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.

To be human or not to be is Superman’s great question, a schism that evokes other familiar God-human divides. It’s one that he struggles with in his fights with an alien foe, General Zod (Mr. Shannon), and in his attraction to Lois Lane (Ms. Adams). It’s hard to believe that any actor could compete with Terence Stamp’s dandified turn as Zod in the 1978 “Superman,” but Mr. Shannon, delightfully embracing gnashing-teeth villainy, proves one of the new film’s strengths. A true Krypton believer, Zod has his own good reasons for chasing after the being he knows as Kal-El. While these add another layer, they and everything else are almost lost in the last 45 minutes, when Mr. Snyder piles on the hammering special effects, becoming yet one more director gone disappointingly amok.

That’s too bad, because if you wave away all the computer-generated smoke and see past the pulverized buildings, it’s possible to remain hooked on the resonant origin story that wends through “Man of Steel” — that of the immigrant. It’s a story that begins with the launching of the spaceship and continues through a child’s pained attempts to assimilate and a young man’s sense of not belonging. In his excellent 1987 essay “What Makes Superman So Darned American,” Gary D. Engle wrote that “Superman raises the American immigrant experience to the level of religious myth.” Mr. Snyder isn’t capable of mythmaking, but in his sometimes poetic, sometimes crude way, he has given Superman a new lease on franchise life by affirming that this most American hero is also an alien yearning to breathe free.

“Man of Steel” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Parental death, alien battles and annihilated worlds.