[Review] Man Of Steel – Thumbs up
**Now before I go into this review of the highly anticipated film, Man Of Steel, I want to preface by stating there will be spoilers addressed, so read on at your own discretion. **
Everyone Once and a while a film comes along that changes the way things are done in the typical mold that previous films has done. When Batman Begins and Iron Man came along, they showed that a story could be told in a way that would not only be pleasing to the fans, but while the source material could be respected it could evolve into its own entity.
That’s what Man Of Steel has done.
Now before you take Amanda’s highly negative opinion of how they handled the story, you first need to see what they’ve done.
In the original story for Superman, Krypton was about to be destroyed so his parents sent him to Earth so he could live on. The child grows up and after the life he was given by the Kent’s, becomes Superman.
Simple as that.
And Man Of Steel does that, but they did add/change quite a bit.
Krypton is dying, because of the foolish choices of the people they have mined the core of the planet to the point of instability. For centuries Krypton has abandoned the concept of a natural birth so that they could grow and create live as not only a means of population control, but to control the course of their societies evolution and what they felt as perfection. Jor-El knows this, and feels that for Krypton to live, they needed to have the ability to chose. So he and his wife Lara have Kal-El by means of a natural birth, and during a coup staged by General Zod to take over Krypton from the Council that he feels failed everyone and led them to destruction, Jor-El and Lara send baby Kal-El off to Earth in means to save the child from Krypton’s destruction.
The movie then jumps 30 something years showing a full grown Clark Kent trying to basically find himself, throughout this portion we are treated to glimpses of his childhood via flashbacks.
Then the film hits into high gear. He finds an old Kryptionan scout ship, turns it on, meets a holographic Jor-El, gets his suit, becomes Superman, and then Zod shows up looking for him and what he feels is the means of a way to restore and rebuild Krypton through something he thinks Jor-El hid inside baby Kal-El’s ship.
In the end, after close to 2 and 1/2 hours, it felt like the movie was a more akin to Batman Begins rather than anything else we have seen from Hollywood in terms of Comic Book Adaptations. The Action was breathtaking, the story, although lacking in some areas, did deliver some of the most heartfelt moments I have seen from a film like this.
Instead of focusing on the trivial things that were changed/adjusted as to fit the film (people thinking Jimmy Olsen got gender swapped into Jenny Olsen when in fact she is actually Jenny Jurwich), I chose to take it as it was. A reboot that not only modernized the character, but did it in a way that truly worked.
Man Of Steel was more than what I could have asked for in a Superman film. Better than any of the previous film adaptations, and it truly felt that this Superman could indeed live in the world we are in today. Now that its confirmed that Man Of Steel 2 is being fast tracked, followed by the long awaited Justice League, I cannot wait to see what Henry Cavill brings in the next film.
