Superman: Man of Steel

1. General Viewpoint: I very much enjoyed the new Superman movie, but realises that it could give a 4 year old child bad nightmares and it was quite a violent action packed movie indeed and indeed there was an immense amount of destruction taking place that might almost be post 9/11-ish. It might all be a bad dream in the end that someone had after eating a pizza. Perhaps also it was fairly low on the type of humour that made the first three Superman movies quite fun. The truth is that I am not really sure why this film is going in one direction after another and it just seemed that all assumptions that I could make about the story seemed like a cloud. Perhaps the film's story had been clouded by the new additions to it in terms of the mythos relating to the Kryptonians and Superman's role in the story, one might start to ask where it was all coming from, as if it were an odd injection of DNA from other movies that we've seen that made it seem very post-Prometheus and post-Matrix. It appears as if we have to keep running around in circles looking for a way into the nucleus of this movie that the production crew are not talking about. Whose idea was it and why? Or was it all just strange assumptions from David Goyer that came out of a cloud. The 3D in this film was sometimes good and then at other times almost non existent at some points.
2. Choice of actor: Henry Cavill, the actor who played Superman in this movie seemed to be an ideal choice for this time especially after his appearance in Immortals where he played the hero Theseus , Immortals had been produced by the same producer as 300 which was directed by Zach Snyder the director of this film. Henry Cavill is certainly not Christopher Reeve, but stood well in his own boots within this new film in a world where we might give up hoping for anything too interesting and innovative to get onto the screen. I probably thought he was the best man for the job.
3. Making the humans feel comfortable: I started to wonder why the armored outfits for the villains seem to be almost like the Engineers from Prometheus and these invaders were using terraforming technology as well. However the villain was a great one and his reason to be a villain worked well with the story.  The villain's armor seems to be loosely inspired by Giger's artwork. Also the reason that Superman keeps his handcuffs on for a while during the story is revealed to be more or less the reason David the Android reveals for why he is wearing his suit and helmet for their adventure aboard the planet's surface in Prometheus.
4. Kevin Costner's Performance: Kevin Costner gives a sensitive performance as the adopted father of Superman who obviously has been forced to develop a wider perspective of life with a great sense of foresight about his adopted son and it appears to be quite an important part of Superman's character development in the story about realising where it is important for him to conceal himself and in the process let people die including his own father.
   
5. Superman's DNA: One might ask if it was in Superman's DNA to have the urge to wear a red cape as he is as a child seen wearing one during play and well the superhero suit is one presented to him in a space craft.  Are we to assume that he wore a different coloured cape for every day of the week and it just so happened that they are selecting the day that he wore a red cape and this just so happens to be the colour of the cape of his cape from the suit he was given as a 33 year old adult.
6. The Derelict Ship: In the film we arrived at a point where a derelict space ship is discovered buried deep in the ice, and when Superman manages to tunnel into the ice to get to the spacecraft and soon it is revealed to be an ancient space craft from Krypton, with one mummified dead body in a sleeping capsule and the sign that someone had got out. Yet, this space craft is still in working order, and uses the same technology that Krypton had been using when Superman/ Kal-el as a baby left Krypton. Due to the compatability in technology so he is able to inset a key into the computer and upload a virtual copy of his father into the computer system so that Jor-El can be seen walking around and talking as a seeming living human being. This craft also just so happens to contain a growing area for the Kryptonian babies who appear to be being grown in the manner that babies were being grown en-masse in Matrix to act as batteries for the computer main frame. I'm not actually sure why it had this artificial womb feature but after all the confusion about why in Alien the derelict ship had a cargo vault that might have been a cave beneath the ship instead, the confusions that one can have about alien ships and their contents is to be tolerated. So what was the derelict ship doing there for 20000 years? Are the many of them to be found all still in fine working order? Do they all look as if they were based on slugs?
7. The terraforming ship: The villains' space craft indeed seemed to look a bit like a Philippe Starck orange squeezer, there's no getting away from that and indeed they also resembled oversized lobster crackers as well
8. General cloud of assumptions: There are many questions to ask about the story, I don't bother to read the comic books so I didn't mind the possible ways that this film might differ from the comic book world and maybe I might be in a position where I really can't comment about the story because I don't really know where its foundations are and to some degree the whole thing seems like a cloud, but it certainly seemed to be a huge disaster movie with a vast death toll, endless collateral damage and buildings destroyed by the dozen. Towards the end there was the point where we have General Zod making his boast about how he spent his whole life training as a warrior and well it doesn't stop Superman  who wasn't from beating him up. Perhaps the violence and death toll might be expected after what we've seen in 300. Perhaps the script remains a little unfirm with characters making claims with little foundation. However General Zod's character only seems to be after Superman because Superman contains the genetic blueprint of the whole civilisation of Krypton in his DNA. General Zod believed that his civilisation that he was fighting for was now dead once the ship with birthing capabilities had been destroyed and the terraforming machines had been destroyed, and it was his job afterwards to kill Superman for stealing his soul. One wonders what the point of it all violence from Zod was all about, and if all Kryptonian warriors had these ideas. And maybe everything that General Zod represented was just a general cloud of assumptions. However beyond all the clouds of confusion I do look forwards to a sequel and look forwards to the release of the blu-ray DVD.
9. See also: ghosts of Giger's biomechanics in Superman: Man of Steel