A bit of a fanwank, but I think Zod wanted to die at that point. He was slowly moving his heat vision towards the family, but seriously, how long does it take to move your eyeballs? He wanted Kal-el to kill him because Krypton was dead, so he no longer had a purpose in life, and he wanted to die in battle, because he was a warrior-type
I definitely think modern history has affected how we look at those destruction scenes, as opposed to when something like Independence Day came out.
An interesting suggestion that I’ve seen proposed elsewhere: use this in the sequel to set up the rest of the DC universe by showing some mystery person(s) zipping around Metropolis rescuing folks from the fallout.
I see the destruction as part of modern more realistic filmmaking. People have seen The Incredibles. Some have read Wild Cards. The comic books these came from are too antiseptic to feel real today. Supers fight, shit gonna get fucked up. The Avengers destroyed half of New York. Iron Man relentlessly gets his ass kicked and goes through suits like tissue paper. It’s all an effort to show what Super Heroes would really be like if they actually existed. I don’t think it was too far off from what it would be like if there was a Superman fighting in the city. Superman 2 tried to give some of that feel but didn’t have the effects to pull it off.
I think it’s just as reasonable to assume that most of those buildings were evacuated, too. After all, the Daily Planet fled their building before Supes was even in their hemisphere, and as reporters, you would assume they’d stick around longer than others. That most of the evacuation happens offscreen doesn’t mean it’s any less valid a likelihood. Plus, as I mentioned in another thread, the body count from the fistfights even if the buildings were populated would be just a small fraction of the loss of life from the terraforming engine’s destruction that preceded them.
Indeed–there is evidence in the film itself that a mass evacuation had already occured (though I am not sure it is believable that this could have been accomplished so quickly)–after the initial combat between Zod and Superman, before their final fight, there was no one to be seen anywhere around them. You would think that if the buildings had been inhabited, at least some of them would be out on the street at that point, rushing around and trying to get away or rescue people. But there was no one.
Well, to be fair, my 8-year-old son made the same argument when I (unwisely) brought this up at the breakfast table the next morning. I didn’t argue with him and just let it go, thinking it was good for him to believe nobody was hurt. Maybe a quick shot of people evacuating would have been enough for me to go along with it during the movie. Or maybe I’m just old.
How long would it take to evacuate a city the size of Metropolis? I don’t know if anything like that has ever been attempted in the real world, but my gut feeling is you wouldn’t stand much chance of doing in in under 24 hours, and in the film, I don’t think they had anything like that amount of time
Someone else must have the same sense of humor as you. Does that frighten you? 
Analysis done by the unfortunately acronymed Watson Technical Consulting for buzzfeed…
If only there were someone around to clear all that rubble – and move girders from Point A to Point B, welding 'em together easy as looking at 'em, say.
As an incidental note, and as a member of the Canadian Forces, I was pleased to see Canadian military personal in accurate uniforms as characters in the film.
If the WTC estimate stands, then after the battle of Metropolis Superman should be one of the most hated figures in the world. It’s not like he had any public reputation to a hero beforehand; as far as the public is concerned a bunch of superpowered aliens showed up, had a fight that destroyed a major city and killed 100,000+ people, and now the one survivor from the fight expects to be treated as a hero. Sure, he claims to have been trying to stop the bad guys, but millions of people who lost family members and friends are going to forever associate and blame him for with their personal tragedy. He’d be a pariah, if not for that fact that he’s nigh-invulnerable and impossible to stop from going anywhere he pleases.
I understand how everybody is justifiably upset about the probable loss of life in Metropolis. But we never saw what happened immediately after Zod’s death. It’s entirely possible that Clark spent the next three weeks x-raying rubble and pulling people out from under buildings, right?
When you’re partially responsible for thousands of deaths, pulling a few people from the rubble he himself helped generate probably isn’t going to cut it for the victims.
Just sayin’.
“He himself helped generate” is a bit harsh, he didn’t cause any of those deaths he prevented billions of others. There was only one way to stop people from dying and that was stopping the bad guys as fast as possible.
Andrew raises a good point, though. Much of the world isn’t going to know what Superman actually did, just that he was involved somehow in a major catastrophe.
He’s gonna have to a lot of good deeds to get past this.
We never got to see public reaction to the “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” messages people were seeing. I was curious as to whether Clark’s father’s ideas about how people might react to someone like Clark would be reflected in how they react to threatening space aliens showing up and saying, “One of us is among you. He is a fugitive from our planet. If he doesn’t turn himself in to us within 24 hours, we will start killing you.” :eek: Holy crap! That might be too much information for ordinary folks to process in a short time. Would they pick up on the idea that this stranger is the only thing between Earth and the frightening aliens?
I thought the woman warrior was impressively badass and loyal to Zod. In any other movie, she could have been the lead.
Lois sure did recover quickly from Kal’s surgery on her! I also noticed the ridiculously impractical shoes she was wearing. Amy Adams can do no wrong in my moviegoing eyes, but she was too petite and girly for this role, I thought. Kal can do better than that!
And how did Mr. Kent get killed in a tornado? Do they not have tornado watches and warnings in Kansas? Why were there so many cars on the road? Stupid.
The warrior woman’s name was Faora Hu-ul, another lost-established comic-book villain, and a refreshing restoration after the pointless change in the original Superman films where Zod’s henchwoman was “Ursa”.
I gather, though, Faora’s hulking nearly nonverbal partner was a reference to Jack O’Halloran’s “Non” character from the earlier films.
And this was explicitly hit on in the film. There’s the scene where Clark is in class and starts getting overwhelmed and Marta Kent had to come and help him focus. Superman is special even among Kryptonians and despite living his whole life there, he had trouble adapting, particularly as a child. Zod was specifically bred and spent his life honing his focus. So if even both of them struggled with focus, how would some other Kryptonian, perhaps more of a grunt warrior rather than a general, or a politician, or a laborer have handled that overload? It wouldn’t have gone well. Besides, it seems that they get at least some powers from just the sun and lower gravity, as Faora-Ul was doing fine in keeping up with Kal-El.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he wanted to die, rather he just didn’t care. He no longer had a purpose to exist and he’d re-established that, as a result, he would exact his revenge on Kal-El, which included killing off humanity, and the fight wouldn’t end until one of them was dead. I think he correctly surmised that putting humans in harms way would cause him pain, and perhaps he would use that to expose a weakness. After all, he was already in a vulnerable position himself.
A few things on this whole destruction thing. First, I would agree that at least some sort of evacuation was started. Hell, I imagine people started evacuating the moment they saw the “You are not alone.” thing. We’re also not sure how much time actually passed. Obviously, Clark spent time thinking about it before he turned himself in, and he spent some time on the Kryptonian ship getting his mind messed with, so it very well could have been more than a day.
Second, as pointed out upthread, I think most of the deaths of those left would have happened when Zod started up the World Engine, before Superman had shown up to fight him. And, again, we don’t have good timing on how long that was going on, because Superman flew to the other side of the world and back to stop it. I don’t think it was all that long, he probably did it in a few hours or even a few minutes, but that’s still more time for people to evacuate, or at least get away from the World Engine itself. Further, most of the fighting between Zod and Superman occurred around where the World Engine was, so even if all of Metropolis wasn’t evacuated, presumably at least the area around the World Engine was mostly free.
Third, at least to me, it’s established that Superman does take precaution in combat to minimize collateral damage, particularly in hurting others. Presumably he was stronger than Zod, part of why he ultimately beat him, because he was fully adapted and had spent more time absorbing energy from the sun and all, but he expends some effort in avoiding hurting other people, rather than just trying to beat the hell out of him. Zod, OTOH, didn’t care, and as the fight progressed realized that he could use the people as a weapon against Superman, hence the situation that forced him to kill Zod.
Finally, Superman is new at this, and he realized the stakes were high, but if he didn’t stop Zod, every human being would be dead. It obviously pained him greatly, and I’m sure it’s exactly the sort of thing that will help him become more aware of the sort of collateral damage he can do in the future. I’d be nearly certain exactly that sort of scenario will play out in the sequel, someone like Lex realizing exactly that, not unlike Zod in Superman II.
And as an aside, playing off of all of that, it’s a perfect kicking off point for the sequel. We know he was fighting to save everyone on the planet, and some of the people around him, but it’s clear that the government doesn’t trust him, and likely much of the rest of the planet will be at odds about exactly what happened. This is exactly how a villain in the sequel, like Lex Luthor, can get into a position to challenge superman with the backing of the government and military, getting funds and technology, and he’d know that the way to stop him isn’t with brute force but by going after others instead.
Well, consider how easy the press conference Q&A would be. I mean, you almost can’t help but ask the right questions:
“Hey, what the hell was that? Cars floating into the air, buildings toppling?”
“Alien invaders started ruining our gravity, to Kill All Humans.”
“So why aren’t we all dead?”
“The one alien who grew up here smashed their Kill-All-Humans machine.”
“And the rest of the aliens?”
“He gave us a Teleport-The-Bad-Guys-Away device.”
“So we got all of 'em?”
“We missed one. Superman killed him.”
“Superman?”
“That’s what we’re calling him.”