
Originally Posted by
WashingtonPost
It takes nearly an hour for Clark to don the iconic red cape and “S”-imprinted chest plate, which turns out to be not even the midpoint in a story that, with its back-and-forths, jump cuts and flashbacks and repetitively percussive action sequences, seems to have been filmed by an easily distracted child or sentient garden hose.
We see Clark being bullied as a child, then saving a bus full of his tormentors; we see him confer with his adoptive parents, the Kents (beautifully played by Diane Lane and Kevin Costner), who sense they’re in the middle of the ultimate drama of the gifted child. We zip to the Arctic tundra, where Daily Planet staffer Lois Lane (Amy Adams) — now a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter — is writing about a mysterious discovery beneath the ice. Wait a minute, is that Jor-El again, brought back in holographic form? Wait, how did Clark get to the tundra, exactly? Is that a tornado coming our way? I thought we weren’t in Kansas anymore!
Dispensing with such pesky bits as smooth transitions and logical chronology, Snyder pings and pongs viewers through “Man of Steel,” his blurry swish pans, jittery zooms and blobby close-ups an uneasy fit with 3-D that, as in most cases, is completely unnecessary. With such a disorienting visual language, accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s turgid, over-produced score, “Man of Steel” is an exceptionally unpleasant viewing experience