Again, I didn’t despise this film. It was a fun summer movie, but was it a proper Superman film? No, no it wasn’t.
Admittedly, it looked cool (a common theme of this list) and the casting was not awful (seeing as to how Michael Shannon is the f*cking man), but there were just too many things that made it not feel like Superman to me. I respect that they wanted to make this reboot grittier than the last reboot (when Superman threw LITERALLY zero punches the entire movie), but to have this movie end the way it ended was a joke.
I know I mentioned this before in a previous article, but Superman does not break necks. I can present to you about forty things he could have done in the final moments of that battle with Zod, but breaking his neck and then screaming in emo agony about it was awful. Just awful. That would be like Batman pulling out a gun and shooting the Joker. It just wouldn’t work, and neither did this.
I also took issue with the great amount of holes in the story. The irony that his (Costner) Dad told him he should have let that bus full of kids drown. The irony of his (Crowe) Dad being dead but honestly not being dead at all. There were just too many glaring errors to overlook. It may have been fun and loud and shiny at times, but this was not a Superman movie. This was not a Man of Steel movie. This was not a comic book movie. This was a summer movie in the vein of Michael Bay.