If you dig watching Superman fight fellow Kryptonians using today's special effects, you'll probably want to catch this in the theater. If not but you still like Superman, I'd suggest watching it at some point anyway.
Spoilers follow!
Seriously! Big spoilers!
Okay, so this is another "origin story" for Superman. I'm not a Superman buff, but this one is quite different from the Christopher Reeve movie we all know. It starts out on Krypton, and we get an idea of the technology and society of that planet in its last days as things play out. Jor-El gives his big "We're all gonna die" speech, then Zod comes in and starts the first action sequence. Zod is a little different than in Superman II. He shows respect for Jor-El, for one thing. He's just a little less "Rarrr Zod smash son of Jor-El!" and a little more "I have reasons for acting like this."
The next part of the movie is basically a series of vignettes, out of temporal order, showing Clark Kent as a child and as a young man, dealing with his powers and otherness . . . sometimes being heroic, sometimes being less so. It's done pretty well, in and of itself. Again, I'm no Superman buff, so I don't care much how the secondary characters are portrayed, but I suspect this is a different Pa Kent than people are used to seeing. He spends his scenes mostly concerned about Clark keeping his alien nature a secret and telling him that he must find his own destiny. And this plays into the movie's main themes, such as they are: Superman represents Hope. The question of individual Free Will. How do people react to a powerful Other?
Lois Lane comes into the movie at about the same time as Clark finds out about his Kryptonian roots. She and Kent/Superman have a different dynamic than usual, but I think it works pretty well and feeds into the themes mentioned above.
Then Zod comes a-calling, demanding Kal-El, and humanity and Kent are both put to the test. There's some back-and-forth, and then -- about an hour and a half into the movie -- the fight scenes start really breaking out. The themes are mostly dropped. I enjoyed this part too, for the most part, although I think somebody needs to investigate whoever's supposed to be enforcing the building codes in Metropolis. One or two of those buildings went down after damage that a Jenga tower would laugh off.
Modern camerawork concepts were on display fairly often. Yes, good old shaky-cam.
The shaky-cam was mainly restricted to reasonable contexts, however. They also used dramatic zoom-ins a lot, to the point that it was a little annoying. And occasionally they used a sort of "natural", imperfect "unsteady-cam" that really was not needed at all. None of it kept me from understanding what I was looking at, though.I'm not going to complain about any of the acting. Cavill sold me on his being Superman, being an adult Clark Kent who wanted to help people despite personal risk. Pa and Ma Kent were loving parents. Lois Lane showed some spirit. Jor-El had dignity. And Zod was a convincing threat.
This movie isn't going to win any Best Picture awards, but I found it entertaining, and -- despite all the destruction and death and a dystopic Krypton -- not an overly gloomy movie. Superman decides to side with life over death, and even though we can sympathize to some extent with Zod's desires, it's never suggested that Superman is wrong to defend Earth from him.
Hopefully, by the next movie, Superman will have learned to aim away from things that go boom.
