When I was a young kid, I saw the Christopher Reeves SUPERMAN movie. It was at night, it was at one of the big theaters in the Valley in San Diego. Back then, the big tag line was ‘Do you believe a man can fly?’ When I came out of the theater, there was a crowd of reporters and one of them asked me that question. I said YES.

Years later, I still liked the movie but I didn’t love it. It was Superman but it wasn’t Superman. See, the thing about Superman is he’s . . . well Super. Most heroes, even the ‘super’ ones, are still human on some level. They aren’t on the power level of someone like Superman. The big code a creative person has to do with Superman is get the god-like abilities and the humanity of the character to fit together. Before SUPERMAN RETURNS, technology limited what could be done with the character. When you look at a film like SUPERMAN 2, it was a very good movie, but the action, by today’s standards, was dated.

SUPERMAN 1 and 2 existed in a comic book world pre Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. After those books, the comic book audience grew up in a sense, although the general public still thought of comics as Archies and 60s Batman. The world changed in 2001 and we wanted our heroes to fight back, no matter what. Probably a big failure of SUPERMAN RETURNS, in my opinion, was going back to the well with a Luthor land deal. It’s like making a Star Wars movie about taxes and political intrigue. All good, I guess, on some level but the public today wants actions and battles.

We want to believe a man can fly and kick spectacular butt!

MAN OF STEEL starts off with the destruction of Krypton. I guess it is a pre-requisite of any Superman movie that if you show Krypton, the actor playing Jor-El must wear something resembling the Superman symbol on him. You can now add must be an action star to the list. This Jor-El is no boring, pondering scientist. He is a scientist and a man of action. There was an interesting twist to the mythos of Krypton, but to me the change made sense considering modern sensibilities. Setting up Kal-El as a naturally born Kryptonian, as opposed to an artificially predestined individual, made his growth on Earth and his Kansas independence made him even alien to his Kryptonian roots. This Superman was really the only one of his kind, alien to us and alien to his own people.

I liked that we got the Superman origin in flashbacks. I liked how we saw him struggling with his abilities and how he and his parents worried about what people may think of him if he was revealed. There was an inevitable religious reference to Clark’s abilities and, I don’t know, it had to be addressed because of the direction the script, but I have a feeling some of the parallels to Jesus and Superman may make some overly religious and/or conservative people go a little bonkers when there isn’t a need to do so. I like that we got a Lois Lane who did some reporting. She followed the lead, followed the trail that helped her get an idea of what type of man Clark is.

Now, let’s be real clear, this is a comic book movie, which means a lot of things aren’t going to be perfect. It’s almost a given that characters in this type of movie are going to be put in situations that defy logic. They will make decisions that help the plot rather than help us get a sense of the characters. It’s a bad excuse to claim bad logic, outrageous situations and other bits of bad decisions by the writers can be tossed off as ‘part of the genre’ of superhero movies but it seems like the only explanation that can be given to some of the bone head problems in the movie. I have to say I’m grateful they aren’t massively bad stumbles (see Green Lantern) but those things keep the movie from being a great movie. The fact that the good parts well outweigh the bad parts makes me wonder if those bad parts were corrected, how cool would this movie be?

I said the public wanted a Superman that would kick butt and we got this in MAN OF STEEL. The battle sequences in this movie seem to be the dividing line between geek Superman fans and general public / older generation Superman fans. Some critics think those battles were disturbing because of the implied collateral damage with the civilian population. They think that is unbecoming of Superman. Some critics just aren’t enamored by CG fight scenes. My answer to those critics would be to go online or pick up any of the animated Superman films put out by DC in the past few years, or take a look at the excellent animated Justice League and Justice League Unlimited series. Superman fight scenes, when he is up against someone or something as powerful as him, are usually brutally powerful events. People fly through buildings, building fall on them, trains and other huge objects are thrown on each other and all the while, people are running in the streets, normally away from the violence. When someone gets smashed through a building, yes you have to figure people are inside the buildings. Think about the fight scene in AVENGERS in New York. Hulk is smashing, aliens are smashing and there is a ton of destruction to the city. People were saved but many more people died as the result of that battle. In MAN OF STEEL some people got out of the path of destruction and obviously, some didn’t.

Action films aren’t like the action cartoons like GI Joe in the 80s. Buildings don’t empty out miraculously before they explode and pilots don’t eject from aircraft with parachutes before they explode. It is cold to say it this way but there is innocent collateral damage when you have heroes and villains beating each other up in a populated area.

Yes, I can say I really liked MAN OF STEEL. It wasn’t a perfect movie but it was a movie that portrayed Superman as a complex individual.