd be able to see that the actors could barely move in that armour.

The fight scenes are nonsense. All superhero movies have to end in a big fight scene, so it's easy to fall into the trap of just escalating a bunch of explosions until you reach the end. So while I do enjoy action movies, I tend to find "final battle" scenes in superhero movies to be pretty dull -- with the exception of The Avengers. The final battle in the Avengers went on for half an hour but was still entertaining because each of the characters had an interesting role to play, and it was full of jokes and snappy dialogue. Unfortunately, there are no jokes or snappy dialogue in the entirety of Man of steel, never mind the fight scenes.
Logistically speaking, the extended final battle sequence in this movie made no sense at all. From an ethical and strategic standpoint, every one of Superman's decisions were a nightmare. Most of the fights took place in heavily populated areas and he made no attempt to, you know, fly Zod out into the desert or something, where he couldn't raze any more skyscrapers to the ground. Seriously. SO MANY PEOPLE DIED IN THIS MOVIE. And in really unnecessary ways.

Spider-Man and The Avengers both have major fight scenes in inner-city areas, but that's because Spider-Man and the Avengers have to defend the city. Superman is in the unique position of being powerful enough to at least try to move the fight somewhere safer, like space, or the middle of the ocean. In Man of Steel, Superman is fighting Zod because... well, Zod Is Bad. So they have to punch each other a lot. But once the spaceship has been destroyed, there's definitely no good reason why they'd still be fighting in the middle of the city. So why do they keep going? For hours and hours? Sorry, Metropolis. RIP.

For a guy who usually seems ridiculously nice and caring (Henry Caville's Superman is great boyfriend material, if you overlook the part where he snapped a guy's neck), he is oddly callous about the vast number of civilians who die during the course of this movie. As are the audience, because the film never makes an effort to illustrate the real, human casualties of Zod's attack. Instead, characters just sort of... talk about it. Because that's what people do in this movie. They tell each other really obvious things, but totally fail to illustrate or express anything on a deeper level. Which is more or less the opposite of what you want to be doing when you make a film.

Man of Steel is far from groundbreaking, but the movie it most reminded me of was Thor. A really, really bad version of Thor. In Thor, the main character goes through some awesome character development, changing from a well-meaning spoiled brat into a sensible, adult warrior. In Man of Steel, Superman is sent to Earth by his father (like Thor) and ends up fighting people from his home planet on the streets of smalltown America (like Thor), but there the resemblance ends. We never see him struggle with his heritage, and he never really learns anything or comes up against a challenge more complicated than the physical fight between him and Zod. The whole thing was framed as a serious, grittier version of Superman, but in the end it far less intelligent and emotionally complex than the "lighter" movies of the '70s.
To cap off this semi-coherent rant, I thought I'd mention that there were a couple of things I did like. In no particular order:

1. Lois Lane. SHE WAS AWESOME. I can't believe that Zach Snyder and Chris Nolan teamed up to create a movie starring a dynamic, interesting female character in one of the lead roles.
2. Perry White.
3. The hilarious casting of about a million "hey, it's that guy!" actors from Battlestar Galactica, The West Wing, Dollhouse, etc. 
4. Jor-El's Kryptonian dragon thing. Really, just Jor-El in general. Is Russell Crowe's new hobby just taking roles where he's unintentionally hilarious all the way through? My favourite part was when he was pointing out directions to Lois by materialising in front of her every five steps. How was it that "Jor-El is a holagram" was instantly understood by everyone, but things like "We're in danger because someone is shooting at us!" had to be loudly and repeatedly explained by multiple people all the way through??
5. The final scene where Lois says "Welcome to the Planet", ie the only funny or charming line in the entire movie.
6. The fact that we now know that as well as traditionally using his baby blanket as a cape, Superman actually IS fighting in his underwear. Because that whole body-suit thing is literally Kryptonian underwear. 

Postscript: Most unintentionally funny moment in the movie: When, standing in the ruins of central Metropolis, surrounded by (presumably) the corpses of thousands of civilians crushed by buildings needlessly destroyed by Superman and Zod, someone stood up and said loudly, "He saved us!"