Maybe it's the time you spent suffering through Fallout: Equestria and what not, but I think you're way too kind on it. I have no qualms with calling it one of the worst films I've seen.
Oh, I'd actually say this is worse that Fallout: Equestria. If a fanfic is disjointed or rambly, I'm going to be kinder to that, because A. it's an amateur piece, and B. it's a serial medium and therefore more susceptible to it. And while I may have found the characters in that story unlikable, they were at least characterized well-enough for me to dislike them.
If I seemed too nice to this movie, it's because I only had 400 words to organize my thoughts and, quite frankly, I didn't do a very good job organizing them. There is sooooooo much wrong with his movie.
Fanfiction I hate.
I agree the 400 word limit is a very poor idea: RMN, another website I now frequent, has a 300 word minimum and no maximum limit, and so writing reviews there is a lot more rewarding. To get past this a bit, I now make sure to leave a score out of 10 at the end.
Thus, for the superhero films, for instance, first Iron Man is a solid 8/10, Age of Ultron is 5/10 bordering on 6, and Man of Steel is barely a 2/10. Pretty much the only two scenes I genuinely liked was the first flashback where his mother tells him to listen to her voice and the moment where he saves people from the oil rig.
The rest went from blandly forgettable to outright horrible. Some scenes (like one where Kryptonians search Lane's mind but can't find the Kryptonian USB in her pocket) were so stupid they would've been so-bad-it's-good if the film wasn't trying to be so dark and Nolanesque all the time.
Not a fan of the numbers thing, personally. Just not my bag.
I'd say that I think the best scenes in the movie was the part where he was learning how to fly and the scene where Lois escapes from the ship. In a movie that was full of big, dumb action scenes, that one stood out to me as the only one that was actually creative, tense, or memorable. Even if it's contrived as hell; the justification they give for Lois being on Zod's ship in the first place is eye-rolling.
Fanfiction I hate.
I'm of two minds about the 400 word limit. I'm able to cover at least the basics in my reviews under that word limit (even if I'm less than 50 words below the limit most of the time), but at the same time, there are times when I'd like to go more in depth. As for others, I see many reviews that get bogged down in minutiae without providing a good assessment of the quality of the subject as a whole, and I suspect that increasing the word limit is more likely to enable this than it is to allow reviewers to branch out to other topics. The character limit does force people to keep things concise, although how successful they are depends on their writing skill and style. Factors such as conciseness, organization and choice of topics are fairly important in these short reviews.
In short, having a larger word limit does help the quality of one's reviews, but so does adapting to the current limit.
In any case, I wasn't especially a fan of the movie, so I largely agree with the points raised in this review.
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Well, That Didn't Quite Pan Out
Put simply, Man of Steel was not a very good movie. It had a great deal of bombast and a stellar cast, but it failed to rise above an abysmal script.
The script, for the first half of the movie, at least, seems to largely consist of a series of vignettes, very clunkily strung together with no real sense of progression. Throughout the movie we have segues to flashbacks that only seem to be there because Batman Begins did it. Little, however, actually seems to be important for the character's growth. I think on the events that happen during the Superhobo segment and I can't really think of what actually mattered as far as character development prior to finding the scout ship. As far as that scout ship goes, it sure is fortunate the tech on that still worked and was compatible with much, much later Kryptonian technology. Otherwise Clark would've been stuck with Jor-El's space drive and not had any way to use it or talk with his dad.
In fact, the characters in this movie are fairly weak. All I get from Superman is that he A. doesn't like watching people getting hurt and B. he's kind of passive-aggressive. Decent character traits, but there isn't really a whole lot there. Lois Lane is quickly established as a tough gal and a competent reporter (though the script feels the need to clunkily exposit to us that "I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter," one clunky line out of many), but needs to be contrived into scenes for Superman to save her. The pair also has no chemistry as a screen couple.
General Zod, for all the attempts to make him into a quasi-sympathetic, tragic villain, ultimately just boils down to a screaming crazy person who tries to destroy the earth with a giant space laser. He's basically Nero from the 2009 Star Trek movie.
The script is also full of contrivances, things that don't make sense, and thematic inconsistencies. For example, the movie makes a big deal about how Superman, being a natural birth, has free will, whereas Zod does not. However, Superman doesn't really make any big choices of his own, as almost everything he does is because Zod forces his hand. Even becoming Superman and coming forward is something that he only does because Zod is threatening everyone. Since when is Superman defined by his villains, anyway?
Ultimately, the movie falls through because it's badly-written.