After Superman Returns garnered decent reviews and a $400 million box office, a sequel was pencilled in but a combination of various commitments and a slightly off lack of enthusiasm on the part of the studio meant that it never happened. Singer’s vehicle had been a decent enough film, but the studio made noises about not enough action and not leaving the character where they wanted him to be. In addition, despite generally favourable reviews, most critics felt that the film had been a little too respectful in its paying homage to Richard Donner’s original. The studio began soliciting other ideas for the character from various writers and directors, eventually settling on a pitch by Dark Knight Trilogy team Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer. With Zak Snyder brought on to direct and Henry Cavill putting on the cape and tights, the stage was set for a new chapter in the DC/WB cinematic adventure.

Kal El has grown up on Earth, having been sent there by his parents before the destruction of his home world, Krypton. Struggling with hiding his abilities from a young age, the adult – known as Clark – is forced to choose his destiny when the renegade Kryptonian General Zod threatens his adopted home.

Zak Snyder might not seem the ideal choice to direct a Superman film. His work on 300 and Watchmen showed that he had the aesthetic ability to convert comics to the screen (in the case of Watchmen arguably a little too faithfully, the ending excepted). But they also demonstrated a certain aesthetic style to Snyder’s work – dark, with de-saturated colours and a murky palette. His preference for the idealised muscular male physique and deconstruction of heroes however, meant that he could at least bring an interesting new take on a hero who had traditionally slightly struggled on screen since 1980’s Superman II. That direction, combined with a script by Goyer, fresh off his work on the Dark Knight trilogy, could produce something original and tailored more to appeal to a modern audience who might not respond as well to the big blue boy scout in his more traditional aspect.

And the truth is, Man of Steel is an interesting deconstruction and reimagining of the Superman mythos. It doesn’t stray too far from the key details – the destruction of Krypton, the flight to Earth, the Kents, Smallville and Lois Lane are all present and correct. But it reinterprets the mythos in the round by playing around with how those details fit together. The reimagining of Krypton as a planet where natural births do not occur, and the babies which are produced in Matrix-esque ‘farms’ are each genetically coded to perform their ‘destined’ role in society, is an interesting one, giving both a natural sense of uniqueness to Kal as the ‘first natural birth on Krypton in centuries’ as well as setting up a more grounded, fleshed out villain in Zod, a General created specifically to protect Krypton at any cost, no matter how horrific.

The changes with the Kents also raise interesting points – Jonathan’s insistence that Clark not use his powers and reveal himself to a world he believes to be unready to cope riled many fans of the character, and it is indeed odd to hear Pa Kent say ‘maybe’ in response to a young Clark’s heartfelt question as to whether he should have simply let his fellow students die in a bus crash. That said, considering the world in which we now live, with a generally more cynical attitude towards authority and government than was present in the golden age of Superman comics or even the era of the Donner films, it makes sense to update the characters in this way. Of course Martha and Jonathan, who have raised what they see as their son since he was a baby, would fear what might be done to him by authorities if they were to find out who and what he actually was. Of course they would have that primal fear of losing their son. Far from destroying the myth of Clark’s adoptive parents, Snyder and Goyer make it more real, more believable. It doesn’t matter if they know their boy can lift a car or jump over a house; they are parents, first and foremost, and their concern that their son might come to harm – emotional or physical – at the hands of a world that doesn’t/can’t understand him, seem well-founded and appropriate.

This combines to give us an origin story for the character which isn’t the ‘same old’ origin story, at once giving us the familiar but with twists. The idea of young Clark has been explored in depth in the Smallville series, but the 33 year old Clark, making his way through life as quietly and best he can, is something new. This isn’t the story of a well-turned out young man who goes to work in the big city fresh from a small hick town in America. This is the tale of a man who’s travelled a fair bit, seen the rough end of the world as he goes from manual job to manual job, trying to maintain a low profile, but who can’t help but keep finding himself rescuing people from danger and then having to disappear. Fans disliked this idea because Superman is supposed to be a naturally noble figure who chooses to help and be the superhero he is naturally – here, Clark wavers for a long time, only revealing himself to the world when the fate of the planet is threatened by people searching for him. Even then, he needs the push of his real father in the form of a hologram to make him take the final step, and on the way there is a little bit of agonising about the nature of his existence and his duty to his dead adoptive father and so on.

In case the Jesus metaphor isn’t quite hitting hard enough by the film showing us our hero at 33, and emphasising his destiny to save the human race after he is sent down to Earth from the heavens, then Snyder packs in a few more unsubtle hints, whether it’s a scene where Clark discusses his options with a priest in a church, a stained glass window depicting Christ framed next to him in the shot as he speaks, or the way in which he leaves Zod’s ship in orbit, falling out, arms outstretched as he is framed against the Earth below him. There is of course argument that there has always been an element of Christ metaphor to the character – an infant sent to save the world, a refugee on a planet of people who look like him but are not him and so on – but Snyder just makes sure that it’s really hammered home here.

And for the first two acts of the movie it works. Those who accuse Snyder of being a simple brash, over the top action director would really do well to pay attention to his choices in the first hour and a half of Man of Steel. Whereas it isn’t lacking for action scenes, they aren’t overpowering, and they are interspersed with quiet scenes of powerful emotion. Diane Lane’s Martha (one of my favourite parts of the movie) talking a terrified young Clark out of the closet where he has hidden himself as his powers overwhelm his senses, Clark talking to his real father for the first time and learning of his personal history, even Zod and his failed coup – all provide scenes of gravitas and feeling, emotional gut punches which signal a director who respects the source material as much more than ‘just a comic’.

Unfortunately, in the third act, the film somewhat loses its way, almost feeling as if Goyer and Snyder hand over to the second unit and go for an early beer. Dialogue starts to get much less involving and to feel much less believable, the antagonists slip from being believable three-dimensional characters into cliched two-dimensional villains and the action starts to dominate and overwhelm everything else. I’ve often said that the third act of Man of Steel feels more like a Michael Bay Transformers movie, all massive explosions, destroyed buildings and flailing bodies, and on this re-watch the impression remained, but strengthened. It’s not just that the film descends into a loud, flashy festival of things smashing into one another, but also that the dialogue drops several notches in tone. Where before I could understand (if not sympathise with) Zod and his companions as refugees bereft of the world they were literally bred and indoctrinated to protect, in the third act they literally de-evolve. This is most clear in a line from Zod’s second, Faora-Ul, when she tells Clark that he will lose because he ‘has morality’ which she and her companions ‘lack’. To that point, there has been no suggestion of any such thing – indeed early on Jor-El remarks to Zod during his coup that he will remember and mourn the ‘man he was’ not the monster he has become. There are other suggestions throughout that Zod and Jor-El were once friends, or at least that each respected the other, and when Zod tells Clark that if he destroys the ship he will destroy Krypton, there’s a real sense of feeling there. When Zod talks of doing whatever he must to protect Krypton, he is not a man who comes across as lacking morality, rather one that acknowledges he must sometimes do immoral things in the name of the greater good.

The other side of the third act’s orgy of destruction is of course how badly it reflects on Superman himself, the hero who’s always supposed to be about saving people. Much was written about the projected body count in Metropolis and Smallville from the final act carnage of Man of Steel – so much in fact that Snyder would go out of his way to assure audiences in Dawn of Justice that the final big battle was taking place in an uninhabited space. But this is to miss two fundamental points. First, this whole film is literally Superman’s origin story. This represents his first go at saving the world, having hidden his powers from it for a long time. This isn’t a confident Superman with years of experience under his belt, it’s Clark Kent, suddenly confronted with a violent, ugly side of his heritage and asked to fight against people literally bred and trained from birth to fulfil their sole purpose in life as warriors, with decades of experience of having done so. He’s doing the best he can in rapidly evolving circumstances, and to judge him on this as his first go at the job is to be a little too hard. Second, the original Superman character was actually quite an angry and aggressively violent one, often throwing around human villains in such a way that they would be unlikely to escape at least serious injury. Superman’s ‘toning down’ in the comics came in 1940, two years after regular stories had started to be published about him in Action Comics. Perhaps Snyder knows this, and perhaps not, but the point is that like all comic book character, the last son of Krypton has evolved many times since his creation, and to hold any one adaptation – be it film or comic – as being objectively wrong is to miss the point of the medium in my opinion.

Superman’s killing of Zod – the part which particularly exercised fans – also makes sense in context. It isn’t a choice he willingly makes but one forced on him in the moment, and his immediate reaction afterward demonstrates this. Snyder didn’t turn Superman into a bloodthirsty killer; he made him into a man, who has to start from the beginning and learn from his mistakes.

Cavill does his best as Clark/Superman, but there’s something a little lacking by comparison to Reeve (who in fairness set the bar for the character and has yet to be bettered). He doesn’t have the same easy charm Reeve possessed, nor the same confidence. Arguably that works to the advantage of this portrayal in many ways, but there’s no escaping that slightly wooden quality to the performance at certain points. Though he looks the part, Cavill just doesn’t quite have the spark that’s needed. Opposite him Adams does the best she can with a Lois Lane who’s more plot advancement device than actual character. Always where the script needs her to be in order to progress the narrative, this goes from suspiciously serendipitous in Act 1 where she discovers the ship with Clark to just plain stupid in the third act when she is taken by Zod for no reason, then ends up on the plane for the big finale mission for no apparent reason. Adams is a superlative actress who has shone elsewhere, but it’s difficult to think of any actress – however talented – who could do much with dialogue like ‘I’m a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter’.

The rest of the cast all perform capably enough. Shannon’s Zod is an intense, scary presence with a real believable zealotry in his eye that makes me want to have seen more from the character and Diane Lane knocks it out of the park as Ma Kent, possessed of exactly the right amounts of fragility and steely determination for the character.

As a movie then, it’s a little bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. An original, compelling take on a well-known character for its first two acts and a messy, noisy, clunky concluding act which somehow manages to not be completely unsalvageable and probably would have looked far better were it not attached to such good stuff before it. Though it wasn’t necessarily clear at the time, this film would shoulder the burden of being the foundation stone in Warner Bros’ DCEU project, looking to emulate the success of the MCU. In that respect it’s a shame because this film doesn’t have the charismatic lead or consistent solidity of plot of Iron Man, and when you’ve unveiled your most powerful character in the first movie, where do you go from there? Had this had the luxury of not being first, or at least having a bit of distance between itself and Dawn of Justice – as Iron Man did from Avengers Assemble, then that might have worked out better. As it stands, it’s a flawed project much like its immediate predecessor, Superman Returns, although unlike that movie, it at least stands on its own two feet, not relying on homage to what went before. It’s not quite a failure, but I can’t shake the feeling that it could have been so much more.