^I thought Marvel's most recent offerings (Avengers and Iron Man 3) were a lot of fun, like superhero movies should be, for the most part (although Captain America's 1940s diesel-punk concept did fall pretty flat). I didn't find Man of Steel very fun at all in this sense. It was more brooding and plodding and arduous. It took forever just to get off Kypton, and much of that never really got worked into the later plot to justify the time that the Snyder spent gawking at the epic destruction and insurrection. And even then so much was exposition/back story.
And:
[spoil]the gravitational wave explanation was just laughably tacked on, the whole Jesus symbolism in the church and Superman miming the crucifixion as he leaves through the hole in the Kryptonian spaceship with Earth as the backdrop was really heavy handed (Superman is a pop-culture sun god, I get it), plus, Superman just lets his frigging dad get sucked into a tornado? WTF?[/spoil]
There was a lot of talent working on this movie, and I like a lot of their previous work, but much went wrong here. I think there's just too many idealistic and deistic themes in the story to make it work as a live action super hero movie (it may be easier to stomach in a more icongraphic medium like animation where such conceits don't pop out so gratuitously -- it certainly works fine in graphic novels). That said, the fight scenes were pretty epic, and the 300-esque close-in chiaroscuro lighting does work well with those themes aesthetically in terms of light and dark, good and evil.
EDIT: All the design and production of the Kryptonian tech was pretty cool, too (the retracting virtual-veil helmets and the presentation of the holographic projections especially). It's also only fair to admit that my perceptions, and, perhaps, my judgments, were altered by MXE and cannabis.
