'Man of Steel' certainly does take itself seriously as an origin story. It starts with a pounding heartbeat, followed by you-know-who emerging from his mother's womb on the planet Krypton. (Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer are the baby's parents.) That auspicious event is, we are told, Krypton's first natural birth in centuries. On our planet, however, the story proves to be a miscarriage, if not quite an abortion. Here's one more studio extravaganza brought down by numbing action and an addiction to generic digital effects. (I chose to see the 2-D version, so I can't blame the third dimension.)

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'