I’m about a quarter of the way through the thread (and probably won’t finish all the posts), but Skammer captured my feelings mostly, though maybe he was slightly kinder than me.
Superman killing Zod destroyed the movie for me. As I left the movie, I could focus on nothing else other than the poor writing and direction that forced that scene. I also think that the post-fight scenes might have spent a few seconds showing Superman being Superman in Metropolis - finding and rescuing survivors and helping with the rebuilding.
Cavill did a fine job, but there were a number of scenes where he was so pale I thought I was watching Zombie-Superman. Adams was also good. But together…not so much.
I could somewhat deal with the codex MacGuffin, but MacGuffins are better the less explained they are. Making it a partial skull and encoding it into Supes DNA, however, was just stupid. Jonathan Kent’s death was just as stupid and senseless, if not more so. I understand that he was emphasizing “stay hidden” but it came out more like “I’m so tired of Martha, I prefer the tornado”. Poor execution.
I often wonder if these poor choices come from the director or from the studio. I’d like to think Snyder would know better but some focus group wanted Kal-El to get revenge and kill Zod and Snyder was told from high above to make it happen. I’d at least like to think that is what happened.
That’s ridiculous. Superman didn’t kill, or even fight Zod, out of a sense of revenge (save for the once time he threatened Ma). He fought Zod as a protector of Earth and humanity, and Zod had to monologue about how this was a fight to the death (just before he bear-climbed that skyscraper) and of course the heat vision scene in Metropolis’ Grand Central has Zod putting the Kryptonian he views as a moralist into an moral dilemma. Superman cries out over this Pyrrhic victory. I was happily surprised at all of this because, while I like Snyder, Man of Steel was markedly more restrained than the chest thumping of 300 or the protagonist-violence-always-equals-cool vibe of Dawn of the Dead.
Huh. I hadn’t really connected the dots between that and Faora’s your-morality-is-your-weakness putdown – but if you squint just right, it’s kinda there.
So, Kal is a moralist because the other Kryptonians tell us so.
We, as the audience, know Superman has a moral code, but nothing in the movie really showed us this. We had to rely on exposition.
Show, don’t tell. Within just the context of the movie, Clark did very little to show he was averse to the act of killing if necessary or that he had some moral dilemmas about the confrontations.
Seems like half the movie was either people in exposition mode explaining things either to Lois Lane (who just happened to be in the right places at the right times to have gobs of exposition tossed her way) or to Clark Kent.
That’s a handy superpower, especially for a newspaper reporter. Just show up wherever in the world (scientific expeditions, middle of nowhere Kansas, alien spacecraft, military operation on a C-130) and have random people explain everything to you.
I had exactly the same reaction, much to my daughter’s chagrin (she took me to the movie for Father’s Day).
The other moment when I embarrassed her was when whosit, the guy who used to be the lieutenant on Law and Order: SUV empties his pistol at the evil female super-villain. I was unable to stop myself from saying out loud: “Throw the gun at her - she’ll duck!”
Is it necessary for Superman/Clark to be in such good shape? If he was out-of-shape or even obese, he would still have his superpowers, right? Does the muscle help at all, i.e. would Zod have had a better chance of defeating Superman if Clark didn’t take such good care of himself? In fact, how did Clark stay in good shape? Did he lift Everest 10 times, do 20 laps around Earth and skip breakfast every morning?
I asked this in my prior post, but is it ever explained anywhere why Kryptonians evolved to look exactly like humans despite being on a different planet?
Saw it the other day. I thought it was by far the most powerful movie yet to deal with the problems brought about by illegal aliens and their anchor babies.
Has anybody else noticed that in certain lighting and at certain angles Henry Cavill is kind of hot?
Earth may be a much better candidate for [del]terra[/del]kryptoforming that Mars or Venus, but it still orbits a yellow sun. The world engine isn’t going to change that. One would think a planet orbiting a red sun would be a much better candidate than Earth.
To be fair it seems like all the Kryptonians (save Jor-El & Lara Lor-Van) had been fascist eugenicists for millennia. And let’s not forget that Zod was right; the Council was wrong. His own genetic engineering & the conditioning he’s undergone since birth are what compelled him to attempt that coup in the first place.
Wouldn’t be hard at all once I came to realize that lil’ clark has an endless supply of energy and needs a constructive way to burn it off.
What, clark? you want to turn me into the othorities? remember, you are the very definition of an ‘illegal alien’… remember that little area 51 film I showed you?
Meh. His solution was to double down on the eugenics. That’s not exactly being right. More like being wrong in a worse way.
And blaming everything on genetics is quite passe. They may have been predisposed to careers and pushed into them by society, but that doesn’t compel somebody to attempt coup d’etats. Otherwise, why stop him in the first place? Or sentence him to the phantom zone? Predestination as excuse doesn’t work, even in an engineered society.
In terms of muscle, eugenics / genetic engineering.
In terms of looking human, I don’t know if it was intentional, but the whole outpost thing made me think there was some kind of relationship between our people, especially considering all the other Prometheus references.
According to TV tropes:
“Superman, Supergirl, and all other Kryptonians are outwardly indistinguishable from humans, despite obvious biological differences. Exactly how close or distant humans and Kryptonians are can vary depending on the work:
According to some Silver Age stories, Kryptonians were descendants of humans plucked from Earth by a more technologically advanced race. Some Post Crisis stories imply this as well.
One Superman/Flash story has the duo facing a mysterious alien race that apparently seeded both Earth and Krypton with life, at around the same time, serving as a possible explanation for this trope.
It is mentioned that Jor-El chooses Earth because humans looks exactly like Kryptonians, so Kal-El could live among them without detection.
Lampshaded in an issue of Starman where Jack Knight’s journeys through space and time land him on Krypton before its destruction. He is promptly arrested by the authorities, who suspect him of being a member of a Kryptonian rebel group. When Jack tries to argue that he’s an alien visitor from planet Earth, his interrogator refuses to believe him, pointing out that he looks no different from any Kryptonian. Jack wonders whether God was feeling unoriginal.
Other stories suggested that the human and Kryptonian species actually were directly related:
Krypton dodges the Caucasian Aliens trap via “Vathlo Island”, home to “a highly developed black race” of Kryptonians, first mentioned in 1971.”