Like RuneScape, Man of Steel has audiences split down the middle, either hating it or loving it with little middle ground to be had. I have to side with the critics on this; Man of Steel sucked. I let my childhood out of its dark, damp basement to let it enjoy its playground of sweet nostalgia when he noticed Zack Snyder in a large trench coat and wide-brimmed hat eye-balling him in the distance. Snyder held up an ice-cream cone decorated from top to bottom with Superman yum-yums, playfully dancing it lower and lower, fiddling with his zipper with his other hand when it gets caught on something. Screaming in a fit of rage, he throws ice-cream down and proceeds to flail angrily like a Gmod rag-doll as my childhood looked on, sad, scared, confused, but somewhat entertained as the mad-man takes out his frustration on a passing squirrel. Then my present self came in and told my childhood what that man intended. That is how I describe my feelings about this movie.
The movie plays like it's trying to be the world's longest episode of Lost, flashback after flashback in no particular order, turning the already half-baked story into an incoherent mess. Plot progression is like a Darth Vader stranglehold: forced, only happening when everyone decides to leave their brains at home. Jor-El discovered how to turn a Kryptonian diesel engine into a warp core decided not to publish his work to save his people, instead he went home and had sex with his wife, giving birth to Superman. Zod and his crew, near the last moments of Krypton, is put into a spaceship the size of a city with enough food, fuel, enough energy to last them decades in warp speed, and a copy of Adobe CS6 in case they get bored of feel like threatening a planet, so Zod could be the villain. The drowning kids in the bus elected to ignore the fact that both doors were open, forcing young Superman to save them so he can have a talk with Jonathan Kent, who makes a far more convincing villain than Zod ever did. The crew of the Daily Planet stood in awe as a city was being destroyed, and only when death knocks on their doors like the world's worst Jehovah's Witness do they consider running away. I almost believed this movie was a Socratic Exercise: "Suppose there was a universe where babies are welcomed into the world by being dropped on their heads" and Jor-El just took it to the next level.
Character development falls by the wayside, ignored like a terms service agreement. Superman was supposed to reluctant to use his powers because Jonathan, who died in a scene that would later inspire the cinema sins of Sharknado and Stoneado, told him not to. It's a little hard to take that seriously when he's already torn down a metal door into a room full of men with his nipples of fire, and crucified a truck early into the movie (I thought I was being cute and original by saying that in my video review but Nostalgia Critic beat me by a day).
Akira Toriyama and most other manga writers have the sense to have their personifications of good make every attempt to minimize collateral damage. Superman in this movie makes no attempt to move his fights out of either town he's fought in. In movies like The Avengers, games like Knack, or cartoons like Justice League, the heroes are left unable to because the heroes were a nuisance, not the objective. Superman at all times was the objective, and was fully capable of moving his fights elsewhere, but he didn't.
Other critics criticized Man of Steel for not being funny, which was weird to me at first because movies don't have to be funny to be good. When I thought about, I realized this movie made attempts to be funny and just flat out fell on its face. A prime example being the movie's closing joke: "Welcome to the Planet" which was more out of time than a plump turkey on Christmas, and I would have missed it entirely if someone in the back hadn't laughed at it. This movie suffers from bad writing all across the board.
