Here's something non-spoiler-y: According to the LA Times, Warner Bros. is distributing religious Man of Steel resource packs to pastors who want to include lessons from Man of Steel in their sermons. You can see what those lessons entail at the Man of Steel Ministry Resource site.

Now. If you're looking for a spoiler-free review of Man of Steel, you can find my review right here. After the trailer, I'm going to be talking about the climax of Man of Steel. Let me repeat: You should assume that everything after the trailer is made out of spoilers. (I'll get back to that ministry thing after the jump, too.)

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• Superman: All right, who stole my underpants? Anyone seen a pair of red underpants? Anyone?

(In the film section this week, you can find my review of Man of Steel, which I had to shear down to 300 words to fit the constraints of print. But since the internet doesn't have a word count, I thought I'd share my full Man of Steel review here. This review, as in the one in the film section, is spoiler-free. I really want to talk about spoilers, but I'll save that for a clearly marked post early next week.)

Even though he’s the original superhero—let’s for a moment pretend Doc Savage doesn’t exist, for simplicity’s sake—Superman might be the single hardest superhero to get right. We’ve heard all the complaints a million times before: He’s too powerful. He’s too pure. He’s too earnest. He belongs to an America that doesn’t exist anymore. First, the complainers probably haven’t read Grant Morrison’s excellent 2005-2008 comic series All-Star Superman, which gave us a positively positive, folksy-but-godlike Kansas farmboy who could create whole universes and fend off intergalactic threats without breaking a sweat and still managed to tell a terrific story. Second, let it be said that Henry Cavill, in The Man of Steel, proves those doubters wrong by giving great Superman: He grins a lot, flashing a great big wide welcoming smile that would leave Batman rolling his eyes. And he moves like he’s indestructible. This is a man who doesn’t fear stubbing a toe or, say, getting hit by a mack truck, but he is always slightly worried about accidentally crushing these delicate fleshy humans all around him.

And as you probably already suspected, Amy Adams is a wonderful Lois Lane, a gutsy, smart reporter guided by a strong sense of justice. And Michael Shannon, who is the closest thing to a Christopher Walken our generation is going to get, is a great, creepy General Zod, the nightmare side of the Superman coin: Godlike power honed with military discipline and a pragmatic worldview that puts Kryptonian lives above all else. (And since the score is such a vital part of this film, let's take a second to mention here with the major players that Man of Steel's score, by Hans Zimmer, is absolutely incredible. Superman's main theme is rousing and catchy and completely original. Most modern film composers could learn a lot by locking themselves in a room with Zimmer's work for a month or two.)

The goal with the film is obviously to pull a Batman Begins for DC Comics’ most recognizable intellectual property. They’ve even got most of the Begins team together behind the scenes: David S. Goyer wrote the script, and Christopher Nolan produces. But while Begins delivered a few surprises and felt like a layered reimagining of the Batman story, Man of Steel glosses over the same story beats we all know by heart.

We open on Krypton, which seems to be intentionally the opposite of the cinematic Krypton we’ve already seen: While Marlon Brando’s Jor-El walked around a pristine crystal palace, Russell Crowe’s Jor-El frets over a dusty, brown-and-grey desert land, replete with dinosaur-like creatures and incredibly phallic machinery. (Some of the Kryptonian design feels like floor-model H.R. Giger leavings.) We get to see some of Kal-El's childhood in Kansas and his God-bless-America upbringing by the Kents (a could-be-better Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). We very briefly meet Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) and the rest of the Daily Planet masthead before Zod is introduced into the plot and the movie becomes a straight-on conflict. There’s none of the nimble self-awareness or ingenious reinvention of Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie, only good-guy-versus-bad-guy schematics that play out just about the way you figure they will.

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I've Slogged about the upcoming salary dispute between Robert Downey Jr. and Marvel's movie-making division. It looks like Marvel wants to treat the talent in their films the same way they do the talent in their comics: Interchangeable, in service of the intellectual property. But that's going to be a harder sell with movies than it is with comic books, especially since it looks like Avengers director (and upcoming Marvel TV show Agents of SHIELD developer) Joss Whedon is in Downey's corner:

He is Iron Man. He is Iron Man in the way that Sean Connery was James Bond. I have no intention of making Avengers 2 without him, nor do I think I’ll be called upon to do that. I don’t think it’s in my interest, Marvel’s interest, or his interest, and I think everything will be fine. But I know that this is Hollywood and you roll with things. You have to be ready for the unexpected. But I loved working with Robert, and everybody knows he embodied that role in a way no one else can. The day he was cast, I went up to [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige and said, “You brilliant son of a bitch.”

It's a pretty great interview, and you should read it all. Whedon also talks about how he hates that there are no female-led superhero movies on the horizon:

It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, “My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,” and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

Yes.

• "For the last time, I do not look like an otter!"

Though it's hard to write meaningfully about Star Trek Into Darkness without spoiling anything—it's packed with surprises—this review will be spoiler-free. Which means I have to keep the specifics about the plot to a minimum. (I'll do a spoiler-filled review after everyone gets a chance to see the movie this weekend.) So here goes: The crew of the Enterprise runs up against a mysterious man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, a delight of growling disdain) and then they find themselves drawn into a much larger conflict that could imperil the entire United Federation of Planets. As is shown in the trailers and on the poster for the movie, the Enterprise suffers a considerable amount of damage along the way.

So let's start with the good news: With one unfortunate exception, the actors are all growing pleasantly into their roles. Some of them (Chris Pine as Kirk, Simon Pegg as Scotty) choose to riff on the performances of Star Trek: The Original Series actors while wisely not hewing to staid impersonations. Zachary Quinto's eerily exact Spock feels less like a perfect copy of ST:TOS Spock and more a kind of seance—is it insulting to say that this is the role he was born to play? And Karl Urban's DeForest Kelley schtick, all bad metaphors and outraged puffery, is hambone acting at its finest, which makes sense, because no one in their right minds would want to watch an understated interpretation of Bones. Of all the actors in rebooted roles, Zoe Saldana gets shortest shrift. Her Uhura is an embarrassment, the highest-profile female character in the movie pushed to the periphery, only earning a line when it's time for her to react to men, never truly getting a great moment of her own.

And now for the bad news: There's very little trekking in this Star Trek. Outside of a pre-credits taste of interstellar adventure involving a dilemma around that classic Star Trek saw, the Prime Directive, way too much of this movie is set on Earth or is simply floating, semi-stationary, in outer space. The script from Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof doesn't get the point of Star Trek, really: It's too petty and small and uninterested in adventure. A silly little analogy to current events wraps the movie in the wrong tone, and the pacing, with a series of tense, exciting action scenes layered between some very long expository passages, is downright weird. Star Trek Into Darkness is a pretty thing to look at—the 3D is decent, but by no means necessary for enjoyment of the movie—but it's just so dumb and uninterested in the possibilities of the premise that it feels like a waste. And one of my favorite parts of the 2009 Star Trek reboot, the commitment to comedic adventure, fails to materialize here. This movie is too busy dwelling in darkness to remember that Star Trek should be about optimism and aspirations and fun, and that's a goddamned shame.

Pitch Black was a fun little pulpy creature feature. I think I tried to watch The Chronicles of Riddick once, but I certainly didn't get all the way through. Now, nine years later, the third movie starring Vin Diesel as Riddick is about to be released. It's titled Riddick. Here's a trailer:

Is it me, or did that trailer feel like five times longer than it really was?

• Iron Man 3: Google Goggles are for amateurs.

Since it's in the bizarre position of being the third film in one series and the seventh in the larger Marvel Comics movie universe, the average viewer will probably enter Iron Man 3 with at least two questions: With its focus on a solo superhero, can it possibly outdo the over-the-top team geekfest that was Joss Whedon's Avengers? Or will it at least be better than the property-management-obsessed mess that was Iron Man 2? The answers: Of course not, and, oh my God, so much better.

New Iron Man writer-director Shane Black treats Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark as less of a superhero than a jittery cross between James Bond and Thomas Edison, a wholly American, tech-obsessed adventurer. But he's got a sensitive side: Stark is suffering anxiety attacks after saving the world at the end of The Avengers, and his nervousness manifests as a lack of sleep, a compulsion for building dozens of new suits of armor, and an inability to be close with his girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, surprisingly likable)...

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Iron Man 3 is almost here, but it's not the only Marvel movie coming out this year: In November, the Thor sequel, The Dark World, will be released. Here's a trailer:

And so?

Slashfilm says:

Today at Disney’s CinemaCon presentation, the studio announced that beginning in 2015 we’ll see a new Star Wars movie every summer. The plan is to begin with Episode VII, written by Michael Arndt and directed by JJ Abrams, then alternate between standalone “spin-off” movies and new Episodes in the core storyline.

You see, if we cut the goose wide open and take a look at its intestines, we'll be able to figure out how it lays those golden eggs. Then we'll all have more golden eggs! It's what we like to call a win-win situation.

UPDATE: Related: