Watched Man of Steel for the first time since 2013. Back then I remember liking it surprisingly much, and I even made a thread on these forums' successor comparing it and its contemporary, Iron man 3. Upon revisiting it I thought...
WHAT. THE FUCK. WAS I. THINKING?????
Good god have my standards for movies improved drastically since then. This isn't just a bad movie. It's like an amalgamation of every conceivable type of bad Hollywood movie: Pretentious. Indulgent. Shallow. Badly paced. Seriously dated despite not being even a decade old. Filled with characters who don't matter. Unfocused. Overstuffed. Horribly edited. Chasing trends. I could go on.
This movie gets so much wrong it should be studied in film classes. I wanted to re-evaluate it because for some reason it'd been on my mind, and I'm glad I did because holy god, I finally see why people hated it so much. I literally just spent an hour writing notes so I won't do it again here, but here's some shorter points: the editing and structure are disastrous, the acting is stilted, the characterization is shallow and rushed, no groundwork is established, there's too many characters that don't matter, tons of just laughable moments that are supposed to be serious, the film feels like it's on crack and never stops to take a breath, important moments don't feel earned, I could go on for probably hours. This actually made me rethink the entire DCEU: it wasn't some victim of studio meddling, or a vision cut short. It was dead on arrival. Fuck me Man of Steel was terrible.