"Earth's sun is younger and brighter than ours was. Your cells have drunk in its radiation, strengthening your muscles, your skin, your senses. Earth's gravity is weaker, yet its atmosphere is more nourishing. You've grown stronger here than I ever could've imagined. The only way to know how strong is to keep testing your limits. You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders."

"A good death is its own reward."

"Make a better world than ours, Kal."

"His name is Kal, son of El, and he's beyond your reach."

"Yet with the removal of mortality from the equation, the mayhem is just deadening; all bombast, little consequence. Zod’s villainous compatriot Faora warns Superman, “For every one of them you save, we will kill a million more”: “A million” is such a large number — and one so easily attained in expensive CGI-laden blockbusters these days — that it's meaningless. A special-effects department can conjure up a million people as easily as they can one. That’s why it’s actually surprising in Fast & Furious 6 when, after the villain begins to run over innocent bystanders in his tank, Vin Diesel barks to his crew, “Take their attention away from the people!” Characters in blockbusters these days rarely ever comment on the titanic amounts of destruction they (and we) are witnessing. We’ve seen buildings smashed onscreen since Godzilla trampled on Tokyo in 1954 (and I have no doubt we will again when the Godzilla reboot is released next year), but now there’s a coldly pornographic attention to detail that implies that the only lessons imparted by 9/11 were technical ones. It’s as if more time and effort were spent on simulating a toppled skyscraper than in telling you why you should care about the people trapped in it. It’s not until the very end of Man of Steel’s third-act battle, where the stakes grow smaller and much more intimate, that Superman truly seems to become emotional about the lives in danger, and that’s a moment that blockbuster filmmakers could learn a lot from: There’s no need to robotically kill faceless millions when a single character in jeopardy will always prove more galvanizing. Instead of trying to top the mayhem in Man of Steel next year — instead of continuing to mine one of the worst days in American history for a series of wowser trailer moments — can we give the pummeled buildings a break and find creative new obstacles for our heroes to overcome? Please, let’s have a summer-movie spectacle we don’t have to wince at."

"What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?"

"I was bred to be a warrior, Kal-El, trained my entire life to master my senses. Where did you train? ON A FARM?"

"People are afraid of what they don't understand."

"There is only one way this ends, Kal: either you die or I do."

"You're not just anyone, Clark, and I have to believe that you're–that you're sent here for a reason. All these changes you're going through, one day–one day, you're goin'a think of them as a blessing, and when that day comes, you're goin'a have to make a choice: a choice of whether to stand proud in front of the human race or not."

"Look at this. We could have built a new Krypton in this squalor, but you choose the humans over us. I exist only to protect Krypton. That is the sole purpose for which I was born, and every action I take, no matter how violent or how cruel, is for the greater good of my people. And now, I have no people. My soul... that is what you have taken from me!"

"You'll just have to decide what kind of man you'll want to grow up to be, Clark, because whoever that man is, good character or bad, he's–he's gonna change the world."

"Considering that every previous "Superman" movie put the courtship dance between men and women at the heart of its action — particularly "Superman: the Movie", "Superman II" and "Superman Returns" — the fact that "Man of Steel" has a No Girls Allowed sensibility seems like a deliberate creative choice. It's as if the filmmakers want to reassure young male viewers accustomed to the glib swagger of "Iron Man" and the dire self-pity of Nolan's Batman trilogy that Superman is in the same wheelhouse. (Zod's right-hand woman Fajora-Ul, Antje Traue, is a powerful presence, but she's even more desexualized than Lois; her character's main trait is a pathological hatred of men.)"

"I am going to make them suffer, Kal, these humans you've adopted. I will take them all from you, one by one!"

"This council has been disbanded! [Ro-Zar: On whose authority?] Mine."

"You won't kill us yourself! You wouldn't sully your hands, but you'll damn us to a black hole for eternity! Jor-El was right! You're a pack of fools! Every last one of you! [to Lara] And you... you believe your son is safe? I will find him. I will reclaim what you have taken from us! I will find him. I will find him, Lara. I WILL FIND HIM!"

"What's the "S" stands for? .....well, here it's an S. ...well, how about "Super..."."

"My name is General Zod. I come from a world far from yours. I have journeyed across an ocean of stars to reach you. For some time, your world has sheltered one of my citizens. I request that you return this individual to my custody. For reasons unknown, he has chosen to keep his existence a secret from you. He will have made efforts to blend in. He will look like you, but he is not one of you. To those of you who may know of his current location: the fate of your planet rests in your hands. To Kal-El, I say this: surrender within twenty-four hours, or watch this world suffer the consequences..."

"YOU THINK YOU CAN THREATEN MY MOTHER?"

"How do you find someone who has spent a lifetime covering his tracks? For some, he was a guardian angel. To others, a ghost who never quite fit in."

"Tell me, you have Jor-El's memories, his conscience, can you experience his pain? I will harvest the Codex from your son's corpse, and I will rebuild Krypton atop his bones."

"Welcome to the Planet."

"Look closely, because the closer you think you are, the less you will actually see."

"I have so many questions. Where do I come from?"

"4 amazing magicians. 3 impossible heists. 1 billion dollars. This is no illusion."

"My father believed that if the world found out who I really was, they'd reject me…out of fear. I let my father die because I trusted him. Because he was convinced that I had to wait, that the world was not ready. What do you think?"

"Let's put our cards on the table, General. You're scared of me because you can't control me. You don't, and you never will. But that doesn't mean I'm your enemy."

"If you destroy this ship, YOU DESTROY KRYPTON!"

"Chris Nolan wasn't there during the production itself, although I'm not sure how much work was done behind the scenes. I'm sure Zack had a phone call or two with him, but this is definitely Zack's baby. He was the man in charge, and we created the character together, as opposed to having too many outside influences."

"Come in close, because the more you think you see, the easier it'll be to fool you."

"There is a legend of a secret order born in ancient Egypt called "the Eye". It is said that they perfected sleight of hand to steal food from the Pharaohs and give it to the slaves. Their purpose: using magic and illusion to even the scales of justice. Are the Horsemen the next in a long line of fools to believe this myth? Will they evade the rules of law and logic like they did in Las Vegas? Or will the dark mysticism of this Southern swampland get the better of them?"

"First rule of magic: always be the smartest guy in the room."

"Want to know how they did it? Just say the magic word."

"Let me warn you. I want you to follow. Because no matter what you think you might know, we will always be 1 step, 3 steps, 7 steps ahead of you. And just when you think you're catching up, that's when we'll be right behind you. And at no time will you be anywhere other than exactly where I want you to be. So come close, get all over me; because the closer you think you are, the less you'll actually see."

"As of this instant, we are ahead of them. We need to keep it that way, understand?"

"Whatever this grand trick is, it was designed a long time ago, and I believe that what's about to follow, is really going to amaze. So I suggest you sit back and enjoy your front row seat. You paid quite a lot of good money for it."

"So here's my new theory: the legend is that the Eye is everywhere, waiting for the truly great magicians to distinguish themselves from the mediocre ones. Maybe that was you. Deep down inside, you wanted nothing more than to be part of the Eye, but you were never invited, so you tried to destroy them, but instead, what happens? You pissed them off."

"Again, it comes back to the human element; because he's alone and there's no one like him. That must be incredibly scary and lonely, not to know who you are or what you are, and trying to find out what makes sense. Where's your baseline? What do you draw from? Where do you draw a limit with the power you have? In itself, that's an incredible weakness."

"Welcome to the Eye."

"At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, “Man of Steel” will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off. Summer blockbusters have a way of encouraging multiplex Manichaeism, though I propose a middle way. It won’t be easy. Even those who patiently ride out the bludgeoning excesses of the film’s final 45 minutes may wonder what happened to the movie — the one about human and humanoid struggles — they watched for the first 100. They may also wonder why no one, anyone, smacked the director, Zack Snyder, in the head and reminded him that he was midwifing a superhero franchise, as the film’s first image, of a yelling, straining woman signals, not restaging the end of days."

"There are a number of overt references to the past in “Man of Steel,” a title that itself summons up America’s lost industrial history. There’s even a scene in which Jor-El narrates Krypton’s rise and calamitous fall using immersive, metallic-gray images that morph and scroll across the frame like an animated version of a W.P.A. bas-relief mural. For roughly 100 minutes, or the running time of an average movie, Mr. Snyder is in control of his material. His handling of the story’s many flashbacks, which fill in piecemeal Superman’s Kansas childhood as Clark, is fluid and apt. Each return to the past becomes another tile in the mosaic, adding to the emerging portrait of the adult wanderer and seeker he has become. His adoptive parents, Martha (Diane Lane) and Jonathan (Kevin Costner), come into focus, as does the bewildered child (played by Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry), who doesn’t understand why he’s so different. Mr. Snyder borrows too many canted camera angles and too much sun-kissed fluttering laundry from Terrence Malick, but the Kansas scenes solidify the human foundation of a divided identity."

"Gailard Sartain - Chef Paul"

"Jim Garrison - Judge Jim Garrison"

"Charles Ludlam - Lamar Parmentel"

"Grace Zabriskie - Mam"

"Tom O'Brien - Bobby McSwain"

"Marc Lawrence - Vinnie 'The Cannon' DiMotti"

"John Goodman - Detective Sergeant Andre DeSoto"

"Solomon Burke - Daddy Mention"

"Lisa Jane Persky - Detective McCabe"