Why man of steel is a poor superman adaptation

A good film adaptation is a tricky thing to pull of, it is a balancing act of trying to make it faithful to the source material, while also making changing that are necessary for a multitude of reasons such as ease of translating into another media, trying to fit a large body of work into a short amount of time or simply because the original source had flaws (whatever the purists might say) to name just a few. However there is one thing that is imperative in an adaptation and that is an understanding of the source material and its themes, an understanding that the creative team behind this summers "man of steel" clearly do not posses.

There are two main reasons why i believe this the first pertains to the actual character of superman and this is something a lot of people don’t seem to understand. Superman and batman while simmaler in some ways are completely night and day in there differences. What i mean by this is Bruce Wayne is the mask batman puts on where Clark Kent takes on the persona of superman. the film focuses on his kryptonian linage far more than the Kansas farm boy which is what resides at the core, his powers come from krypton but the most important and overriding factor of the character is the kindness and strong moral compass he obtained from his parents and more importantly his father. There is a story arc in the superman comics (from #701 - #714) called grounded where superman decides that he has lost touch with his human side and begins to walk (not fly) across America helping people he meets ranging from talking a suicidal woman off the edge of a building to cleaning the kitchen at a diner to pay for a sandwich, as horrible as that arc was in quality it embodied superman in spirit which is more then i can say for this movie.

my second and final point in this argument is the biggest insult to the 75 year history of superman present in this film and it is something that can be discernd from any 5 second clip of the movie you pick. the film is completely and utterly joyless. do you know how many times superman smiles in this movie? in the 143 minuet run time he smiles twice. Once when he is flying for the first time and second when he is talking to Louis Laine. and that's not all the colour pallet has a grey tint like when you turn down the colour on your television only half the way. say what you will about the Christopher Reaves superman movies but those films where bright they were heroic, the tone of the first two films alone makes you want get out of your seat punch the air and say "HELL YA SUPERMAN IS AWSOME". that's the word for it heroic there is nothing heroic about man of steal its like the entire film was directed by Eyor from whinie the pooh..

to finish up on a brighter note I would like to recommend some good superman stories.

firstly there ae the first two Christopher reaves movies (Film 1) (Film 2)

there is a retelling of superman’s early years by Grant Morrison (Amazon.co.uk) (Comixology.com)

and an alternate take on superman set in our world (Amazon.co.uk) (Comixology.com)