Thanks for clearing that up, I was curious as to what the "school of douche" definition was.

Just got out of it. Will have more thoughts later, but as someone who doesn't give a fuck about Superman, I kinda appreciate this movie's massive FUCK YOU attitude. It's like, I know you hate origin stories, so we'll do the origin as quickly as possible in little flashbacks so we can get back to the action. And the action is so ludicrously crazy, it puts the Transformers movies to shame. I don't think its anything more than a watchabley good movie, but at least for me, I don't think you can make a great Superman movie, because he's a totally uninteresting protagonist. At least here, we get to see what a real superhero fight might look like at that scale, so I got my money's worth. Also Hans Zimmer needs to have an intervention so he writes good music again, I miss 90s zimmer

Thinking on it some more, while I do appreciate the action, this movie really needs another 20 minutes to flesh out the characters. Teague is absolutely right, grown-up Superman is a complete non-entity in this. He barely even says anything the whole movie, isn't allowed to establish much of a personality or anything. The whole first hour just feels incredibly rushed, and key moments that should be amazing don't really get a chance to resonate.

Like, take the first flight sequence. That should be an amazing, majestic moment, but the movie is rushing so fast that it's not built up to properly and doesn't resonate. The super-lazy Zimmer score doesn't help, compare this to the first flight sequence in How To Train Your Dragon, and its not even close.

Beyond that though, this suffers from the same problem I have with The Avengers, which is that super-powered, invincible people throwing each-other through things has no stakes and is completely boring. That's ultimately a problem that's inherent to Superman as a character, and no movie can really work around it, but it definitely hurts it (if they at least showed him getting progressively more damaged it would help, make him strong but not invincible).

It ends up being watchably entertaining, but not even close to as good as Dark Knight Rises or even Iron Man 3, which both have way more memorable moments and way more personality. It sure is pretty though, visually it's pretty staggering.

after thinking about it some more, I do agree with you Bullet, the film is boring because it has no stakes.  That and the main character is pretty dull.  He seemed much more interesting the way they wrote him as a kid.  I'd love to watch a movie about THAT kid, he seemed much more interesting. 

I'm gonna have to disagree with you on the dark knight rises though.  That movie wasn't any less boring than this Superman film.  IM3 was pretty fun and had more interesting moments than those two movies. 

To be quite honest with you, all the Dark Knight movies felt like they were moving too fast, as is the case with MOS.

I find the Captain America movie more interesting than MOS frankly.

Zimmer's score for The Peacemaker is pretty bad. And I'm not too keen on his scores for the Sherlock Holmes films. And I used to love it but apart from the main theme (Brothers) his score for Broken Arrow is rubbish too.

Just sayin'

My reaction is almost exactly Dorkman's. Everything was going great until we got to the action. At which point it became generic, video game, and, for god's sake, can this be the last alien superhero fight in front of 7-11 in the middle of nowhere for a while? I'm on record as deeply disliking Snyder's style, but even I was surprised by how boring the fights were. And equally surprised by how good the non-action bits were.

And I don't know why they bothered filming in Chicago. The city was plastered with CGI. They should have saved some money and shot in Detroit.

*EDIT* And I really like the score.. even if it wore on my nerves after 2 hours of looping that 45 second bit from the trailer.

I thought his performance was very good, but I really dislike what they did with the character. He's supposed to be the one who gives Superman his personal connection to and love of humanity. Here, he's barely in the movie, and when he shows up all he does is tell Superman he will never be accepted and to hide his true nature, they make him a bit of a bastard. I get the idea of making him more of a pessimist than an idealist, but they don't really give you a grasp on why Superman cares about him, there's like a scene missing. As a result, Superman's decision to turn himself in feels really rushed and unjustified (there's the ultra-brief scene in the church and that's it), why should he trust or want to help humanity?