The weirdest thing happened to me this weekend. I finished reading Dan Brown’s Inferno the night before I went to see Man of Steel, and all of the messages and themes of population control, fertility, DNA, etc all blended together. There’s one part of Man of Steel where you see, like, a weird sci-fi harvest of babies and it just reminded me of Dan Brown’s book in a weird way. Anyway…

Everybody went to see Man of Steel this weekend. Did you? Probably. It made approximately $113.1 million (probably more because the Sunday matinee I went to was PACKED) and of course it’s the new #1 movie. MoS was actually the biggest domestic June opening in history. I’m glad for Henry Cavill – in his magazine interviews done months ago, he seemed to be holding his breath and waiting to see if this big gamble would pay off. And it did. And I’m sure he’ll be Superman in a second film, and a third and on and on. Would you like to hear my thoughts?

SPOILERS – POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR MAN OF STEEL

I liked MoS. I didn’t love it. It was too long and I could have easily edited out about a half an hour in the second half of the film. The half-destruction of Metropolis was kind of ridiculous, and it was too much CGI and that part of it gave me a headache. Overall, I thought it was solid-to-decent reboot of a beloved franchise and I’m glad they managed to pull it off with such a charismatic, damaged, interesting Clark/Kal/Superman. Here are some general bullet points:

*Henry Cavill is a really handsome dude. I preferred him with some scruff, and I loved all of his shirtless scenes (they’re mostly in the beginning of the movie). For those eagle-eyed watchers, I also loved that his burly chest hair came peeking out of his Superman uniform. Clark is kind of emo at times, but Henry knew when to reel it in so it didn’t feel like Clark is just made of angst. Clark does have some dimension and moral ambiguity, which is mostly thanks to how Henry played it. Also: there are a couple of shots where he strongly resembled Christopher Reeve, and that just made me sad.

*Surprisingly enough, Kevin Costner did not suck. I was expecting him to. I was expecting Costner to be my least favorite part. But there’s one scene where Costner almost made me cry. Damn you, Costner!

*They made poor Diane Lane look like hell! Poor Diane. She was good, though. I liked her relationship with Clark. It felt realistic (as realistic as these films can get). He just seemed “lighter” when he was with his mom.

*Amy Adams is adorable. She’s feisty and she’s a great screamer. I mean that as a compliment – the heroine/love interest’s scream is important! And Amy’s got a great set of lungs. She and Henry had a lot of on-screen chemistry and it just felt… interesting. Like he’s going to show her his Krypton Dong and she’s going to know what to do with it.

*OMG, Russell Crowe!! I get why Rusty took the part as Jor-El. Jor-El is one of the best parts. And Rusty looked really good too – he got to do some action sequences and he got some great lines. I was really pleased with him.

*Michael Shannon as General Zod… I was expecting him to be fantastic and to steal all of his scenes. I was not disappointed but Shannon knew how to reel it in too. He was creepy and violent and crazy, but they also went a long way to explain his motives, and it felt like Michael didn’t want to chew the scenery just to be a BIG “villain”. I thought Zod’s most effective scenes were against Cavill and Crowe, man to man (or whatever they are).

*Christopher Meloni had a great smaller part, and I was pleased to see Richard Schiff in a small role too. Laurence Fishbourne was kind of useless (he played the editor of The Daily Planet).

*The Christ imagery got really heavy-handed at times. There was some Christ-on-the-cross posing and the constant reiteration that Clark was “sent” to Earth to “save” people. There was one point where Clark Kent is literally sitting in a church next to a stained-glass window of Jesus and seriously, you should see how they framed the shot. WE GET IT, ZACK SNYDER.

Here are some photos of Henry, Amy and the gang in Italy (for the Taormina FilmFest 2013) over the weekend.

Photos courtesy of WENN.