I didn’t have the highest hopes for “Man Of Steel,” but I thought it might be fun, especially on a hot and sticky day. It wasn’t.  The newest “Superman” movie left me feeling angry and a bit hopeless. I get it. Movies as I know them are over, another sacrifice to the corporate profit ethic. I’m not into old-fartism, I can handle change as well as the next guy, but I’ve had enough of movies like this, they are almost a scandal.

I grew up on the Superman (and other) comics and this was really the simplest and most human of the comic myths that brought kids like me into story-telling and writing. The man of steel came from another planet, was adopted by a sweet farm family in Kansas, and when he grew up, thrilled the world by going out to save human from bad guys and natural catastrophes. The two nerdy young men who wrote it came out of the Depression and they hoped the man they called “Superman” would give the country a dose of hope.

The plot was clear and simple: Clark Kent fooled even Lois Lane with his simple timid reporter disguise as he rushed out to save lives and collar bad guys (even turn meteors around).  Lane had a crush on him, but nobody ever broke through his disguise. The story was written and illustrated by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel two poor immigrant kids from Cleveland, they were nerdy and powerless and so they created a fantasy of the ultimate American hero  – good, powerful, a battler against evil, always victorious. Superman, they wrote, “stood for truth, Justice and the American Way.” Millions of kids loved it, it seemed to be just what they needed.

This newest incarnation starting Henry Cavill and Amy Adams is like watching an expensive car crash and burn – and collide with a couple of hundred other cards that crash and burn and bang into one another for more than two hours.  There is no reason to make this “Superman” movie except to grab the name as an excuse to make another dumb explode-a-thon behind a false premise. Mid-way through, Maria turned to me and whispered, “I can’t believe how boring this is,” and I said, “you are being generous.”  There are some pretty scenes, but you wonder how any super-hero involving alien-invasions, the destruction of a good part of the earth, and scores of meaningful glances from  our leaden, slow-witted but sensitive superhero could possibly be boring. Trust me, it’s a snoozer.

There were more explosions in this movie than in the Normandy invasion, and Superman’s dead father, Jor-el (Russell Crowe) from the lost planet of Krypton pops up so many times saying mystical and sorrowful things  I was rooting for him to finally get blasted and put out of his (and our) misery. The aliens went through most of the skyscrapers in Manhattan which collapsed in endlessly slow and detailed motion.

Any real semblance of the original story was simply discarded and overwhelmed by what seems liked tens of thousands of overturned cars, trucks, and bridges,  collapsing buildings and evil aliens who seemed to have sprung from some mating ritual between the Transformers and Nascar Drivers.  All those animators and nobody can come up with an alien that doesn’t look badly dressed. I kept thinking that the cost and scale of this movie was mind-boggling given how bad it is. Don’t these people care about anything? Cost? Plot? Acting? Coherence?

The bar is getting pretty low and our sensibilities are getting numbed. In corporate Hollywood on big and vapid movies like this can get funded, and they are an insult to us and the kids who are supposed to love them. The money to make it could have paid off the college loans of at least 10,000 worthy college students and turned some small countries around. A country that can’t pay it’s librarians and bleeds it’s people for health care doesn’t seem to even blink when corporations in Hollywood blow hundreds of millions of dollars on a deafening and forgettable mess than nobody will remember a month from now. Make that next week.

I loved the comics and the movies they spawn, they were original, touching and well-written and plotted. I have seen almost all of them, but the corporate ethic now running Hollywood doesn’t care what I think or critics think, they just want to make 14-year-old boys happy, as they love explosions and go back to see them three or four times and make their millions back. Okay, Hollywood doesn’t need to make movies for me, 14-year-old boys have as much right as I have to go to the movies.  But I’m a rabid movie-goer and I am out of movies to go see, and I wonder if it really makes any sense to alienate so many loyal customers and emasculate our most popular stories and myths. It is hard to imagine how writers could take these popular myths and turn them into the most mindless and soulless exhibitions of runaway computer animation. This is not a re-imagining the Superman myth it is just a dumb movie hiding behind the cape.

I gather all of the good movies are heading for TV now, so this, I suspect, is where I will have to go. “Man Of Steel” was about as thrilling as watching Mr. Potato Head, and as scary as listening to the wires on a telephone pole hum. Any semblance of the humanity and simple evocations of heroism in the original story are gone, as has any semblance of a rational plot. This movie made absolutely no sense from beginning to end, and only way this loud and obnoxious mess can be absorbed is by giving up on the idea of a plot at all. And why do we need an alien invasion for the superhero? Don’t we have enough real issues for him, from terrorism to a dysfunctional Congress to climate change (think tsuanmi’s) and truly real and evil bankers?

This is the fifth or sixth time in a movie recently that I’ve seen an alien spaceship filled with evil aliens hover over New  York City while superheroes run around running into walls and one another below. Inevitably, the aliens start dropping laser bombs while thousands of wide-eyed extras scream and run for cover. What does Hollywood have against Grand Central Station in New York? It gets blown up every time a comic book movie is made while panicked commuters (I’m starting to recognize some of them, run into traffic or get incinerated.) I sure knew what was coming, why didn’t these poor people just stop gawking at the sky and take off, they had hours of pre-attack explosions and alarms to wake them up. Here’s a tip: at the first siren of the Apocalypse, get out of Grand Central Station, head for the bridges. The only way Hollywood producers seem to know how to get rid of alien ships is to open up black holes in the sky, drop bombs overhead (our jets get shot down in droves but big lumbering cargo planes with bombs seem to slide through),  and suck the bad guys away. And even that doesn’t work in this movie.

The last hour of the movie is spent in a sort of mutant martial-arts combat in which the evil alien General is killed, re-killed, re-born and re-killed, and then killed another half-dozen or so times. Sort of. When he is finally killed (you can’t give this plot away, there isn’t one), it’s in a manner so simple that our superhero could have done it two hours and 1,000 explosions earlier). And I’m not sure he even was killed. If this dreadful movie makes money, the nasty General will be back to kill all of us.  I have too much respect for 14-year-old boys to even pretend that this is anything but an incredibly witless monstrosity of a movie, a black hole all unto itself.

In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed corporations destroy every part of the culture I’ve loved – radio, media, television, movies, publishing. I’m sure they are hard at work on the Internet. This isn’t just a bad movie, it’s a corrupt violation of every single ethic and spirit of the creators of the story and the many people who enjoyed it. Yuk. Send your movie to help college kids pay off their loans.

In 1975, when trade magazines first reported that a Superman movie was in development, Jerry Siegel, then 61 destitute and in poor health, wrote a letter to more than a thousand news outlets. “I, Jerry Siegel, the co-originator of Superman, put a curse on the Superman movie!,” the letter said. “I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal Superman fans stay away in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds Superman, will avoid the movie like a plague.”

Siegel wrote that the people exploited and profited from Superman – he had lost all rights to his creation – were greedy and selfish. He didn’t know the half of it. His Superman story – precisely what the country needed at the time  it was written – has been destroyed almost beyond recognition, the whole notion of this elemental myth violated.  The Superman movies now attract all kinds of fans who have no idea what the original story was about, what Siegel and Shuster created or why. In corporatized Hollywood, that doesn’t matter.

But I thought of Siegel as I left the theater. I hoped that wherever he is, he can take some comfort at least that the curse worked. It would be  hard to make a worse movie about Superman.