"Man of Steel" is far grittier than any other Superman movie, since that's now a requirement for all reboots. Most of that grit got on the character himself, who kind of goes off the rails. He starts off bumming around Earth taking odd jobs and changing his identity every few miles. He has a "turn the other cheek" policy when it comes to confrontation, but like a psychopath he uses his powers to impale a semi-truck on logs when a guy at a bar throws a drink at him. Somehow, one of his superpowers is forging the necessary documents to apply to any job he wants, because he ends up working at an military controlled Arctic station. You'd think the army would at least run a background check on a guy who doesn't even have a picture ID before letting him in. How does he even get paid without a Social Insurance Number? Assumingly, he's doing all this to find out more about his origin, which he knows comes from another planet. So what was his plan? To just keep wandering around forever and magically find a trace of an alien race? Why didn't he become an astronomer?
Amazingly, it works. He finds a stranded Kryptonian vessel that's been frozen in the ice for over 20,000 years. He finds out his father left him a virtual simulation of himself in a crystal he's been carrying with him all his adult life, which should logically have been completely useless as the odds of him ever encountering a Kryptonian computer interface were literally astronomical. Why did his father even bother with it? He couldn't have planned it out ahead. The vessel, for an even more inexplicable reason, has an El family uniform in it. We find out the, "S" stands for, "Hope," but it's also the symbol for the house of El. So really, it means, "El." He's Elman, or possibly Hopeman. His real name is Kal-Hope.
His father, by the way, is the worst criminal in Krypton's history. He steals the very means the Kryptonians have to reproduce.That's like sterilizing every man, woman and child on the planet all at once. He's even told before he does it that it's a "Zeta-Level" crime, which one would assume means "Way-Bad."
If that's the case, then why isn't his wife, who's his co-conspirator, arrested? She's at Zod's trial, standing with the rest of the high council. She's also guilty of breaking their strict "no-child" policy. Why is there a double-standard?
If the movie had been directed a little better, audiences could have walked away wondering if Zod had been the hero all along, instead of a fascist maniac.He's basically just Super-Hitler, but he's just the product of his people. He was literally made to act that way. Superman has a choice, and he chooses to kill the last surviving embryos of his people. He aborts an entire species while the "bad guy" begs him to show mercy. How cold is that? There wasn't even a reason to. He'd already destroyed the World Engine. All that was left was to mop up some leftover Kryptonians, and he could have called it a day. He makes a choice to kill his own people while they're still in the womb. He decided to kill a species based on a day-long encounter with a single group of people. That's like deciding to kill all Aryans because you didn't like the Nazis.
It's the single, most evil thing I've ever seen anyone do in a movie. That's why I don't think it's even a Superman movie. He never calls himself Superman, after all, it just kind of crops up as a nick-name.
I think he's actually Ultraman, the evil-opposite version of Superman from Earth-3.
Ultraman's real identity is Clark Kent, but he has a different origin than Superman. His powers are the same, but Kryptonite gives him new powers. He's also bat-shit crazy-evil. Except for the "U" his costume is closer to the one in Man of Steel than Superman's traditional outfit (no red shorts).
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