Christopher Nolan & Zac Snyder have figured out the secret to making a comic book superhero movie: Don't. Make another movie instead. Watchman was true to the comic book, as I recall (I read the comic once or twice before they made the film) but fairly inaccessible to normal people, and fell short of satisfying the source material's fans. 300 was a stylized war movie. Nolan was more successful with the Dark Knight trilogy, which was devoid of super powers and instead was an allegory about freedom, power and society. And "Man of Steel" succeeds in similar fashion as a straight-up science fiction movie with some familiar names. Change the Superman-specific names in this film, and switch around his famous powers, and it would still work, I think.

The first act is a brief political story in an alien setting - sort of like a Game of Thrones episode with laser guns and better creature effects. It does a much better job than the Richard Donner movies of giving depth and background to Krypton. Then we cut to a second act of a guy-with-powers, struggling to fit in in the world and grappling with what makes him different.

Rather than the usual time-wasting tedium of the superhero's childhood, instead, we get a fully-adult guy trying to camouflage himself in a series of unskilled jobs, until his frustration with bullying or his altruistic impulses lead him to blow his cover, and his struggle growing up with his powers, and the high notes of his upbringing and moral development at the hands of the Kents covered in a series of flashback vignettes. You got all the same stuff you did in the other movies or the first few seasons of Smallville (and a few little Easter eggs like a truck that says "Lexcorp" which IIRC was the name of the Luthor family business from the show), but without obnoxiously inscrutable (wooden-acting) Eurasian love interests or obnoxiously spunky blonde nerd friends, and instead of being in the only black family in small-town Kansas, Pete is a chubby ginger.

The childhood material is also presented in a way that makes it more relevant to the character of who he is and why he does what he does. The bullying theme is harped on to establish a seminal distaste for the abuse of power and to emphasize that Clark learned restraint and adaptation the hard way, rather than to give the audience cheap vicarious thrills of the nerd secretly having powers.

The second and third acts are bridged with a Christ allegory that makes "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" seem subtle. When Clark contemplates sacrificing himself to save humanity, he does so aloud with a stained glass window behind his head depicting Christ's Agony in the Garden. He states his age as 33, and responds to an urging to save the human race by falling back into a cruciform pose before turning around and flying.

The third act is a straight-up alien invasion action movie, with Michael Shannon's General Zod seeming a lot more credible and menacing than Terrance Stamp's pirate-at-a-particularly-boring-funeral style of dress and behavior. As always, Shannon flirts with scenery-chewing, but the story is, I believe, more tightly woven together. Zod's conflict with Clark/Kal-el(the word "Superman" is only spoken in one brief scene, which sort of lampshades the oddity of the name in our post-ironic social mindset) is more organic and character-driven in this rendition. In the Donner films, it seems like his backstory was a retcon to explain where Superman gets three equally-powerful menaces to fight, and the connection between them felt forced and nothing to do with the character. Basically, any threat could have been substituted for Zod and his henchmen, as the conflict was all internal. "Man of Steel" makes Zod a more personally meaningful foe for Clark.

As far as the action and the visuals go, Richard Donners' films, by comparison, look like a puppet show put on by hippie peacenicks. The climatic battle is very reminiscent of "The Avengers" only with fewer silly characters or ridiculously bright colors. Henry Cavill might very well be the best Superman I have personally witnessed. Christopher Reeve was a little too smirky and off-putting. The handful of moments of Dean Cain were too regular-guy for such an iconic role, and Tom Welling had the charisma of a wet turkey. Brandon Routh was utterly forgettable, but Cavill manages to make the character believable as an admirable & inspiring hero and a respect-worthy man. His relationship with his mother seems more genuine and natural than any of the prior movies, and Kevin Costner's Jonathan Kent is rebooted as more than just the nay-saying lecturer of Clark's adolescence, briefly sketching in a man who is believable as both Superman's moral touchstone and mentor and as a loving father who believes in his son. For his other father, Russell Crowe's Kryptonian scientist is a lot more badass than Marlon Brando, and his expository role to Clark is handled in such a way as to give his Kryptonian heritage comparable significance to his humanity, without being an unnecessary source of conflict, as I vaguely remembered from "Smallville" (I gave up on that show after the witchcraft episode).

Another aspect that I felt improved the movie immensely was leaving the oft-derided secret identity issue almost completely out of the film. We don't have to endure the bumbling of a mild-mannered reporter, or Perry White & Lois Lane being such absolute jerks to him that you wonder why he is personally invested in saving them. However the film cleverly forestalls a legion of irate nerds launching a flame-crusade over the internet. There is a brief coda at the end of the film to service the demands of the sort of recalcitrant fanboy who pitches a shitfit over the omission of such ridiculous comic-book elements as a student inventing an adhesive substance and delivery-system to perfectly complement his spider-related powers, or a flying aircraft carrier or putting a god of thunder and a nuclear-powered rage monster on the same team as a skinny chick with pistols and a specialist in obsolete weaponry (who, sources tell me, was never on the same Avengers roster as the Hulk, so he COULD have been left out of the damn movie!* ).

With a scope that combines both the Richard Donner films, with none of the tediousness or cartoonish aspects of all subsequent films, I really think "Man of Steel" is my personal favorite Superman movie, and the best treatment of the franchise I have yet to see, including a couple of episodes each of the really old show and WW2-era cartoon. It might also be the best movie I have seen about anyone with super powers, and a worthy addition to Nolan's resume within the genre.

But then this site is where I go to find people with precisely opposite taste in things like Egwene, so you should probably not take my word for it.

*I strongly recommend DC take a hint and leave "Arrow" out of any Justice League movie. Superman from this film just does NOT belong in the same organization as any mortal human being with a bow and arrows, no matter how much karate or supercomputers he has backing him up. I don't even see Bale's Batman being a worthy teammate, though I would imagine that if you could make a credible Avengers movie featuring Hawkeye & Thor at the same time, you could find a plausible way to team up Superman with some version of Batman. Aquaman seems equally futile, but "The Big Bang Theory" which I have recently been marathoning, suggests even source-material aficionados share my skepticism.