Man Of Steel : Review

Director: Zack Snyder
Screenwriter: David S Goyer 

Starring: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne,
              Russell Crowe

Running time: 143 mins

Certificate: 12A
Release: 13 June 2013 (Malaysia) 

Everyone knows the Superman story - it's one that's seemingly burned into the subconscious from birth. So clearly and definitively rendered was this comic tale in Christopher Reeve's 1978 blockbuster that the last filmmaker to tackle the character (X-Men's Bryan Singer) lifted its iconography wholesale for 2006 misfire Superman Returns.

That film was hamstrung by nostalgia and left audiences nonplussed, so the latest big-screen version is understandably a clean break from the past with Dark Knight duo Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer hatching a story to re-invent DC Comics' flagship hero.



Man of Steel begins on Krypton as Lara (Ayelet Zurer) and Jor-El (Russell Crowe) welcome the planet's first natural birth in centuries. Their people, once ambitious intergalactic explorers, genetically engineer newborns to serve in pre-determined roles. With the planet's natural resources exhausted and Krypton in its final days, Jor-El rockets his son to safety as military leader General Zod (Michael Shannon) stages a last-minute coup with designs on purifying the race and starting over. He's banished to the Phantom Zone, but only after vowing to find Kal-El.

Director Zack Snyder then makes a daring cut from Kal's plummeting rocket to a fishing trawler carrying a bearded Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), wandering the globe looking to help those in need. In a neat structural trick similar to the one employed in Batman Begins, we flash back to see a younger Clark struggling through adolescence due to his nascent superpowers. In the present day, a spaceship buried deep in the Arctic Circle points Clark in the direction of his destiny, while also putting him on a collision course with a Zod hellbent on resurrecting his obliterated homeworld.