Well hey, if we're digging up this dead thread, let me put in my two cents.
I have to say that I liked MOS a lot. DC has been trying to reinvent itself and this is, in my opinion, the most successful attempt to date. They set out to make a new and stand alone superman film that was its own movie rather than a poor remake of one of the old ones. This usually does not go so well. I appreciate a superman who struggles with things that I have always thought Superman should struggle with. The main thing I saw it trying to do was define Superman to a critical audience through the choices he makes when he must choose. So often, a super villain tries to force this choice on a superhero with a classic, your girlfriend or the city scenario. Pretty well all of the time, the super hero manages to do both and skip off into the sunset avoiding any kind of moral statement. I appreciate that this movie did not allow Superman the easy option to have his cake and eat it too. It made him choose between his father and his identity and between his ideals and innocent lives and defined him by these choices. It also gave us a superman who was more adult and secure than in past through the way he deals with the government. Finally, for the first time, superman looked and felt like a man from another world. Usually the story is Clark Kent puts on a suit and becomes Superman. Here, Superman gets to be a character rather than an alter ego. Clark discovers that he is Superman and has to put on a costume to be Clark Kent.
Now the movie had flaws but all of them do. It changed things, but that's how comics work. They must reinvent the classic to make it relevant. Many may be too young to remember the time that superman was a blue energy being in a containment suit for a time in the 90s or the long haired superman phase. Comic heroes change, even their origin stories. What makes them timeless is that they somehow retain the essence of what it means to be that character even when they are rebooted. That essence was there in MOS I thought, though the character was forced into situations he had not been in before. It was an exploration rather than a divergence and I like to think that the classic superman of old would have done the same thing had push come to shove and an absolute win was not an option.
