I enjoy superhero movies (I think Marvel have done a fantastic job ), so would like to see Justice League work (I gather Zack Snyder is doing a reboot.)
However I am dismayed by how powerful Superman has become, making the other characters almost redundant.
For example, the Flash has a good superpower (and can even time travel, I believe.)
Out of costume, Barry Allen is an interesting character.
But Superman can do everything the Flash can.
Aquaman is jolly strong and can breathe underwater.
Superman is stronger (and can breathe underwater.)
Superman can fly, travel through space without a suit, is bullet-proof, has X-ray vision, can fire heat and lasers from his eyes, has superhuman breath abilities etc.
I miss the days when Superman could jump tall buildings because he came from a high-gravity planet…
Check out the recently finished “Superman v. the Klan” miniseries. It’s set shortly after WWII, around 1948, and is a retelling of the famous radio serial that was credited with helping destroy the Klan’s public image and marginalize them as an extremist group. It features a Superman with his original, basic powerset: he’s faster and stronger than a normal human, but that’s it - no flight, no laser eyes, none of that.
Also, he beats the shit out of the Klan, which is always fun.
I haven’t watched many DC movies (I much prefer Marvel) and Superman being ridiculously powerful is part of the reason. Of course, there are many “versions” of Superman to deal with.
Golden Age and Silver Age comics, more modern comics: I am unfamiliar with these versions. IIRC it was one of these that could lift up a book with infinite weight. (He had help, and it was missing a few pages, but this still.) Quora is a great place to find over the top stories about Superman. He could also punch a planet in half and zap one with his eye beams, so One Punch Man and Dragon Ball Z style, but invincible.
Lois and Clark: I used to watch this TV show. He was weaker than his comic book version but still unkillable. He basically regenerated in the sun, resisted disintegration, resisted hypnotism, etc.
Movies: There have been many live action versions of Superman. One that ticked me off was Superman carrying a continent made of kryptonite. Sure he collapsed afterward but he could maintain his superpowers under those conditions long enough to fly while carrying something that large.
Animated: The weakest and IMO best version of Superman. He can be hurt by throwing lightning at him, needs to wear a spacesuit if he goes into space, and so forth. He occasionally struggles with very heavy objects. He is powerful but not over the top. He comes across like a top of the line Marvel superhero (Hulk or Thor as examples).
Superman has so many powers the writers sometimes forget them. He can react at faster than light speeds and might be able to fly that fast out of the atmosphere. The Flash is similarly ridiculously powerful, despite not having the attributes of superhuman invulnerability. (The Flash basically has overpowered numbers. He can react to something that takes place in a femtosecond. I don’t think the writer knew what that word meant, exactly. How has he not gone made yet?)
Yeah, that’s always been the problem with Superman.
Superman is too powerful (ok, post-Klan he is…). And, in Zack Snyder’s hands, too cold and one-dimensional. So I’m not sure you’ll see a good Superman story on the big screen for a while…
But on TV, it looks like you can! I loved the analysis of the new CW show, from the SUPERMAN & LOIS thread:
the climax of the story is that he’s been subconsciously holding himself back because he’s afraid of being seen as an alien; Linda Lee helps him overcome that block, and at the end of the story he’s got flight, laser eyes, cold breath, etc.
It is a really good series, though, and one I highly recommend.
I don’t know about too powerful but he’s top tier for what would be interesting in live action. It’s just that when working in a group with heroes from different power tiers the lower tiered heroes are secondary.
While I don’t think it would make for a good series (movie, tv, steaming or other), I found one point moving for me in the otherwise forgettable Superman Returns.
“I hear everything.”
It’s a simple line, and he then goes into the traditional Superman savoir complex. But for me, it is evocative of one of the great tragedies of Superman’s existence. He is, within the realm of earth, nearly omniscient but far from omnipotent. Yes, he can fist beat the gods into submission, but even at his speeds he can’t be two places at once.
He feels compelled to help us all, even if we say we don’t want it, and in several comics, he’s been flat out told to stop interfering. But he’ll still be aware of those cries for help that he wouldn’t be allowed to respond too.
And that’s leaving out the times he chooses to spend as Clark. No matter how little, it is time in which people are dying, being hurt, or hurting others.
This is why stories/what ifs about Superman eventually becoming a Dictator figure are so common - combine amazing power with an overwhelming need to ‘put the world right’ lean that way. Especially if you consider his commonly seen near agelessness. Given long enough, he’s going to have to leave earth, or give up the fight because he’ll always know that he’s doing less than he can.
But, going back to your point, I do agree - Superman works best in a world in which he’s alone. Put him in a group like the Justice league and his sheer versatility makes balancing a story with him and others feel contrived.
that’s why I put the twist between spoiler tags. Although just the fact that I put a spoiler is I suppose in itself a spoiler. Still, it seemed relevant to me in a recommendation for a series where Supes doesn’t have the full power set that in that series he eventually does have them. If anyone who hasn’t read the series yet is reading these spoilers, I apologize for ruining that twist. Even without that twist, I think it’s a great series.
I love that story! It illustrates the power of ridicule. If it is difficult to debate or legislate bad things out of existence, perhaps you can make them look ridiculous instead?
And yeah, Superman has been too powerful for a long time. He can also never be killed…
The recent-ish superman movie Man of Steel (2013) did a great job of portraying the carnage someone so powerful would create, even when only using their powers for good. Sooo much carnage.
Well, that’s a function of real-world economics, more than anything related to his power set. As long as there’s a market for Superman, he’d never going to stay dead for long. And it applies to basically every other superhero in some measure.
It’s not just a problem for DC; Marvel (or at least, the MCU) has the same issue, most notably with Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, who was so powerful that they had to sideline her in Avengers: Endgame and the when she showed up in the final battle she went head to head with Thanos after singlehandedly wrecking his ship and almost defeated him. Other characters with mystical powers (Dr. Strange, Scarlet Witch) are almost equally powerful if not moreso; it was arguably Strange, who was able to use a cheat code to look into the future and see the one possibility of defeating Thanos, who actually won the fight for the Avengers.
It is the personality flaws and interpersonal conflicts between the heroes of the MCU that actually make those films work and drives the dramatic tension; this was something that Tim Burton understood about the Batman movies that he made, and similarly for Christopher Nolan Batman films, a lesson that unfortunately didn’t percolate well into Zack Snyder’s “vision”; even when his characters have conflicts they just aren’t well-developed or consistent enough for the audience to care, and the films are just CGI spectacle showing a generic conflict without any emotional stakes even when the world is on the verge of being destroyed. We know Thanos and Steppenwolf will not ultimately be successful so the entertainment and engagement depends upon the conflict within and threat to the characters, and Superman has neither moral conflict nor physical vulnerability except to the much overused achilles heel of kryptonite, so unless the villain has kryptonite-bedazzled boxing gloves or forces him to make a choice between saving Lois Lane or the rest of the world, he has zero actual internal conflict.
The solution to that isn’t to make Superman “grimdark” or whatever Snyder is thinking, but to give him an actual personality where he is conflicted about his actions and beliefs, which is something that the recent DC films have just done a terrible job with. Even the recent Wonder Woman 1984, which did exactly that, undermined itself by failing to follow through and essentially resetting at the end, notwithstanding that the whole Steve Trevor romance felt so unnecessarily glommed onto the first Wonder Woman film that it had no real resonance with the audience.
For some reason comic book writers can’t resist having one person in the group that makes the rest essentially obsolete. Even the Fantastic Four which has clearly defined non-overlapping powers (plasticity, invisibility/force fields, fire/flight, and strength/durability) has to throw Mr. Fantastic’s unbounded genius into the mix so he can whip up a gadget that makes all their physical superpowers unnecessary.
A few years ago I bought some collections of old reprints of the Fantastic Four and Marvel Two-in-One (where The Thing teams up with various heroes). I was mildly disappointed how formulaic action scenes with The Thing were. They boiled down to maybe four categories:
The Thing and another strong character bash away at each other for several pages.
The Thing gets mind controlled.
The Thing breathes in knock-out gas.
The Thing gets tangled in some stuff and “can’t get any leverage”.
I remember buying World’s Finest Comics (Batman/Superman team-up) as a kid, and looking back they almost all used magic and/or kryptonite in order to provide a challenge to Superman.
At one point, he had a “friction field” that shielded him from air friction and ultra-high-speed impacts. It occasionally was even portrayed as limited invulnerability; I have an old copy of Justice League of America from the 80s somewhere where a Red Tornado copy suicide bombs a JLA meeting and the Flash is called out in dialogue to have survived because he was partially shielded from the blast by his “friction field”. I don’t think that concept really got used much other than as a vague handwave whenever someone raised plausibility issues about how he physically interacted with the world at Flash speeds.
Since the 90s at least, I think the Flash comics have really leaned into the “Speed Force”, which is a sort of transdimensional cosmic…something. It’s basically magic. Anything that doesn’t make logical sense about how his powers work is just handwaved as “that’s the way the Speed Force works.” The CW Arrowverse version, depending on the episode writer and the needs of the plot, references both the Speed Force (which in that version is apparently sentient and even sapient - when it’s plot convenient) and the Flash having “speed healing” (regeneration and a turbo-charged immune system).
Yeah, this is why Shazam (2019) was so effective. It didn’t take itself too seriously, and as a result was a complete delight to watch. I recommend it!
There should be a term (maybe there already is) for the tendency for superheroes or superpowers to become increasingly powerful. You see the same with the Force in Star Wars. Yoda was the most powerful Jedi that ever lived and he was breathless after lifting Luke’s X-Wing out of a lake. Move forward a few years and Rey effortlessly lifts hundreds of tons of boulders with barely any effort, Leia can fly through space like Mary Poppins, and suddenly everyone is doing Force video calling.
I don’t know that I would call it “a delight” but at least it moved quickly despite being over two hours long. Shazam did at least make a stab at characterization although it was so broad and unsubtle that Billy and Freddy felt more like characters from an Afterschool Special than fully realized personalities like Josh and Billy in Big (to make the obvious comparison). The Mark Strong’s villain never really seemed to have a clear motivation or reason for being a complete psychopath, and in general his unhinged violence seemed discordant with the rest of the film. In comparison to the rest of the DCEU films it was certainly at least watchable, but I would call it far from being particularly good or narratively well-structured.
), so would like to see Justice League work (I gather Zack Snyder is doing a reboot.)
