Avis des critiques

Man of Steel attempts to reimagine the Superman legend, but it's also enhanced by a forthright acknowledgment of its influences and an acute appreciation for the sci-fi canon—one that's ripe with social commentary (a young Clark can only see his classmates' insides, providing a potent visual/political link with John Carpenter's meta-allegory They Live), spirituality (Superman's surrender evokes the military greeting party of The Day the Earth Stood Still), and unrivaled cinematic beauty...

Man of Steel has a similar structure and climax to The Avengers, but it's a far more ambitious work, refusing to relax into geekfest fun and games. Snyder tries to retell the most famous origin story in modern pop culture, not quelling the memory of previous incarnations but coherently setting up its own priorities, and doing it all in a fashion that recreates the specific gravity of this mythos.

It's not that I don't take Superman seriously, as a viewer; it's more that I don't automatically take him seriously. The onus is on any new version to make him come alive – and Man of Steel mostly falls short. This is Superman as Sexy Hunk, going conspicuously shirtless ("I just think he's kind of hot," admits a shamefaced female soldier). This is Superman as Gentle Doctor, looking at Lois with infinite sadness as he prepares to cauterize her wound...

The entire movie, with its thrumming and droning and lumbering and crashing, seems especially nostalgic for imagination and morality on the human scale. If it's so much more engaging, even in its roiling gray clashes, than Nolan's own movies, it's due in large measure to the primordial simplicity, purity, and clarity of the issues that Superman brings in his wake.

Snyder's roving quasi-documentary camera and writer David S. Goyer's determination to tell the familiar Smallville part of the Superman saga in nonlinear form do nominally break from the blockbuster style sheet. But Snyder and frequent Michael Bay DP Amir Mokri's Malick-lite bucolic Americana long lens inserts share screen time with... portraits of Smallville's IHOP and Pizza Hut...

For the most part it's splendidly realized, even though the muted color palette, shaky camerawork and mostly secondhand design concepts won't win any prizes for originality. I like how Snyder, Goyer and Nolan bring together Superman's embrace of his destiny and Zod's arriving on Earth and assuming the mantle of visionary warrior-leader that Jor-El denied him back on Krypton... The most striking and curious aspect of "Man of Steel" is the way it minimizes and even shuts out women.

The movie has its only fun grazing big political themes, but it's not committed to turning them into any sort of principle. Nolan is a producer of Man of Steel and shares a story credit with Goyer. Each of his Batman movies managed to turn current events and political policy into a worldview. There's no conviction like that in Man of Steel — just a lot of heavy-lidded winking right up until the finale, in which Metropolis falls under heavy siege.

For roughly 100 minutes, or the running time of an average movie, Mr. Snyder is in control of his material. His handling of the story's many flashbacks, which fill in piecemeal Superman's Kansas childhood as Clark, is fluid and apt... [but in the last 45 minutes,] Mr. Snyder piles on the hammering special effects, becoming yet one more director gone disappointingly amok.

Unfortunately [Snyder] can't pull it off, and "Man of Steel" has all the Nolan-esque tics you expect, from the Leni Riefenstahl heroic extreme close-ups to the oversize muscles and proto-fascist (or flat-out fascist) iconography to the creepy-looking technology ripped off from "Alien" to the assaultive and incoherent action sequences that go on so long you yearn for death, or at least for deafness.

Snyder's sense of morality has never been this trite. Take Clark's ongoing conflicts with identity and faith, struggles that are supposed to be the film's thematic core. Often, such emotions are verbalized in purely melodramatic terms without hinting at the deep-seeded trauma underneath. Here, Man of Steel proves just how little vested interest it has in the tangible spirit of humanity, for any feelings of substance born here on Earth or in the stars above.

Cavill—whose performance involves more posing than acting—is alternately presented as an alien messiah, a superweapon, and an American flag flapping in the wind; the one thing he never gets to be is a character. As a result, Man Of Steel sometimes feels like arty advertising—the tentpole movie equivalent of a car ad that invokes images of freedom or luxury without ever mentioning the price or specifications.

Snyder overemphasizes the direness of the narrative, especially its conflicts, the result of which is that Man of Steel feels both naïve and portentous. The filmmakers don't honor the sense of duty, moral or otherwise, of the brave soldiers and citizens portrayed here as much as they underline the importance of sacrifice through suffering and death, which echoes the film's unsettling sense of martyrdom as inherently masculine.