It's a huge disappointment, since the buildup to the action is so promising, albeit joyless. The promise lies partly in Alex McDowell's elegant production design, which suggests that Krypton's civilization was influenced by cross-cosmos currents of Gothic and Gaudí, but mainly in the darkly revisionist premise. We will not, the long prelude makes clear, be seeing Superman as yesteryear's sturdy superhero in tights; he's to be taken more seriously than that. We won't even be seeing this iteration of Kal-El as Superman, a name that goes unspoken throughout, though it almost escapes the lips of Amy Adams's Lois Lane. Then what does that capital S on his chest stand for? It isn't an S at all, David S. Goyer's script reveals slyly, but a Kryptonic character that means 'hope'─i.e. hope for mankind.

The steely man of the title, liberated from yesteryear's external underwear and played with unalloyed gravity by Henry Cavill, has come to us with godlike powers. Therefore the movie, which was directed by Zack Snyder, raises the question of whether we'll be smart enough to receive such a one with open arms. That's a fair question, even if the visual parallels between Kal-El and Christ are insisted on overmuch. And there's plenty to enjoy in the drama of the hero coming to grips with those powers as a confused youngster in the heartland (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are his adoptive parents); meeting Lois, who learns quickly, for once, the truth of his identity; and preparing for the struggle against the evil General Zod (Michael Shannon), who arrives from Krypton with a gang of baddies and extremely bad intentions.

Yet hope springs ephemeral in this production. First off, there's the problem of casting in the central role. 'I can do things that others can't,' Kal-El tells the grievously injured Lois as he cauterizes her wound with sizzling eyebeams. It's tempting to think that another actor might have done things Mr. Cavill can't, but there's no way of knowing, given Mr. Snyder's stiff direction and the generally turgid dialogue. (Lots of talk about trust, leaps of faith and initiating the phantom drive.) There's also the issue of Mr. Crowe's Jor-El, who keeps materializing with bizarre frequency as his son's holographic spirit guide and real-time strategist, never mind that the old man is long dead. Marlon Brando's Jor-El returned too, but only in obvious outtakes.

Eventually, though, what seals the movie's doom─as inventive entertainment, though perhaps not as a commercial venture─is its surrender to the lower power of coarsegrained action and computer-generated images of inexplicable banality. It's 'Fight Club' cum sci-fi as Zod and Kal-El duke it out on the streets of Smallville, then do it again, just like barroom brawlers, during an interminable climax set against a background of a Manhattan seized by the usual chaos of fireballs, shattering glass, flying trucks and toppling towers. 'You know they say it's all downhill after the first kiss,' Lois tells her inamorato early on. She doesn't know the meaning of downhill.