Entertainment

It’s not easy being blue

In the 75 years since Superman debuted in Action Comics No. 1, he’s faced down threats from near and far, fending off Kryptonite-toting evil geniuses, sentient supercomputers bent on destroying the universe, dimension-hopping gods with world-crushing powers and any number of hell-bent terrorists. He’s been beaten so badly we thought he was dead, but, like the indomitable American spirit he represents, he always gets up and fights back.

Which is why the last time we saw the DC Comics star on the big screen, in 2006’s “Superman Returns,” he did what caped crusaders do best: dish out sensible travel advice. “Well, I hope this experience hasn’t put any of you off flying,” Superman, played by Brandon Routh, tells a gaggle of reporters after saving an airplane from crashing. “Statistically speaking, it’s still the safest way to travel.”

That dopey, aw-shucks approach to the character worked in the past, when Christopher Reeve’s do-gooder gave us the hero we needed to fit the rough and dangerous ’70s. But is Big Blue just too much of a boring Boy Scout to carry his own movie in an age of self-mutilating Jokers and quip-talking Iron Men?

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Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel,” out Friday, answers that with something darker, grittier and more contemplative — a Superman unsteady with his powers but not afraid to use them.

Filmmakers wanted to cut the line and start fresh, recapturing the soul of the character in the same way they reclaimed Batman from the awful neon-vomit covered toy commercial that was 1997’s “Batman & Robin.”

“It was the only way to approach it,” says screenwriter David S. Goyer, who co-wrote director Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies and the script for “Man of Steel,” which Nolan also produced. “For us, we have to draw a line in the sand and pretend as if none of these other iterations even existed. Zack said, ‘You have to decide if you’re going to chart your own path or if you’re going to do an homage.’ ”

The team hadn’t originally set out to do a Superman movie. Goyer was actually in the middle of working out the ending of 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises” when he took a break and read through some old Action Comics that were lying around. An idea for a take on the character hit him; a few days later, he showed Nolan a few pages of his ideas. Nolan immediately asked if he could produce it.

The Nolan-ization, for lack of a better word, of the character means you won’t see classic touchstones in the film: no Lex Luthor, no Kryptonite; even those dorky Clark Kent glasses don’t appear for most of the film. What you get is in some ways closer to the WB’s hit take on Superman, “Smallville,” which saw a teenage Clark Kent exploring and discovering his powers over time.

Instead of Clark landing on Earth with a complete Zen-like mastery of his powers, we see him go through superhero puberty, dealing with things like X-ray vision that he can’t quite control. Almost like the Hulk, this Superman is wary of what his powers can do.

“It’s the interesting thing about him — he’s very much subjected to the frailties of the human mind,” says Henry Cavill, the 30-year-old Brit who dons the cape. “He’s dealing with the idea that he’s different. Imagine walking through life never having hugged someone as hard as you can. And you know that you can’t because you could kill them. It’s things like that.”

That’s the challenge writers for Superman have faced for generations: How do you make a nearly invincible character with god-like powers relatable?

“It’s trickier to do than it is with Batman,” Goyer says. “I spent more time writing the first draft of this script than in any in my career. There were a lot of false starts. We had to fill in a lot of things that we didn’t have to fill in with Bruce Wayne, because Bruce comes from Earth.”

The movie is visually darker than all previous versions: Krypton is a bleak landscape, bustling Metropolis looks gray, even the famous Superman suit is made of muddled colors.

Goyer says Snyder broke with stylistic methods he used in previous films, such as the slow motion cuts in the fight scenes of “300” or the bright comic colors of “Watchmen.” For “Man of Steel,” he used hand-held cameras and did more filming on location than ever before.

“That in and of itself made it more relatable,” Goyer says.

The tone of the film aims for that golden balance with the character: To be interesting, he has to be both a guiding-light hero and a sympathetic human character dealing with inner turmoil.

“Superman is difficult. There’s no denying that,” says Paul Dini, a comic writer and a co-creator of the hit “Superman: The Animated Series” that ran on the WB from 1996 to 2000 and is considered by many fans to be the finest iteration of the character off the page.

“Batman is kind of a reactive character,” Dini says. “He stays at home, waiting for that light to turn on, and then he goes out and fights villains. Superman is out confronting the guys gone bad. It’s more physically challenging than a mental-might challenge. Batman has to more or less outwit [the bad guys].”

That leads to the question: Who’s big enough to take on Superman? More so, who’s big enough to take on Superman in a way that makes for a summer blockbuster?

He fought cunning, missile-toting Lex Luthor a few times in the Christopher Reeve series of movies, battled tinfoil-covered cyborgs in the silly “Superman III” and again faced Luthor and his absurd mountain-made-of-Kryptonite time-share scheme in the 2006 film.

“Man of Steel” pits him against General Zod (Michael Shannon of “Boardwalk Empire”) and his cronies, who arrive on Earth from destroyed Krypton with the same powers as Superman.

We saw Zod once before in “Superman II,” but Shannon’s version has deeper layers that play off Superman’s torn identity between Earth and Krypton.

“It’s very easy to take a Superman story and blow it up so big, but it’s harder for readers to relate to,” says comic writer Dan Jurgens, who worked on DC’s 1992 blockbuster “The Death of Superman” storyline and created Doomsday, the monster villain who killed him. “That’s why Clark Kent is so important. It allows you to bring it down to a human level.”

Jurgens hasn’t seen the movie yet, but he’s encouraged by the trailers.

“It’s got a lot of beautiful moments for Clark Kent so far,” he says. “You’ve got the drama backed up with character.”

The real tension in the movie isn’t Superman battling his Kryptonian foes, it’s Clark Kent feeling uncertain just how much power he has inside him. Goyer calls it very much a story about two fathers: one, his adoptive Earth parent (Kevin Costner); the other his noble Kryptonian father (Russell Crowe), each who give Clark a sense of principles.

What you won’t see in this movie is Superman being the Boy Scout, doing good deeds like telling Lois Lane she shouldn’t smoke (as Reeve’s version did), for instance.

“For the time being, he’s very much a real-world person,” Cavill says. “He’s the kind of person that doesn’t want to draw attention to himself so he’s not going to tell people what to do. But he certainly can lead by example.”

When you consider the history of the hero — from the comic’s debut in 1938, to the George Reeves TV show, a campy musical in the ’60s and a rom-com angle with “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” in the ’90s, you see how the rise and fall of interest in Superman reflects changing social tides.

“Each generation creates their own interpretation of Superman,” says Kevin Burns, who directed the 2006 documentary “Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman.” “It’s not only a reflection of the times, the audience, the market, but also who he’s going to be read by, who he’s going to be watched by.”

Comic fans are, understandably, unsure if they’ll finally see the Superman movie they deserve for this era.

“People are apprehensive,” says Mitch Cutler, owner of St. Mark’s Comics and a lifelong Superman devotee. “They made some questionable choices that are evident in the trailers. Of course, no one wants to overreact. We’ll see the movie and we’ll judge.”

One thing fans will likely applaud: There’s less of the cutesy flirting with Lois the other movies dwelled on, and more Superman just being awesome old Superman.

“The problem with the last movie [is that] audiences had grown up a bit more as far as what superhero movies could be, and Superman was still stuck back in the ’70s,” Dini says. “Now it looks like Superman has some cojones and is really allowed to cut loose.”

tdonnelly2@nypost.com

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