There is an essential problem with all superhero movies: they are stupid. They violate the most basic rules of storytelling. To make a ‘hero’s journey’ story, you need your hero to do a few simple things, most of which superheroes cannot do.

The hero has to start out wanting something. This something has to be a bit out of reach. It can be fame, or love, or glory or a ’69 Camaro. Superheroes have trouble with this because they are super, and that makes most things within their reach. This is especially true of Superman, who has virtually unlimited powers. Everything Superman wants and does not have is something he’s denying himself – none of us can stop him from taking them.

The hero has to be opposed by someone/something that can keep him from the thing he longs for. For superheroes, this pool is generally limited to other superheroes, and if your name is on the marquee, it’s hard to believe in any stakes at all. If Superman didn’t get everything he wanted, the movie would be called ‘Zod, Crabby but Superior Man of Steel’.

The most important part is that the hero has to be a different person when the goals are achieved. There needs to be a gut-check, a moment when the hero looks into the abyss. How you gut-check a dude who can see through walls, shoot eye lasers, repel bullets and fly is a bit beyond me. At the end of the story, Superman is still just Superman. He has learned nothing, not even a moral lesson. We can’t teach him a moral lesson because he’s morally Super, too.

You can add Kryptonite, you can mute all the primary colors and get all ponderous and Christopher Nolan-ish on it, but you can’t make it compelling. You can’t create stakes with an immortal, omnipotent being.

I was planning to complain about the wooden dialogue, the boring and tasteless city-smashing (this movie might have the biggest civilian body-count of any superhero movie) and whatever else, but it occurred to me that the problem is as much Superman as it is corporate committee film-making.

The reason Hollywood keeps rebooting these franchises and showing us the origin story over and over is simple: coming to terms with their powers is the last interesting thing superheroes ever do.

Avoid.