I just saw it. I won’t recap my review - it’s over in Movies You’ve Seen Recently - but the thing thing that bothered me the most is … how come filling Superman’s lungs with metal nanites, or whatever, will kill him, but filling his lungs with anything else (fire, water, radiation, vacuum of space) doesn’t?
What makes you say that filling his lungs with anything else wouldn’t kill him? They establish in the movie that the way that he survives vacuum for many hours is by holding his breath. Presumably, that’s also what he does when underwater, or in the midst of a fire, or whatever.
I didn’t catch that, but that’s the first ret-con I’ve heard for how he does all that stuff.
The nanites would physically fill the space in his lungs so there is no space for oxygen and adjust for any “super strength” his lungs might have to fight it off. It wouldn’t be the same as fire or something.
I finally saw the movie last night. I’m not a comic-book nerd, so a lot of the references to the various comic alternate realities as discussed here went over my head. But, allowing for the “remember, it’s just a movie” nitpicks I generally enjoyed it. The idea of Lex Luthor turning the whole world on Superman by releasing the complete message from his parents revealing that he had been sent to conquer Earth was not something I expected. Why didn’t Superman ever try to decipher the rest of the message himself? (Because it would ruin the plot of the movie). I did like at the end when 4 repeated his line from earlier about playing the recording of his parents because it always soothes him, and instead of the Kryptonian recording it was scenes of his childhood with the Kents.
The only thing that annoyed me with the HBO streaming was that they shrunk the credits to a box in the corner of the screen, and did not enlarge it for the mid-credit and end-credit scenes. Even worse, the rest of the screen was an ad for the Peacemaker series, which I have absolutely no interest in watching.
There’s often a button you can press on the remote control when streaming services shrink or cut end credits short.
I’ll have to try to find it. In the past when a streaming service has done this they’ve automatically expanded the credits screen when there’s a mid- or end-credits scene, so it was annoying when they didn’t do it this time.
I assume he did (I think there might be some dialogue in the movie towards this end) but he just didn’t have the resources Lex had to spend on the project. Lex is willing to spend billions of dollars on the message on the off-chance it has something he can use against Superman. Superman doesn’t have billions, and if he did, he’d probably have something better to spend it on than essentially a vanity project.
One tap of the back button on my TV’s remote restores the full screen and delays the suggestions.
The message was corrupted. The Engineer, being part machine, was able to put together the rest of the message, which Lex had translated. I assume that Superman was able to speak Kryptonian.
He did try. But because he wasn’t a tech wizard like The Engineer, he wasn’t able to.
and @Maus_Magill
True, I hadn’t considered that Superman didn’t have the tech skills available to Lex Luthor. Plus, he probably assumed that the rest of the message was more similar advice on helping the people of Earth.
I can’t remember who floated the notion, but I’m on board with it, that either Luthor hacked the message to have it state the opposite of what it actually said … or the incomplete message is really a warning about General Zod … but we won’t find out about it until the sequel.
James Gunn has flat-out stated that the message is legitimate, and hasn’t been altered or edited by Lex.
Of course, Gunn could be lying. Or he might change his mind somewhere down the line. But odds are that Krypton just sucks in this continuity.
This what I thought, too. I kept expecting the broken part of the message in the middle to be found, “by the way, there’s these other guys…”
There isn’t room for character growth when the plot is your parents want you to be good; no they actually want you to be a jerk, and now you have to wrestle with your conflicting emotions; oh no, they meant for you to be good all along, so the conflict is resolved. It’s better for Superman to resolve the conflict himself.
Assuming that his parents did want him to take over Earth, then clearly that idea existed on Krypton. Why hasn’t any Kryptonian ever traveled to Earth before to take it over? It’s an easy enough journey that a baby can make it, and then they’ll be unstoppable under the yellow sun.
Maybe that was an incomplete message from Gunn.
Gunn allowed Jor-el to come to terms with his parents being assholes in the first film. There’s no need to address the issue again. One..uh, two Kryptonians is enough for this franchise. I’m not going to see the second film if it features Zod; I’ve already seen that film.
Kal-el is Superman’s Kryptonian name; Jor-el was his dad.
The next one is Man of Tomorrow and is a Superman/Lex team up movie. The villain is not announced but I would bet anything it’s Brainiac. So other than maybe Lex needling Supes about it, I don’t think it will come up in the next one.
The one exception is if they go with the Superman TAS origin of Brainiac and have him also come from Krypton (and allow Krypton to die so he could live). Then the message will probably be a plot point again.
IIRC, the movie has a scene where one of the villains asks another “Wait, is that real?” “Yeah, I didn’t even need to change anything”, or something like that. Lex clearly wouldn’t have had any qualms about a forgery, but not even needing to was just gravy, from his point of view.