Man of Steel

This is SPARTA!!!!!1

I'm really not sure whether to recommend Man of Steel to you or not.  It's very wonderful to look at, a little bit too long, and absolutely gagging on its own sincerity.  I liked looking at it more than I liked watching it.  The pictures are pretty but the plot is a mess.

Like director Zack Snyder's earlier film 300, Man of Steel brings many of the pleasures of reading a graphic novel to the big screen.  Krypton is beautiful and ancient and corrupt and dying.  There's a great version of that old sci-fi trope, the Wise Alien Council, with elderly sages in robes and elaborately sculptural headdresses sitting in really fancy chairs in a cathedral-like throne room.

Kryptonian technology is Art Deco-y and full of nods to H. R. Giger in skull-like helmets and fabulously complex alien machines, many of which really look like stylized penises and vaginas.  (I'm not making this part up.  When the Kryptonian high council or whatever it is imprisons the evil General Zod and his minions in the Phantom Zone, they first seal them into giant flying space dildos.  Seriously.  Watch the movie and tell me I'm wrong.  Also, Superman's mother is frequently accompanied by a giant flying robotic uterus that talks to her.)

In a departure from convention, Superman is not wearing his little red briefs.  Man of Steel never shows us Superman ducking into a phone booth, so perhaps in this version he changes in a less cramped environment and is able to get his underpants inside his clothes where they belong.

Also, Zack Snyder sent Henry Cavill, who was attractive to begin with, to the gym responsible for the thousands of taut Spartan abs on display in 300.  He's buff as hell and spends a decent amount of time with his shirt off.  It's fantastic, if you like that sort of thing.  Sorry straight boys, not much eye candy for you in this one.

Anyway, I'm going to assume you pretty much know the story.  Krypton is dying, so Russell Crowe-El and his wife Lara put their infant son in some kind of pod thingy with a fancy USB drive but no clothing whatsoever and shoot him at the earth.  He lands in Kansas, where he is raised by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane, who are stoic and plain-spoken and own a rusty pickup truck and have a picturesque barn and so forth.  As he grows up, he finds that he has special powers.  (There are some great POV shots of Superman's x-ray vision, where people are talking to young Superman and he's all distracted because he can see their bones and organs.)  He also has a powerful urge to help others, probably as a result of the wholesome, square-jawed American values one only gets by growing up in a farmhouse with peeling white paint in close proximity to a large amount of corn.  BUT!  General Zod has survived the destruction of Krypton and is lurking around.  He has some weird fascist plan to kill humans and sort of terraform earth into a new Krypton.  He also has sinister, flat eyes and an outfit with an extremely dramatic collar.  Will Superman be able to stop Zod and save the day?????  (SPOILER: yes.)  Also, there's a woman called Lois Lane who keeps cropping up.

This story, which is pretty familiar to anybody who's ever seen a Superman movie, is told as a sort of shapeless heap of unnecessary flashbacks and tiresome expository monologues until finally Superman and General Zod get into a giant fistfight to see who wins.  They're so strong that when they punch each other, the one who gets punched flies through a building without getting hurt, and then the building falls down.  This is neat the first time, and then it goes on for far too long.  Only a little way into the fistfight, Zod shouts at Superman: "this can end in one of two ways.  Either you die, or I do!"  Great.  Can we skip to the end, please?