“It’s hard to identify with a god,” Goyer says. “It’s also hard to feel empathy for a character who is invulnerable. [Chris Nolan] and I decided from the beginning that in this first film, we were not going to rely on the crutch of kryptonite, which is the only thing that can hurt him. That was the bar we set for ourselves. Can we get the audience to sympathize with this character without relying on kryptonite?”

A critical part of making Superman relatable was casting. The actor who would portray Kal-El, son of Jor-El (played by Russell Crowe), needed to be a relatively fresh face with little baggage from other films, but charismatic and sympathetic enough to make the audience care about the woes of a being who can do practically anything.

The U.K.-born Henry Cavill, who had acted in a few movies ( Immortals, Woody Allen’s Whatever Works) but was best known for his recurring role on the cable-TV drama The Tudors, landed the part.

“I made a point not to think of any of the other movies when it came to my performance,” Cavill says. “I wanted to feel like were telling this story for the first time. And I could relate to the loneliness and estrangement of the character. That was something quite personal to me. When I was at boarding school, I didn’t have many buddies, and when I’ve traveled, I’ve often been in strange cities by myself. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting down just watching people behave the way they behave. That’s what I think Kal-El does — he’s watching the world and trying to make sense of it. That gives him a sense of an outsider.”

Inside the character

Although Snyder is known primarily for visually stunning movies — and Man of Steel has more building-flattening action than the rest of the Superman movies combined — he says that wasn’t the aspect of the project that lured him in.

“I’m a huge comic-book fan, but I had already made a comic-book movie [ Watchmen],” he says. “I wanted the opportunity to make a superhero movie in a way that people could appreciate the way I appreciated the comics as a kid. For me, it was about figuring out the character. If I were Superman, how would I feel? He’s like a god up on a hill. I wanted to really get inside him and figure out what makes him tick.”

But tinkering with such a renowned figure is not without peril. Choose a creative path the audience rejects and the entire movie collapses.

“You can’t ask for a more commercial character than Superman,” says Larry Tye, author of Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. “ Everyone knows who he is. And yet everyone also has expectations we’re going in with, and it’s really tough to meet all of those. It’s a huge challenge when you’re dealing with a character who is this much of an icon. You mess with him too much and you’re going to anger people who have known him for a lifetime. One of the assets — and one of the liabilities — of Superman is that he hasn’t changed that much in 75 years. You need to be able to bring your kids and your grandparents to the movie, and everyone recognizes him the way they know him.”

Man of Steel, which also co-stars Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Kal-El’s adoptive parents, strikes all the requisite notes while adding some fresh wrinkles (you’ve never seen a Fortress of Solitude like this one). And the movie has a super-charged villain in Michael Shannon as the maniacal General Zod, who shares all of Superman’s powers but not his sense of duty and honor.

Still, despite all its 3D visuals and cutting-edge special effects, there’s something refreshingly old-fashioned about Man of Steel, which is just as it should be.

“Superman has been relevant to a lot of generations, but the core of the character is still there,” Goyer says. “He’s a savior figure, a stepping stone between humans and the gods, so he’s like Hercules in that regard. He also comes from a long line of stories where a stranger shows us our own humanity, whether it’s [Robert A. Heinlein’s novel] Stranger in a Strange Land or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or even the story of Christ himself. That makes him a classic figure, which is why he will never be out of date. Hopefully, someone will be telling a Superman story a hundred years from now and it will still be relevant.”