Lets not forget how important the media is in shaping perceptions of major events. I think it is safe to say the most credence will be given to the reporters on scene, particularly “pulitzer prize winning” reporter Lois Lane who had been first on the story days ago.
I’m pretty sure everyone at the daily planet will be unified in their interpretation of the events and make sure the world views superman as a hero.
Especially if it was with the support and cooperation of Military Commander <Meloni> and world-class scientist <Schiff>, both of whom sacrificed their lives to help defeat the invaders because they believed in the son of Jor-El.
In retrospect, it’s a little weird that the President – preferably played by William Devane – didn’t show up on television to make a brief statement.
After the events of Olympus Has Fallen, they’re still a little bit punchy. 
I’m not sure how much that matters.
If we’re going for a semi-realistic public reaction, how about:
How much influence does the NY Times, for example, have on world opinion, much less US opinion? Newspapers are less and less important with each passing year.
I’m thinking Fox News and the BBC have a much better chance at shaping perception. And if the Planet attempts to spin events differently from everybody else, so much the worse for their own reputation.
And even if he is initially hailed as a hero, how long before a network decides to boost ratings with “How much do we Really know about this alien who’s been hiding from us for 30 years?” Or “Why is this alien guy with some obviously powerful enemies still hanging around our neck of the woods/universe?” Or “Mixed Race Relationships - Is Lois Lane a traitor to our species?”
Not to mention the conspiracy theorists. “Superman is a plot by the US government”. “Metropolis was really blown up by the government”. “It was all a hoax”. “Aliens don’t exist and the US is breeding super soldiers who aren’t under their control”. “Kryptonians probed my cows before probing me”. “The alien threat isn’t really over and we’re being lied to”. Etc.
Haven’t read the rest of this thread yet but I watched the movie this evening. I have to say I was very disappointed, it was a mess of a film and had entirely the wrong atmosphere for a Superman movie.
I’m going to commit heresy and say I enjoyed the much maligned Superman Returns much more than Man of Steel, at least it had two stand-out action scenes (the Gatling Gun scene and the airplane scene) I can’t recall any really memorable scenes in MoS. Though I did like it when the Colonel took a last hopeless but courageous stand against the female villian armed only with a knife and a ‘die with your boots on’ attitude! Though the actors playing that role and one of the main reporters were far too similar looking and a bit off-putting because of it.
And please, just make a fun summer popcorn movie without thinly veiled environmental messages, political statements and religious imagery. Its not fun, its not clever, and its very distracting.
It would be really interesting if they reinvent Luthor as a media mongol, sort of like Rupert Murdock. He could have the Daily Planet as one of his many companies and use it to try and destroy Superman’s reputation.
Mogul, not Mongol. 
I just wanted to say I really enjoy both of these posts. +1 
Tornado watches are meaningless and widely ignored. Tornado warnings are too, for the most part. Either way, tornados are horribly unpredictable - and unless they had their radio on, there’s no way of knowing there was a warning (not too many sirens out in the cornfields). The only thing implausible about that scene is there being that much traffic out in rural Kansas. 
Can we all agree that the “I hear it’s all downhill after the first kiss.” / “I think that only applies to kissing an actual human.” exchange is one of the worst bits of dialogue ever written?
I’ll second that. I had no problem with the kiss or the budding romance aspect–dude saves you from an escape pod falling through space, you kiss the hell out of him (especially when he looks like that). But the dialogue was so totally unnecessary.
Anyopne else think it was pretty pissant to go outside and trash the trucker’s rig? It’s like backing down from a guy and keying his car, only with tree trunks and whatnot. What if the truck doesn’t belong to him? What if he loses his job and can no longer support his family? What if his cargo doesn’t get delivered and a small business goes bankrupt as a result?
It would have been trivially easy to just bounce the guy, could be done with only minor bruising. Jonathan Kent didn’t do Clark any favours by turning him into such a passive-aggressive dick; it would have been better to teach him how to moderate his abilities, rather than how not to use them.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. :smack:
I thought the movie was full of clunky dialogue like that; but that’s a good example.
I’m not condoning it necessarily, but I saw it as a callback to the first episode of Smallville, where Clark gets revenge on the jocks by neatly stacking their pickups three high.
I thought it was a total bush league, passive-aggressive move when I saw it. I thought the same thing about the scene in Superman II when Clark goes back to the diner to beat up the bullying trucker after getting his powers back.
It was awkward as hell.
The lack of chemistry was also palpable (perhaps aided by the fact Henry Cavill makes Oak jealous of his wood-like properties). Like making plywood and jelly sandwiches.
I had exactly the same reaction to those scenes. And precisely because we didn’t see bodies as well as miscellaneous office junk falling out of those skyscrapers as they toppled over and the glass windows popped out, battered dead bodies everywhere, and thousands of terrified people running in panic through the streets, I found the scenes terribly (and distractingly) unrealistic. I’m not saying I WANT to see mass deaths; I’m saying that now that we know what such a mass death scene actually looks like, the film makers need to either show it properly or (preferably) not at all. It reminds me of those 1950s and 1960s war movies which, because they studiously avoided showing the horrors of actual combat, actually managed to inadvertently glorify war.
I actually groaned when Zod popped back onto the screen for the climatic battle. There was no dramatic need for it! Evil Kryptonians’ ship gets sucked back into the Phantom Zone, The End. it would have been a perfectly satisfying ending, and one with no need to portray Superman as a supposedly REAL tough guy because “Hey! He KILLS!”
(Know why lethally violent “heros” are so common in our movies? Because it’s a pseudo-tough choice. We get to pretend the character took the morally difficult option, when in fact he simply took the option which a significant portion of our society venerates and EXPECTS him to take. A lot of people would actually look down on a character who managed to resolve a dangerous situation non-violently. Which says nothing nice about us as a society!)
And Pa Kent didn’t even NEED to die for Superman’s secret to be safe. Why couldn’t Clark have run over (at a relatively normal speed), knocked Pa Kent over, and covered his father’s body with his own? He’d shield his dad from whatever battering the storm could dish out - and in the end, everyone would regard their survival as just one of those freaky things that can happen with tornadoes. “Can you believe it? All that destruction, and Jonathan Kent and his boy somehow survive without a scratch! That’s a twister for you! There’s just no telling what they’ll do!”
The scene with Pa Kent’s death is just another example of the writers clumsily wrenching the plot in the direction they think it needs to go, rather than stopping to think about all the options truly available to the characters.
You have to respect an alien technology that’s 90% based on Bucky Balls.
I can’t really argue with many of the criticisms people have made, but I really enjoyed it. There were a couple brutal bits of dialog, but I think I almost expect a bit of that kind of thing.
One minor thing I would have changed is to have the last shot be the one of young Clark doing the superman pose for his parents.
I think this shows why I’ll never be fully satisfied with a superhero movie ever again - I’ll never be 8 again. The way movies are made now it’ll be such a rarity that the plot, characters, motivation, and dialogue of a superhero movie will satisfy my standards. It can’t. It has to appeal to too wide an age group. I’m sure if Return of the Jedi came out tomorrow as a brand new movie this board would be up in arms over the convoluted escape plan, how the romance hinted at in the first 2 movies is disgusting in retrospect, and ewoks would crash the server.
I’m 100% certain this is how Man of Steel 2 will open. 200% sure if Nolan has anything to say about it.
The answers to 9/11 were equally easy to answer and yet conspiracy theorists abound. With the Metropolis destruction, you would have conspiracy nuts claiming it was government staged as an excuse for Big Oil, NASA, and Richard Branson to collude and delude the American public into funding space exploration.
I also didn’t like how Krypton just inexplicably went isolationist. Population issues? Isn’t that directly solved by these other-world outposts? Resource issues? Directly solved by harnessing yellow-sun radiation to improve efficiency 10 trillion %?
This probably echoes my first response about these movies being made for 8 year olds but I really disliked how the evil guys were evil and the good guys were good. End of discussion. I would have loved for little Clark to have an outburst here or there and try to control his anger. It would have fed into why as a grownup he’s relied on being a passive aggressive dick. It would have made for a more meaningful meeting with Zod. Zod should have been cut as a good guy on Krypton wrongly imprisoned, not a maniac. It would have made for a more complex and thought provoking story as the two switches roles half way through based on the decisions made on the margin, proving that good and evil are not as clear as we all would like to think - a very “Dark-knight” ish premise. I guess that would have been too out there for a Superman story but I think it would have made for a much more engaging story.