"Man of Steel"

Although directed by Zack Snyder (300), this reboot of Superman feels like co-storywriter Christopher Nolan's Batmanification of Superman. 

I like the idea of Christopher Nolan -- reactionary elitist foe of disorder and mob rule, the Duke of Wellington with $100 million to blow on CGI -- more than I actually like Nolan's movies.

If Nolan made claustrophobically airless art house films, I'd no doubt be vociferously championing his mastery of airless claustrophobia. But since his movies (e.g., Inception) don't need my help, I'm left nostalgically recalling the glorious expansiveness of Richard Donner's shots of midsummer wheat country in the erratic but likable 1978 Superman that launched the era of comic book movies.

It's a cliche that Superman is optimistic in a New Dealy nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself way, while Batman is drenched in dread of street crime, but Nolan seems to agree and thus isn't all that interested in Superman's silly but fun omnipotence. Nolan attempts to re-imagine the comic book hero as a semi-realistic space alien psychologically tormented by schoolyard bullies whom he can't punch back against because he's too strong. Whether a semi-realistic Superman is a glass half full or half empty is up to you.

Nolan isn't interested either in Lois Lane (who is played without spark by a maternal Amy Adams). That reminds me of how good Anne Hathaway was in The Dark Knight Rises as Catwoman to stand out as a woman in a Nolan film. In "Man of Steel," Lois Lane figures out quickly that Superman (the word isn't fully mentioned in the movie) is Clark Kent, but that just deprives Henry Cavill in the main role of a chance to do a little acting by playing two characters, as Christopher Reeve got to do in the original.

A big problem hanging over Superman movies right now is that Reeve's death leaves them kind of stumped about how to portray the central figure.

I suspect that in the long run, the way forward with Superman movies will eventually turn out to be to blend Reeve's tragic crippling -- a god falls to earth -- and struggle against his injury into the mythos. Over enough time, all these memories kind of blur together and the distinction between character and actor in the collective recollection gets hazy. Ultimately, somebody will figure out how to use that, but it's likely too soon at present.

(Lex Luthor is, thankfully, gone completely.)

In contrast, Nolan's nominal bad guy General Zod is teh awesome. Played by Chicago stage veteran Michael Shannon, who is the rare American actor to have the diction and stature to play Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Zod gets all the good lines. Born and bred to protect his people, this authoritarian militarist had teamed up with Superman's liberal scientist dad Jor-El (Russell Crowe -- not bad, better than Brando reading cue cards in 1978, but still overshadowed by Shannon) to try to alert the do-nothing planetary council to the mortal peril facing an imploding Krypton.

But they differ in their solutions. Like so many movies these days, Man of Steel has something or other to do with eugenics, but I can't begin to explain why Jor-El's plan for preserving Krypton's bloodlines is the nice liberal eugenic plan and Zod's is the evil racist eugenic plan. It has something to do with genetic encoding of Krypton's billions ... or something.