This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Look, up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane....
It's Superman, complete with a jazzy new 21st-century outfit, X-ray vision that looks suspiciously like red eye and a father complex.
But does this "Man of Steel" fly? Well, let's just say that the film achieves liftoff, but it doesn't always soar.
Within the movie industry, it has become virtually de rigueur every few years to reimagine summertime superheroes for a new audience -- and a lucrative new revenue stream. The challenge, of course, is to infuse vitality, excitement and relevance into these all-too-familiar characters.
Christopher Nolan's Batman series may have the most successful, at least artistically. Spider-Man can claim two reinventions to its credit -- one with Tobey Maguire and another more recently with Andrew Garfield.
Superman tried to return in 2006, with Brandon Routh in the role Christopher Reeve made his own. But he didn't stick around long.
Now comes "Man of Steel," with British actor Henry Cavill in the all-American role. Maybe that's appropriate. "Man of Steel" could easily be titled "Superman: illegal alien."
That's because this reboot focuses on the origins story. As everyone knows, Superman, or Kal-El, was born on the doomed planet Krypton. His father, the prominent scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe, now in his post-hunk career) sends his infant son to Earth seconds before his home planet is destroyed. Normally, that's that -- a prologue that explains Superman's back story.
But in "Man of Steel," Clark's alien origin is the whole ball of kryptonite, as it were and the engine that fuels the plot. It is why the stoic Jonathan Kent (a tamped-down, weathered Kevin Costner) worries that people will fear and harm his son if they know he's from outer space. (And Dad Jonathan has a point -- given the U.S. military's initial reaction to Superman.) It's also why Jonathan is so adamant that young Clark hide his powers, even when the results are tragic.
It's why Jor-El, or a holographic version, becomes Superman's most influential mentor as Kal-El/Clark Kent struggles to understand his identity, discover his purpose and come to grips with his alien origins and human rearing. Superman has a decision to make: Will he join up with the evil Gen. Zod (the ever-glowering Michael Shannon), who wants to remake Krypton on Earth? Or will he preserve Earth and defend a human race that remains suspicious of him? (Bet you can guess where he lands.)
All of this is moderately entertaining for a while. The emphasis on alien origins and his attempts at assimilation is an intriguing twist, and there are a few visually arresting images of Krypton, the arctic and even of a very young Clark wearing a red towel as a cape. It's fun to see Amy Adams turn Lois Lane into a high-powered Lara Logan, Laurence Fishburne as the gruff Perry White and Diane Lane as Martha Kent. And Superman? Cavill is cute and bland, but isn't that the brand?
Eventually, though, the movie is weighed down by its special effects, especially the seemingly eternal final confrontation between Zod and Superman. Can a superhero really be tossed through a skyscraper without a scratch or even a tear in the costume? And even given the strange rules of the superhero universe, could an extraterrestrial who saves the world from an enemy alien attack -- complete with monstrous alien spacecraft burrowing into the Earth's core -- really slip on a pair of glasses and become unrecognizable?
That may be Superman's most singular feat of derring-do.