Man of Steel is mostly an excuse to watch overpowered superpeople trash populated areas while we mere mortals cower in fear. And that’s fine. Plenty of movies play upon our secret desire to burn this mother down. But Man of Steel doesn’t do much else that might make its scenes of destruction part of a more memorable story. Director Zack Snyder provides a few interesting twists on the Superman mythos (the difficulty in adapting to an alien environment, Krypton as an authoritarian regime) and a few cynical attempts to appeal to Christian audiences (Clark Kent doesn’t get his shit together until age 33), but the core story seems to get lost amidst the feast of destruction. Perhaps the sequel will give us a more substantial reason to care when Supes obliterates another city that isn’t Metropolis.
