1. It's A Relentless Onslaught - On The Audience
If you like explosions, then you'll love Man Of Steel. There are red explosions, yellow explosions...you name it. There's even a blue explosion. And all the while Superman emerges unscathed. Trouble is, so do his enemies. And so, after the fiftieth fight sequence, you begin to wonder if these opponents aren't too evenly matched; if not invincible. But still the film goes on, firing bullets, rockets and big shiny lasers at everything in sight to keep you from peering down at your watch. Having destroyed Metropolis, our characters then take to the sky, with Zod using Supes at one point as a skipping stone, sending him crashing through one tower block window after another. This is, of course, when he isn't being relentlessly pummelled into the ground only to and get back up on his feet and go through it all again. You could accuse plenty of films of employing this type of video-game violence, but here it's as though you've unlocked a level in which your character can never die. This immediately robs the scene of any tension, and also sends you reaching for the aspirin. Why is it that when Michael Bay releases a dumb, ultra-violent action onto the masses, we roll our eyes and roll out of the cinema- yet it's perfectly fine for Nolan and Snyder, two directors held in considerably higher esteem, to rehash the same tactics and hope that we won't notice? When Superman finally does kill Zod, it's with an anti-climactic snap of the neck. Something he could have done at any other point but now, when there's a family- of what, four people?- in danger, suddenly Supes is quick to step in. Never mind the millions of people left stranded under rubble or reduced to dust. Winston Smith described his vision of the future as ''a boot stamping on a human face- forever''. If Man Of Steel is anything to go by, the future is already here.