Man of Steel Review

Visually it is the strongest work anyone has done with the character since 1978. Mokri shoots the whole film handheld with real optical flare, which turns a god into a documentary subject, and Krypton is reimagined as a strange biomechanical civilisation rather than a crystal palace. Hans Zimmer's drum score is the rare superhero theme that people can actually hum. Michael Shannon is the best thing here, playing Zod as a soldier bred for exactly one purpose and destroyed when that purpose is taken from him, which gives the film a villain with a coherent tragedy.

Where it fails is tone and argument. Jonathan Kent tells his son it might have been right to let a bus of children drown, which is a thesis the film never recovers from. Amy Adams is capable and underwritten. The last forty minutes are an unbroken demolition of a populated city, shot with an appetite that sits badly beside the neck snap the film wants us to read as agony. Superb craft in service of a Superman who never once looks happy.