I’m annoyed that they’re going back to the Zod plot. Fer cryin’ out loud, Superman has been around for over 70 years, and all they can do is recycle a prior movie plot?
He’s pretty clearly showing doubt when he says that to Clark. It’s part of what we call a “character arc.”
I have high hopes for the new movie but I reject that Superman sucks as a character. He’s a good man that does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. The world needs more of that.
I keep hoping for Brainiac. I’d settle for Metallo. Heck, I’d settle for Titano.
Unless Papa Kent is secretly a Nazi supervillain, his character arc should not start with “You just saved your schoolmates from drowning? Maybe next time you should leave them to die.”
Dude, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape. It’s one of the classic blunders.
His character arc starts with ‘I want to protect my son, who is an alien, from a world that will likely cut him into quarters.’
Right, but he *chooses *to act that way. Why? I’d like to see what made him such a good man. If it’s just because he was born that way, then yeah, he kind of sucks as a character.
I’d like to see Brainiac too. I’d also love to see Parasite and a depowered Man in Red Panties.
From all I’ve seen he’s the way he is because of the Kents.
He looks more like MODOK to me, but I imagine he’d make a good Zod.
Jonathan and Martha Kent raise this alien in a way that inculcates the best qualities of Humanity. He literally becomes the embodiment of every fantasy deeply held in the under-trodden. I have never really liked the character as a ‘character’, but I sure would like to buy him a beer. The ‘oh-gosh’ Midwestern attitude always made me a feel akin to him, because I was raised in a similar culture in Georgia. Goodness was the default condition. Smiting evil was a big background meme when I was a child back in the 1960s. The echoes of WW2 were still a formidable force in the collective consciousness of America. Superman and Captain America were iconic heroes when we needed them, both then and now.
But, the serious treatment of those characters as fictional constructs has only just now been attempted. In the case of Kal-El, an alien castaway, the last (as far as we know) of his entire species, the story could well be compelling. It remains to be seen how this newest treatment of the classic hero is instantiated. I truly wish them well.
Just once . . . just once, I’d like to see a Superhero movie (reboot or first film) that doesn’t cover the hero’s origin. Throw the guy into action right away and give whatever origin you need in a two-minute flashback.
Agreed. But Superman is not the character for that. He’s got one of the best origin stories in all of comics perhaps second only to Batman. There are plenty of viable superhero characters with mediocre origins.
I would like to see a Lex Luthor that isn’t a sad joke. A genius multi-millionaire industrialist who thinks that a super powered alien that cannot be stopped can be a very real danger, someone who knows the power of the media and has connections everywhere-that’s a Lex Luthor worthy of the franchise.
That was one of the great things about The Incredibles, no tedious origin story.
Me too.
Superman is the absolutely best candidate to skip the origin: everyone knows it. It’s impossible to bring anything new into it (other than to screw it up).
Start the entire thing in medias res and go on from there. Create a new villain, with Luthor there on the sidelines (maybe even having to work with Superman). Or tell the story from Luthor’s point of view. But, Jesus, why waste a half hour telling people what they all know? Hell, the original Action Comics only used a page to the origin before getting on with the story.
The entire movie was an origin story.
This is the only reason I’m even remotely interested in seeing this movie; the Superman franchise has never appealed to me at any level.
if they made a LL today, I expect they’d cast someone like Benedict Cumberbatch, which could be a good thing. Spacey’s LL made Hackman’s look good.