Batman vs Superman: please explain me how this movie can be any good

[Pheldagriff]

Next year Batman vs Superman will finally release and I sincerily have to ask: how can this movie be any good?
From what I know the basic premise is that Batman is fed up with how all those vigilante superheroes are causing more harm than good and he needs to take down superman.
Here I already have my first concerns. Apart from "man of steel" we have not seen that happening yet.
But it gets worse.
Apparently we also get a sidestory with Batman grieving about a seemingly dead Robin supposedly killed by the Joker. And a Batman origin story.
And this is supposed to be a Superman movie as well. Then there is likely also some kind of Lex Luthor storyline.
And then there is Wonderwoman
And Aquaman.
Am I the only one who yells "OVERCROWDED MOVIE" yet?
This feels like just starting reading comics and reading sidenotes everywhere saying "as depicted in seriesX#Y" without those referenced series existing in the first place.
How should I buy a batman fed up with superman when we havent met that batman yet.
How should i buy batman griefing about robin when we have never met robin.
How should I buy a world fed up with superman after just "man of steel" (ok, that was awful, I CAN buy that)

This movie will make crazy ammounts of many from batman fanboys alone but I can't see this movie be any good. Please enlighten me.
Seriously. I'm not a troll baiting you. I'm genuinly curious.

[Mato]

I don't know if I can tell you that it can be any good. Superman's recent films have been pretty underwhelming and they don't really stick to his concepts.

If I wrote it, the main focus would be media coverage of Batman's vigilantism led to the question of if Superman stands for justice then why does he allow Batman to run free? This leads to Superman going to the "dark world" of Gotham and squaring off against him. Superman brings Batman in but the police force, prosecuting attorney and court to refuse to follow through leaving Batman to walk free and uncharged.

Then, to plug the villains in and to get them to work together. They can find out Lex illegally manipulated the events to keep them busy allowing the Joker to steal some Kyptonite technology. They team up and bring the Joker in with Batman saving Superman's life from kryptonite and then head over to arrest Lex. Who mentions that one day the state or government will come after Batman and Gotham cannot protect him then. Batman can squeeze his quip of being ready for it in and happy ending!

As a credits scene, Wonder Women is seen cleaning up some unknown opponents. General Named steps into the picture and says she needs to meet up with Superman.

That'd cut the story down to four people and has them run through the motions that you'd expect of the characters while creating the working trust between them and giving you the chance to plug a few things in the background for world building. But instead they are going the route of Superman's trial because everyone loves bad legal discussions simplified for the common guy in an action film. And the Flash is supposed to make an appearance too, on top of Aquaman and Cyborg. And it's a partial Batman origin story, and the vs is being played as Batman is going after Superman.

I guess that's because the new Superman is the kind of guy that'll destroy a man's living just because he got handsy with a waitress, or coward out and take the undefended planet killing device leaving the normal human army to take on Superheroes, or fighting people in the middle of a city instead of just punching his opponents upwards or Supe's neck-snapping. Yeah, they've got me sold on Superman needing a power check. :smallwink:

[BeerMug Paladin]

I obviously can't speak for the vast majority of people, but in my opinion "The Avengers" was a vehicle for special effects and that only. And it was widely adored and hugely successful. If the upcoming movie is a vehicle for special effects and the audience is okay with that (and maybe expecting that), then overcrowding is impossible and is probably preferable.

Translation: if all the audience wants to see is a Superman shaped character on screen with a Batman shaped character and lots of special effects, then nothing else will matter.

[GloatingSwine]

I obviously can't speak for the vast majority of people, but in my opinion "The Avengers" was a vehicle for special effects and that only.

That's clearly not true.

It's a vehicle for special effects and Joss Whedon quips.



And yes, it's by Zack Snyder who has ably demonstrated that he doesn't understand Superman and I also suspect fanboys about specifically the Frank Miller version of Batman, so that's what you're going to get.

[Peelee]

I obviously can't speak for the vast majority of people, but in my opinion "The Avengers" was a vehicle for special effects and that only.

THANK YOU. I mean, people gonna like whatever they want, and I'm not gonna mind if they like something i don't, but i just never understood how that movie got so much acclaim behind it.

[The Glyphstone]

The big thing that worked in Avenger's favor, at least as far as its marketing is concerned, was that they did the individual movies first. Iron Man, Thor, Captain American, and (technically) Hulk were all pre-established franchises, so the concept of the Big Team-Up Movie had 3x or 4x the potential audience already prepped and primed to go see it, if only to get more of the hero they had already seen and enjoyed (5x if you add in the Joss Whedon fans who weren't fans of the four above, but will still religiously watch anything he touches).

DC is like some of the people in this thread, they don't understand why Avengers was popular and are making the mistake of trying to duplicate it (big superhero team-up, yay) without having laid the groundwork that Marvel did. Wonder Woman has no real movie fanbase yet, Aquaman has a negative fanbase if anything, this is yet another new and untested Batman, and responses to Man of Steel's Superman were mixed at best. It's a Justice League prequel, not a Batman vs. Superman and it's going to have a lot of problems.

[BannedInSchool]

With Superman now being Batman and Batman being Superman, it's actually Batman vs. Batman or Superman vs. Superman. :smallwink:

[Zmeoaice]

"please explain me how this movie can be any good"

It won't be. The movie will be average at best, horrible at worst, but will still make a billion dollars because BATMAAAAN!!!!

Lex Luthor looks also horrible. This is particularly egregious because Gangsta Joker also looks horrible, which means Warner Bros perhaps squandered 2 of their best and iconic villains.

[The Glyphstone]

"please explain me how this movie can be any good"

It won't be. The movie will be average at best, horrible at worst, but will still make a billion dollars because BATMAAAAN!!!!

Lex Luthor looks also horrible. This is particularly egregious because Gangsta Joker also looks horrible, which means Warner Bros perhaps squandered 2 of their best and iconic villains.

I think you're underestimating just how internally divisive the Batman fanbase actually is. They're hardly legion, and each successive Batman actor from Adam West onward to Christian Bale has splintered them even worse as to which Batmen are good/accurate/worth watching. It'll likely draw most of them in to this movie as a experimental "Batman? Maybe this one will be good' rather than some sort of slavish devotion to the character, but there the pre-existing reputation of Frank Miller's Batman run will be working against him. Batfleck could kill the movie as much as he could save it.

[Zmeoaice]

I think you're underestimating just how internally divisive the Batman fanbase actually is. They're hardly legion, and each successive Batman actor from Adam West onward to Christian Bale has splintered them even worse as to which Batmen are good/accurate/worth watching. It'll likely draw most of them in to this movie as a experimental "Batman? Maybe this one will be good' rather than some sort of slavish devotion to the character, but there the pre-existing reputation of Frank Miller's Batman run will be working against him. Batfleck could kill the movie as much as he could save it.

Batman fanbase =/= general audience.

I also heard that Dark Knight Returns was well received even by anti-Millers.

[McStabbington]

The big thing that worked in Avenger's favor, at least as far as its marketing is concerned, was that they did the individual movies first. Iron Man, Thor, Captain American, and (technically) Hulk were all pre-established franchises, so the concept of the Big Team-Up Movie had 3x or 4x the potential audience already prepped and primed to go see it, if only to get more of the hero they had already seen and enjoyed (5x if you add in the Joss Whedon fans who weren't fans of the four above, but will still religiously watch anything he touches).

DC is like some of the people in this thread, they don't understand why Avengers was popular and are making the mistake of trying to duplicate it (big superhero team-up, yay) without having laid the groundwork that Marvel did. Wonder Woman has no real movie fanbase yet, Aquaman has a negative fanbase if anything, this is yet another new and untested Batman, and responses to Man of Steel's Superman were mixed at best. It's a Justice League prequel, not a Batman vs. Superman and it's going to have a lot of problems.

There we are. The problem can be simplified down pretty simply. Marvel's properties are making money hand over fist, Warner Brothers, which owns DC properties, would like to replicate that success, but unlike Marvel/Disney, the people running DC/Warner Bros. don't really understand why Marvel's properties have had the success that they've had.

No joke: the producer behind Man of Steel and this upcoming Dawn of Justice film got into movie producing with money he saved by being Barbara Streisand's hairdresser. He doesn't actually have any formal training at moviemaking. But he got into the business in the late 80's, immediately hit it big by financing Tim Burton's Batman, and then just kind of wormed his way into control of the DC properties.

Jon Peters would like to think he knows why Marvel has been so successful: it's because audiences love well-known comic book characters. Conveniently, that bodes well for putting Batman and Superman in a film, to say nothing of minimizes Mr. Peters' shortcomings as a student of the superhero genre. But producer-logic doesn't account for actual movie quality as an explanatory factor. Transformers 2 didn't even have a script, yet it made $400+ million at the domestic box office; audiences never would have bought tickets to that steaming pile if they had actually cared about quality of the story.

[Zrak]

I think that also worked in its favor as far as audience appreciation is concerned. Avengers didn't have to do all of the legwork Pheldagriff talks about in the opening post because it had three or four movies to get all that legwork out of the way so they could make a movie that was essentially just special effects and Joss Whedon quips, but managed to wring out as much emotional and thematic resonance from its special effects and quips as it possibly could because most of the characters had at least one full movie of character development before the opening credits rolled.

I think DC is basically caught between an awareness/fear that the superhero film craze isn't going to last forever/very long and only sort of getting what makes the Marvel movies successful, so they're trying to copy the formula that's worked so well for Marvel without putting in the time to lay the groundwork. While it does kind of look like a recipe for disaster, it could still work, since it could end up successfully stumbling backwards into the same successful formula, it's just going to be a matter of emphasizing character over plot and laying a bunch of groundwork for future movies while intentionally leaving dangling threads for later resolution. They only really need to conclusively resolve the Batman/Superman fight, presumably in such a way as to set up intentionally unresolved plotlines for the newly-introduced side characters. So, for example, the Lex Luthor introduction should be a lot like the Thanatos introductions in the marvel movies; this is a dude, we kind of see him hanging around in the background being nefarious, and in other movies see more and more of him being more and more nefarious until we get the idea that he's a big deal. Wonderwoman and Aquaman just have to do things on the sidelines to endear themselves to audiences and make it clear that they're cool.

In other news, I think it's a shame there's been such an intensely vitriolic knee-jerk reaction to the admittedly strange aesthetic choices in the Joker's character design. It's a weird character design, but I've seen Jared Leto give great performances more often than bad ones, and it's a shame to know so many people are going to discount the performance no-matter what it ends up being like because they pre-judged the character's look for not being identical to the pages of their comics.

In final news, the thing I'm most dreading about this movie coming out is the shrill, screeching chorus of people calling it "grimdark."

[Eldan]

Batman fanbase =/= general audience.

I also heard that Dark Knight Returns was well received even by anti-Millers.

DKR is quite good, but from what I've heard from reviews like Linkara's, his later work is, well, abominable.

[GloatingSwine]

So, for example, the Lex Luthor introduction should be a lot like the Thanatos introductions in the marvel movies; this is a dude, we kind of see him hanging around in the background being nefarious, and in other movies see more and more of him being more and more nefarious until we get the idea that he's a big deal.


What works for Thanos is not what works for Luthor.

Thanos can be this big looming background threat because he genuinely is a big enough deal that he can take on a whole team of Avengers all at once and put up a serious fight.

Luthor is not that. He's not personally dangerous or threatening, he's just a man. He's not even a shadowy manipulator, he's a leader, he's able to pull together disparate villains and make them work together to achieve victories they otherwise couldn't. He's not even the shadowy man in the background type either, he's an involved factor.

The real tragedy here is that the role they've got Batman playing in this plot is exactly where they should have put Lex. That's the sort of role his character is born for, the human who resents the power of Superman and doesn't trust him and believes that humanity should fight him and puts his great wealth and resources to that task (and who takes that far too far).

It would also give them a chance to make an actual Superman to contrast with that, to have even a single damn shred of nobility to Clark's character which Man of Steel sorely lacked.

[Traab]

I have to admit to being annoyed. See, at first I thought this was basically bale batman story wise and man of steel superman, so there would be no need to worry about origins and such, just give us an excuse to slap them together. Wonder woman is honestly a bit of a special case. Even those who arent comic book fans know about wonder woman, so its not like there is a huge need for an origin story there either. A few expository flashbacks and the like would be fine for letting us know what type of wonder woman we are dealing with now. It would be a bit crowded, but still work more or less ok, because these are well known characters for the most part, and already have an established backstory from previous films. But with a different batman (not just actor, different back story... again) I agree, that is really going to over complicate things.

[Kitten Champion]

Moviebob did a pretty thorough analysis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSAp-QCHj_A) of The Avengers to explain its overall success as a work of fiction. Suffice it to say, it has a simple plot with a good structure and Whedon can handle group dynamics very well from years of experience.

As to Batman vs. Superman, I don't know, people defend Man of Steel to the death here and I thought it was at best mediocre with some significant and infuriating script issues and overall poor direction. I think the new movie will probably be... better than that, insofar as Batman is more in their wheelhouse and everyone expects Gotham to be ****ed anyways, so it could succeed in that aspect and a few others while doing poorly with the rest and come out in okay territory by critics. A 60% or greater RT score is probably all they need to not have it detract from the bijillions of dollars they really, really, really hope to make off of this.

Seriously, they've had Batman v. Superman posters up in my local theatres since before Age of Ultron came out - I've never seen one from a movie that far in advance of its launch before.

[Zrak]

What works for Thanos is not what works for Luthor.

Thanos can be this big looming background threat because he genuinely is a big enough deal that he can take on a whole team of Avengers all at once and put up a serious fight.

Luthor is not that. He's not personally dangerous or threatening, he's just a man. He's not even a shadowy manipulator, he's a leader, he's able to pull together disparate villains and make them work together to achieve victories they otherwise couldn't. He's not even the shadowy man in the background type either, he's an involved factor.
I don't know. I don't think a character needs to be physically powerful to be a big threat, and while Luthor isn't the relatively 1:1 Thanatos analogue that, say, Darkseid is, he's a big enough and bad enough dude to deserve a multi-movie villain arc. He doesn't have to be shadowy or in put himself in the background in the story to hang out in the background of the narrative; he just has to not be the focus of the movie. Luthor is a great choice to introduce as a long-term threat precisely because he can put enough pieces on the chessboard to tie a number of disparate stories and movies together, and because he has easy thematic ties to the two most central heroes, being Superman's traditional archnemesis and a villainous foil to Batman.


It would also give them a chance to make an actual Superman to contrast with that, to have even a single damn shred of nobility to Clark's character which Man of Steel sorely lacked.
It's fair to not really like that movie, but that's not really a fair criticism of it. Clark does noble stuff pretty constantly throughout the movie.


As to Batman vs. Superman, I don't know, people defend Man of Steel to the death here and I thought it was at best mediocre with some significant and infuriating script issues and overall poor direction.

I end up defending it a lot on the internet despite not even particularly caring for it because the vast majority of the reasons people hate it are ludicrous. Like, I basically lose all ability to take someone seriously as a human being if they call Man of Steel "grimdark."

[Brother Oni]

Transformers 2 didn't even have a script, yet it made $400+ million at the domestic box office; audiences never would have bought tickets to that steaming pile if they had actually cared about quality of the story.

Another film that didn't have a script was the first Ironman movie - they had a general outline, but the actors and the director basically adlibbed their way through each scene (link (http://io9.com/5417310/jeff-bridges-admits-iron-man-movie-had-no-script)).

With a good enough director and actors, you can basically make it up as you go along without negatively impacting the quality of the story.

[McStabbington]

Another film that didn't have a script was the first Ironman movie - they had a general outline, but the actors and the director basically adlibbed their way through each scene (link (http://io9.com/5417310/jeff-bridges-admits-iron-man-movie-had-no-script)).

With a good enough director and actors, you can basically make it up as you go along without negatively impacting the quality of the story.

That might be true . . . but it is also completely beside the point as far as thinking things through from the perspective of a movie producer, unless you want to argue that the improvisational skills of Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. is basically the same as that of Shia Lebouf and Michael Bay.

The point I was actually making was that movie producers really don't think there is any correlation between movie quality and box office results. Plenty of great films bomb, plenty of stinkers are smashes. So it has to be something else.

Which is a big part of the reason you see movies like Man of Steel adopting plot and structural elements wholesale from the Nolan Batman films: those movies sold. So even though the writer really doesn't know why he's using flashback sequences, or what possible character motivation Jonathan Kent could have to walk into a tornado, they used them quite explicitly because those kinds of things had been used in the one series of superhero movies that Warner Bros. has actually managed to sell. Similarly, just like Sony, Warner Bros. plans to ape the Marvel cinematic universe without really understanding or caring how Feige and Whedon rather meticulously set up their universe.

[BlueHerring]

I end up defending it a lot on the internet despite not even particularly caring for it because the vast majority of the reasons people hate it are ludicrous. Like, I basically lose all ability to take someone seriously as a human being if they call Man of Steel "grimdark."While I wouldn't necessarily call Man of Steel "grimdark," I do feel it does wade into the gritty territory for the sole purpose of being a gritty Superman film. If it was gritty because it actually explored the morality of being a literal god among humans, I'd be cool with that. Instead, it just kinda muddled about for a bit, and ended up not being particularly memorable. I'd have to rewatch it to give you more detailed pointers as to why I didn't enjoy the film myself, but I can boil it down.

DC tries too hard to emulate Marvel's success, and they think they can do this by tackling everything with the grim and gritty Batman palette. Look at the different Marvel films. Each has their own tone and aesthetic approach that they shoot for. Iron Man is distinctly different from Captain America: The First Avenger, which is different than Winter Soldier. Daredevil (the TV series) is different in tone than Guardians of the Galaxy, so on and so forth. This allows Marvel to diversify, and capture the attention of people that - while they may like superhero flicks - have certain aesthetic preferences.

I'm not saying that any of these are, on their own, truly great films. As a whole, however, they paint a vibrant picture full of variety. That's part of the reason I enjoy the MCU and the DCAU, and it's why I didn't like Man of Steel.

[Zrak]

While I wouldn't necessarily call Man of Steel "grimdark," I do feel it does wade into the gritty territory for the sole purpose of being a gritty Superman film. If it was gritty because it actually explored the morality of being a literal god among humans, I'd be cool with that. Instead, it just kinda muddled about for a bit, and ended up not being particularly memorable. I'd have to rewatch it to give you more detailed pointers as to why I didn't enjoy the film myself, but I can boil it down.
This is a totally fair, reasonable criticism. I think it really was trying to do all of that, while trying to do a couple other things (namely a pretty doofy riff on the Spiderman with-great-power schtick and the world's most cursory version of an X-Men-style examination of our tendency to exclude and exploit those who aren't like us), and end up just kind of muddling about without ever getting to any of them in a very satisfactory way.


DC tries too hard to emulate Marvel's success, and they think they can do this by tackling everything with the grim and gritty Batman palette.
I think this is the common idea/assumption, but I actually disagree about the Batman palette; I got the impression it was way behind the times with the Marvel palette it was trying to emulate. Both tonally and aesthetically, I think Man of Steel had a lot more in common with the Raimi Spiderman movies and the first couple X-Men movies than the Goyer/Nolan Batman movies. Aesthetically, Superman's suit is weirdly similar to 2002 Spiderman's, not just in color (particularly in the first Raimi film) but in that weird "scaled" texture they both have, while Zod's gang of hoodlums are basically wearing outfits straight out of the "realistic" black leather X-Men costumes. Even tonally, the themes it doesn't-quite juggle were themes the various installments of those franchises tried to juggle to varying success, and it tried even tried to implement some of them in the exact same ways.


Look at the different Marvel films. Each has their own tone and aesthetic approach that they shoot for. Iron Man is distinctly different from Captain America: The First Avenger, which is different than Winter Soldier. Daredevil (the TV series) is different in tone than Guardians of the Galaxy, so on and so forth. This allows Marvel to diversify, and capture the attention of people that - while they may like superhero flicks - have certain aesthetic preferences.
Some of them even basically go off into their own genres; Winter Soldier is basically a '70s conspiracy thriller in a superhero costume.

[The Glyphstone]

Winter Soldier is a political thriller in a superhero suit. Ant-Man is a heist film in a superhero suit. Guardians of the Galaxy is space opera in a superhero suit. That's one of Marvels' strengths, they can take a genre film and make it work in their cinematic universe, drawing in both fans of that genre and fans of their characters.


As for Man of Steel...it might not be grimdark the way we think of the term, but it's certainly the closest a Superman movie has ever come to the term.

[Legato Endless]

Am I the only one who yells "OVERCROWDED MOVIE" yet?

The thing is though, you can't really know that until you've actually seen the film. I've seen a lot of what equates to numerology on the forum where people complain because there's too many elements in a work, without actually taking into account how weighty those elements are. I think part of it is people don't have an accurate idea of how brief a subplot or character can be in a film. They measure rather the emotional impact and tend to gloss over the less flashy emotional parts.

Darth Vader is only in Star Wars for 12 minutes. The title character of Sleeping Beauty gets less than 20 minutes and less than 20 pieces of dialogue. The Joker in Dark Knight gets about 1/5 of the film. Hannibal Lector gets 15 minutes.

It's not pure numbers. It's what gets done with them. Spiderman 3 isn't widely disliked because it had 3 villains. There's plenty of well regarded films that have more. It failed for how it executed these villians, it's structural mess, the extricable love story of the trilogy, and other issues.

Is there a good chance this film will deftly handle all those elements? Well no. Probably not. But it's not sunk just because they exist. It's such a weird critique to make.


I obviously can't speak for the vast majority of people, but in my opinion "The Avengers" was a vehicle for special effects and that only.

That seems rather too simplistic and reductive an assessment, considering the sheer number of scenes in the film that involve people standing around talking with little visual effects to speak of. The direction isn't even particularly deft or excitingly well edited when it's happening.


In final news, the thing I'm most dreading about this movie coming out is the shrill, screeching chorus of people calling it "grimdark."

This is the Playground. Anything that doesn't end on a confidently warm and vaguely optimistic note is basically the dark night of the senses.

[Zrak]

As for Man of Steel...it might not be grimdark the way we think of the term, but it's certainly the closest a Superman movie has ever come to the term.

Really? I think it's Superman Returns by, like, a lot. You know, the one where Superman basically has a nervous breakdown at the ruins of Krypton and disappears for five years, allowing Luthor to get out of prison and abandoning his then-pregnant girlfriend, then comes back to find she won a Pulitzer prize for denouncing him and Luthor is using kryptonian technology to cause massive blackouts (if we want to get into "fridge logic" death tolls. . . ) as part of a plan to kill literally billions of people, which leads to Luthor kidnapping Lois and her five-year-old son (who simultaneously kills his first man and learns his mom has been lying to him about who his real father is a little bit later) and then to a kryptonite-addled Superman being beaten and stabbed after he saves them, leading him to save the world in such a weakened state that it seems as though it's going to cost his own life?

For real, though, right up until a perfunctory (and almost surreally incongruous) happy ending, Superman Returns is abjectly bleak in a way Man of Steel really isn't. I mean, in one movie the little kid with super powers saves a busload of children from downing; in the other, the even littler kid with super powers kills a guy.


This is the Playground. Anything that doesn't end on a confidently warm and vaguely optimistic note is basically the dark night of the senses.

Haha, this is true, although I think it's almost the whole internet, to be honest. I think you made a good point the last time we were both talking about this; because the media of the last decade was much more escapist, particularly the "genre" media, I think it's easy for people to come at things with a much brighter tone as their idea of a baseline, and in the sort of echo chamber of the internet, move from there to the idea that any degree of divergence from that baseline is much bigger than it is.

[Pheldagriff]

Thank you for your well thought-out responses so far. Some faith in humanity has been restored.
Follow-up question: Why are so many people so vividly looking forward to this movie and expecting it to be the Holy Grail of comic-movies?

[Kitten Champion]

Thank you for your well thought-out responses so far. Some faith in humanity has been restored.
Follow-up question: Why are so many people so vividly looking forward to this movie and expecting it to be the Holy Grail of comic-movies?

Well, three reasons -

1. They loved Man of Steel and want to see the sequel.

2. They don't care about Man of Steel and simply are looking forward to a movie starring DC universe's big two - three if you include Wonder Woman - being brought together for a feature live-action film.

3. It's been getting a hell of a lot of attention since it's been in development for years and with that comes a lot of hype - if not positive necessarily, a degree of nervous anticipation. On this forum alone there are threads months apart about every casting decision, media release, and trailer -- this thread included in a sense. WB's putting a lot of eggs in this basket and it's showing.

I don't see reasons 2 and 3 being necessarily a belief the movie will be good, simply a desire to see something that's been promised for such and such a length a time. The 1st group probably has higher expectations and are excited by the trailers and whatnot.

Still, it's really not the level of generally positive buzz that say, Star Wars is getting now.

[Batou1976]

"please explain me how this movie can be any good"



It's DC. It can't. :smallamused:

Yeah.... I don't like DC. :smallfrown:


Seriously, though, I don't think it's impossible for it to be good, but with WB/DC's clear effort to emulate Marvel's success (and my firm belief they don't understand why they've been successful) the odds aren't good. Mostly it looks to me like it's just going to be a mess, with too much thrown into it to drown out the movie's expressly stated "Batman vs Superman" purpose.

[Chives]

In a perfect world, this would be a movie adaptation of Forever Evil. Lex Luthor leads a group of (relative) B-listers against the Justice Lords/Injustice League, an alternate reality group of DC heroes that include MOS superman and Batfleck as Ultraman and Owlman. With the help of Wonder Woman, Shazam and, (sigh) Kal Drogo Aquaman Lex defeats the alternate reality villains only to find out they were running from... Darksiad (Darksied?) Darkseid. Screen time for each new character, fits the massive budget/casting list, and introduces the rest of the league without copying the Marvel Formula.

At this point though, I'm just looking forward to the Rock as Shazam.

[AvatarVecna]

Overcrowding wasn't as much of a problem in Avengers (to the point that most people weren't too phased by it) because it spent...what, 5 movies setting it up? The only really major players that had to be introduced in the film were Black Widow (who got a decent introduction and character establishment) and Hawkeye (who got the shaft, arrow pun intended...but they put all that into Avengers 2, so it's...better now? anyway...); even Nick Fury got a good bit of screen time. Comparatively, the JL movie will have to introduce a brand-new Batman (right after we got a fairly good one for 3 movies), potentially Aquaman (who's got a reputation comparable to Hawkeye's pre-Avengers 2), Wonder Woman (who's never had a live-action movie before), and all they've got to build on is a Superman that has the fandom fairly split on whether he's terrible or just meh.

The Avengers worked because it was the culmination of 5 films of build-up, with character we new and loved; the only one that was even significantly different than when they were introduced was the Hulk (because different actor), but the character remains mostly the same in both personality and capabilities (compared to the Batman, who is supposedly more serious and more powerful than the Nolan Batman), but at least the change with the Hulk was only after one Hulk movie; we sat through two great and one meh Batman movies, only to get this new guy? Why, we loved the other one mostly, why change it?

Oh yeah, because he's got the same problem the original Batman had when DC combined the Batman/Superman universe into the same one: namely, that Batman as presented is not playing on the same power level as Superman by any stretch of the imagination. The hypothetical best Batman could go toe-to-toe with Superman, sure, but the Nolan Batman is presented as having access to vaguely realistic tech (barely super-science), and that's not enough to compete with a guy who's punches result in heavy property damage to multiple city blocks and who can fly faster than bullets (not to mention all the other BS powers). Sure, he might be able to get his hands on some Kryptonite, but that doesn't prevent Superman from frying him from orbit through a few hundred feet of stone (or however deep the Bat-cave is). Without playing on the same level, a world with both Batman and Superman can't work, and that requires either bringing up Batman, or bringing down Superman, both of which weaken the reasons we watch them in the first place. And don't even get me started on all the plot issues caused by bringing the Green Lanterns into the Superman universe! But I digress...

You know what I'd rather see, than a new Batman? What I'd rather see, than Superman going face-to-face with the Dark Knight? What I'd rather see than Aquaman fruitlessly attempting to be relevant in the world of today? I'd rather see a ****ing Wonder Woman movie. And that's not say "because even that would be better", because that implies it's terrible, but not as bad as the other stuff. No, I want to see it because it would be so awesome seeing her finally get a movie. There's been a cartoon movie, but she hasn't hit the big time, and she should; she's not "super-amazing at everything", she's got her flaws...but she's actually legitimately on Superman's level, or at least somewhere close by. It would be a good mix-up of the superhero movie: a superheroine frontlining, rather than playing second/third fiddle to a couple of wannabe tragic heroes...or sixth fiddle, in the case of Black Widow, who has now gotten less overall character development than Hawkeye, a hero who only manages to be relevant because he lives in a world with supervillains like the guy who decided that their blindness-inducing technology gives them the ability to take on Spider-Man and Daredevil in a fight.

Of course, from what I've seen of Supergirl so far, maybe I shouldn't be so excited for DC to try and write an interesting superheroine...

[DiscipleofBob]

I'm glad someone posted a link to the MovieBob review which illustrates why Avengers is more than just a special effects blockbuster and actually a great film in its own right.

I have no faith in DoJ other than it will make piles and piles of money for the same reasons Transformers 2 made piles and piles of money, and only afterward will many fans realize how terrible this MoS cinematic universe actually is, even though there will be a great many people defending MoS and DoJ as the one true superhero movie while Marvel is going onto their third victory lap.

As much as I hated MoS, I do think there's some wasted sequel potential there. Picture this: take the entire DoJ teaser verbatim, same dialogue, same actors, only remove anything bat-related. Instead, have Affleck be playing a different billionaire with every reason to distrust Superman and wanting to see the man of steel bleed: Luthor.

Unlike putting Batman in a power suit to fight Superman which never made any sense, the MoS Supes would at least make Luthor a perfectly justifiable villain, not the creepy awkward redhead Eisenberg seems to be playing. Make him a creepy obsessed fanboy Jimmy Olsen instead.

[Eldan]

Guardians of the Galaxy is space opera in a superhero suit.


I'd say Guardians doesn't even really wear the superhero suit. I mean, no one really has any powers other than "pretty strong" and some small gadets. There also aren't any real superhero costumes. Any of the characters would be right at home in a star-wars knock-off or space action movie.

[Eldan]

Thank you for your well thought-out responses so far. Some faith in humanity has been restored.
Follow-up question: Why are so many people so vividly looking forward to this movie and expecting it to be the Holy Grail of comic-movies?

Is anyone? Because pretty much everyone I've heard talk about it on the net, here and elsewhere thinks it's bad, in a half-joking, half-sad way.

A quick few google searches:
"Batman vs superman will" -> fail, flop, be terrible, Smith
"Batman vs superman is" -> a bad idea, superman evil, going to be terrible, based on

A lot of searches end up like that.

[McStabbington]

I expect it will get the crowds that always go to the movies and some of the people that go specifically to superhero films. This is actually not an insubstantial number of people.

Whether this will push it to commercial viability, possibly? About all I can say is that I will not see it under any circumstances, and hope it tanks. It took Batman and Robin to get us into this mess of creative control at WB; it will take yet another debacle to get out of it.

[AvatarVecna]

I'd say Guardians doesn't even really wear the superhero suit. I mean, no one really has any powers other than "pretty strong" and some small gadets. There also aren't any real superhero costumes. Any of the characters would be right at home in a star-wars knock-off or space action movie.

I want to point out that I went into GotG with no previous experience with the characters, just as I did with Thor. In Thor, I expected a Marvel super-hero movie, and that's what I got. With GotG, I went into it expecting a Marvel version of Suicide Squad, and got Firefly Plus...with Thor stuff going on in the background. I'm not saying it was a bad movie (it was wonderful), but it was a very different kind of movie than the other stuff set in the Marvel universe, but neither the trailers nor my more comic-inclined friends made any attempt to inform me of that. That particular film lacked the power context that helps set the tone of the story in the other Marvel movies; even having no idea about anything Thor related, it was obvious from the first scene that he was playing on a different power level than some of the other Avengers, and that made me like GotG less than it probably deserved.

[DiscipleofBob]

It's worth noting that Man of Steel, a movie about the most iconic superhero in history, was outperformed by a movie where two of the heroes were a talking raccoon and a tree.

And Dawn of Justice is shaping up to be possibly the most expensive movie ever.

[Zrak]

I think pretty much any positive expectations are going to have to rest largely on the backs of a super charismatic cast. On the other hand, one of the the things Man of Steel did best was squander the charisma of Henry Cavill and Amy Adams.

[DiscipleofBob]

I think pretty much any positive expectations are going to have to rest largely on the backs of a super charismatic cast. On the other hand, one of the the things Man of Steel did best was squander the charisma of Henry Cavill and Amy Adams.

As much as I hated MoS, I have to admit that the entire cast was perfect for about the minute they were allowed to actually act.

[TheEmerged]

Seriously, they've had Batman v. Superman posters up in my local theatres since before Age of Ultron came out - I've never seen one from a movie that far in advance of its launch before.

I'll trump you. Not only was there one in the I Am Legend movie... there was one in the Flash TV Series. No, I mean the *original* one, from the 90's. I can't remember if it was the first or second episode but the Barry character is walking past a movie marque that reads "Batman V Superman" - might have been the reverse.

Of course, what they're advertising is essentially that they're running the two films opposite each other, but it's still good for a laugh:smallcool:

[Eldritch Horror]

I think it's going to be quite bad. They're taking two super heroes and putting them in a movie where I think it's safe to assume they wont be doing anything heroic. Remember that scene in Age of Ultron where it shows Captain American hanging off the collapsing bridge just to save that one woman's life? He pulls her up to safety. He does that because he's a hero. He knows he can't save everyone but he feels it is his duty to try and save everyone he can.

What heroic things are going to happen in Batman V Superman? Batman is gonna get all emo and ask Superman if he bleeds in a metallic robot voice and then they're gonna try to punch each other. Oh...

What's the point of that? What does it have to do with these two characters? Why are they making a super hero movie that isn't really about superheroes?

[Anteros]

I think it's going to be quite bad. They're taking two super heroes and putting them in a movie where I think it's safe to assume they wont be doing anything heroic. Remember that scene in Age of Ultron where it shows Captain American hanging off the collapsing bridge just to save that one woman's life? He pulls her up to safety. He does that because he's a hero. He knows he can't save everyone but he feels it is his duty to try and save everyone he can.

What heroic things are going to happen in Batman V Superman? Batman is gonna get all emo and ask Superman if he bleeds in a metallic robot voice and then they're gonna try to punch each other. Oh...

What's the point of that? What does it have to do with these two characters? Why are they making a super hero movie that isn't really about superheroes?

Oh please. About 90% of the first Avengers movie was the conflict between the heroes and everyone loved it.

Heroes fighting each other before they put aside their differences to stop the villain is just about the biggest trope ever.

[Eldritch Horror]

Oh please. About 90% of the first Avengers movie was the conflict between the heroes and everyone loved it.

Heroes fighting each other before they put aside their differences to stop the villain is just about the biggest trope ever.

90%? Hmm, more like 10%-15% I'd say. It was definitely not the focal point of the movie... I mean, it wasn't called "The Avengers: Thor vs. Ironman then The Hulk vs. Thor Some Time Afterwards."

[Zmeoaice]

Oh please. About 90% of the first Avengers movie was the conflict between the heroes and everyone loved it.

The only fights was Cap and Stark vs Thor, which quickly got resolved, and Hulk vs the Helicarrier. And arguably mind controlled Hawkeye.

But that's completely different than 2 heroes who are supposed to actually be paragons of justice (or even just good guys in general) fighting each other after getting to know each other.

[Reddish Mage]

The only fights was Cap and Stark vs Thor, which quickly got resolved, and Hulk vs the Helicarrier. And arguably mind controlled Hawkeye.

But that's completely different than 2 heroes who are supposed to actually be paragons of justice (or even just good guys in general) fighting each other after getting to know each other.

Those are still the most iconic moments of the Avengers movie. We don't know how well Batman and Superman will get to know each other before the fight or how important their fighting will be to the movie. I seriously doubt they won't both be heroes and do heroic things against real villains by the time the curtain closes.

Batman v Superman may be more like the Avengers and less a like a Screwattack Deathbattle then you seem to think.

[Eldritch Horror]

Those are still the most iconic moments of the Avengers movie. We don't know how well Batman and Superman will get to know each other before the fight or how important their fighting will be to the movie. I seriously doubt they won't both be heroes and do heroic things against real villains by the time the curtain closes.

Batman v Superman may be more like the Avengers and less a like a Screwattack Deathbattle then you seem to think.

I agree with you, but my concern based on what we've seen so far and from the very telling title is that all of that will be an after thought. It's not going to be the main focus of the movie and for basically a launching platform for DC's new Marvelesque line of movies I don't think introducing one of their biggest characters as just a big powerful guy who beats people up is a good way to get the audience invested. In fact, I know it isn't because that's basically what happened in Man of Steel where Superman was blowing up sky scrapers.

The Avengers had moments of inter party fighting and those were cool, people liked them. The Avengers also had a movie for each of the characters (mostly) to build up their backstory and get the audience invested in them. That's what made the inter party conflict work. The Audience had a dog in the fight. People who loved any one particular character from their own stand alone movies got to see them interact with the others and even got some brief glimpses of what it was like to see them go head to head, if only briefly. Now, the new Captain America is the Civil War arch and everyone will get to see all those cool moments where their favorite characters were pitted against each other but in an entire movie! That seems like a great idea but only because the audience cares already. Jumping into that with both feet without first establishing who the characters are (I'm sure they'll try and give us 20 minutes of backstory on this Batman) isn't going to have the same impact.

[Anteros]

The parts where they weren't actively fighting they were still bickering like children rather than being heroic. Until the last 10 minutes. That was like, the entire plot.

[Drascin]

As much as I hated MoS, I have to admit that the entire cast was perfect for about the minute they were allowed to actually act.

I keep getting the impression that Cavill would do a much better Superman by simply acting as himself than by following the terrible script he was given.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Jumping into that with both feet without first establishing who the characters are isn't going to have the same impact.

You know, I find it rather confusing that multiple people consider 'establishing who the characters are' as critically important. It's definitely one approach to writing and there's nothing wrong with it, but that is not the only option.

Characters do things. Decisions that characters make inform us of who they are. We eventually learn who the character is over the course of the plot. If the character has little to no impact on the real plot, then learning a great deal about them is going to be impossible and just doesn't matter at all. That might even mean certain characters shouldn't get a lot of depth to them. Otherwise, you get an unfocused mess.

If I were in charge of writing this movie, I would not spend one moment worrying about introducing characters. Only showing how the plot begins and how the characters act with situations relevant to that plot. And guess what? Some people can fly or shoot lasers. That's just what life is like in this universe. The only criteria I'd give those things is that a character must use the power before the halfway point in the movie if they're going to use it in the last half. But that has nothing to do with a character introduction. That's Checkov's gun.

Of course, when there's no plot and no real decisions to be made, this sort of nuanced writing approach is impossible.

[DiscipleofBob]

The most iconic moments of the Avengers movie weren't when the heroes were fighting, or pointlessly arguing. The most iconic moments are when everyone comes together to face the enemy. What's the one scene everyone pictures with the Avengers movie? All six Avengers, standing back to back, facing an alien horde in the heart of New York City.

The entire point of Avengers, as well as most decent superhero team plots, is the best of the best coming together despite different backgrounds, ideals, and abilities to face a greater threat than any one of them could have handled alone.

The point of DC's movies (at least from MoS and their advertising so far) is that their so-called superheroes cause mass destruction, utterly fail to save the people they're supposed to protect with no consequences, and will fight to the death at the first opportunity because they think their fans would rather see the heroes fight each other rather than any actual villain.

[lord_khaine]

The point of DC's movies (at least from MoS and their advertising so far) is that their so-called superheroes cause mass destruction, utterly fail to save the people they're supposed to protect with no consequences, and will fight to the death at the first opportunity because they think their fans would rather see the heroes fight each other rather than any actual villain.

Thats honestly the main thing i think MoS gets undeserved flak for.
Its like a cop getting jumped by 3 thugs in a chinastore, and people then flaming him for things getting broken... :smallannoyed:

[Chen]

Thats honestly the main thing i think MoS gets undeserved flak for.
Its like a cop getting jumped by 3 thugs in a chinastore, and people then flaming him for things getting broken... :smallannoyed:

The battle of new york in the Avengers has plenty of wanton destruction as well. I seem to vividly recall one of those giant dragon things falling from the sky and just crushing a building after it was killed.

[Anteros]

The most iconic moments of the Avengers movie weren't when the heroes were fighting, or pointlessly arguing. The most iconic moments are when everyone comes together to face the enemy. What's the one scene everyone pictures with the Avengers movie? All six Avengers, standing back to back, facing an alien horde in the heart of New York City.

The entire point of Avengers, as well as most decent superhero team plots, is the best of the best coming together despite different backgrounds, ideals, and abilities to face a greater threat than any one of them could have handled alone.

The point of DC's movies (at least from MoS and their advertising so far) is that their so-called superheroes cause mass destruction, utterly fail to save the people they're supposed to protect with no consequences, and will fight to the death at the first opportunity because they think their fans would rather see the heroes fight each other rather than any actual villain.

And why do you just assume BvsS will just skip over this incredibly obvious plot point?

[DiscipleofBob]

The battle of new york in the Avengers has plenty of wanton destruction as well. I seem to vividly recall one of those giant dragon things falling from the sky and just crushing a building after it was killed.

Here's the difference:

The Avengers actually do what they can to minimize casualties and keep the battle contained, despite fighting a very large alien army in the heart of the city. Whenever possible, they go out of their way to help civilians. In Age of Ultron, they made a huge deal of going out of their way to evacuate the city BEFORE punching the evil robot.

Superman, on the other hand, waits for the bad guys' unnecessarily added to the movie world-destroying machine to separate into two parts, watches as one part travels across the world and fires up, then of the two, goes after the one that's hitting nothing but ocean instead of the one that's leveling a city. Afterward, he admittedly tries to move the fight between him and Zod out of Metropolis but completely fails in doing so, causing as much destruction as possible in the meantime, before being forced to snap the villain's neck and pretending to care. After that he goes to ground zero of the city reduced to a gray, ashy crater, with thousands, if not millions dead or dying, where he could AT LEAST be trying to save whoevers left, and instead has a victory make out session with Lois. Hooray! The city's been completely leveled and all these people died horribly! Let's celebrate!

Scorecard: Avengers minimized casualties and infrastructure damage both movies while capturing the villain the first time and keeping the evil AI from leaving any backups anywhere (according to the movie at least). Avengers are seen as heroes, though there are people who are still afraid and see them as threats. Avengers make efforts to do better in later team ups.

Superman, leveled Metropolis, killed ALL of the aliens without anyone just stopped or captured, probably the largest death toll from a single event in the history of the world. Movie apparently doesn't care and goes on as if nothing happened.

Compare to Superman Returns, where Brandon Routh takes time out to stop the damage from the consequences of Luthor's scheme before going to take on the main bad guy.


And why do you just assume BvsS will just skip over this incredibly obvious plot point?

Mostly because they glossed over it in MoS already, but it shouldn't even be a plot point. If there's one character in all of fiction who should be able to actually succeed and save the day, it's Superman. But DC movies don't think superheroes should be either super or heroic. Snyder even tried to criticize Age of Ultron because the team actually took steps to evacuate the city and minimize casualties.

[Infernally Clay]

That was a pretty apparent dig at Man of Steel actually. :smalltongue:

Superman and Batman will team up, at any rate. We know Lex is the actual villain and that he's been experimenting with Zod's corpse somehow. We also know Wonder Woman gets involved, probably because Superman and Batman aren't enough by themselves to beat whatever Lex has planned for them.

[lord_khaine]

Superman, leveled Metropolis, killed ALL of the aliens without anyone just stopped or captured, probably the largest death toll from a single event in the history of the world. Movie apparently doesn't care and goes on as if nothing happened.

Actually that was Zod whose actions kinda leveled Metropolis, the least you could is to try and tell them apart :smalltongue:

And honestly, how on earth would you have stopped/captured any of the aliens? :smallconfused:
Each of them are about as strong as superman, and all were trained soldiers, ready to die for their cause.

[DiscipleofBob]

Actually that was Zod whose actions kinda leveled Metropolis, the least you could is to try and tell them apart :smalltongue:

In a better Superman story, Superman would have stopped Zod from destroying Metropolis, or at the very least not pretended that the completely demolished city and the city of dead people was somehow a victory.


And honestly, how on earth would you have stopped/captured any of the aliens? :smallconfused:
Each of them are about as strong as superman, and all were trained soldiers, ready to die for their cause.

And yet in countless other versions of the same story in the comics, movies, and television, the heroes find a way. Whether it's diplomacy, some way to depower them (like say, sticking them in whatever the not-Kryptonite was), Phantom Zoning them, finding a prison that can hold them, but because the writers don't understand how to actually write a superhero story, they wrote themselves into a corner and were supposed to pretend snapping Zod's neck and the world's most incompetent family at running away wasn't a contrived way to settle the plot.

EDIT: I'm not in a position to link to it now, but see How Man of Steel Should Have Ended.

[AvatarVecna]

I'm not in a position to link to it now, but see How Man of Steel Should Have Ended.

I got you covered, bro. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjSNLmb0Ndw)

EDIT: Bonus link HISHE'ing the trailer. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQPYAhcEhlo)

EDIT 2: And the even better reason for the "BvsS" fight. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QFPuyDrIIk)

[theNater]

Oh please. About 90% of the first Avengers movie was the conflict between the heroes and everyone loved it.
The Avengers was good at thematically demonstrating that heroes fighting was bad, and heroes working together was good. Cap fights Loki alone, he's badly outmatched. Iron Man shows up to help, Loki is immediately beaten. Thor and Iron Man fight, a forest falls down. The heroes get in a big argument, there's an explosion on the helicarrier. Iron Man and Cap work together, the helicarrier recovers. And so on. No, they're not all cause and effect, but the filmmakers associate them in order to build a visceral sense of what they want to say.

I don't trust the creators of BvS:DoJ to be able to do that as cleanly.


Thats honestly the main thing i think MoS gets undeserved flak for.
Its like a cop getting jumped by 3 thugs in a chinastore, and people then flaming him for things getting broken... :smallannoyed:
Given the presence of people in Metropolis, it was more like a cop getting shot at on a crowded street and firing back.


The battle of new york in the Avengers has plenty of wanton destruction as well.
That depends on one's threshold for "plenty". There was significantly more damage shown in MoS than in Avengers.

[Tyndmyr]

Actually that was Zod whose actions kinda leveled Metropolis, the least you could is to try and tell them apart :smalltongue:

And honestly, how on earth would you have stopped/captured any of the aliens? :smallconfused:
Each of them are about as strong as superman, and all were trained soldiers, ready to die for their cause.

Nah, Supes straight up punches Zod into a skyscraper at one point. Not only is he demonstrating apathy towards the fate of the citizenry, he's actively contributing himself.

On the flip side, in Avengers, the heroes are at least trying to protect the random folk. Not perfectly, sure, but if you don't at least try, you're not much of a hero.

Age of Ultron was pretty much just flaunting the crap out of the differences here.


The parts where they weren't actively fighting they were still bickering like children rather than being heroic. Until the last 10 minutes. That was like, the entire plot.

Yeah, if you've read the old avengers comics, this should not come as a surprise. It's par for the team.

But bickering doesn't make one a villain. Destroying people's lives and homes and appearing to not even give a **** about it...ya. That's pretty evil. AoS Supes has basically taken on the role of Luthor in the preceding film.

[L Space]

One of the things I picked up on when watching the trailer was that it looked like Bruce Wayne was there during the events of MoS and that one of buildings destroyed may have been Wayne Enterprise building (this is more of an assumption than an outright observation). There is the scene where Bruce is running down the street while buildings are collapsing and then transitions to him holding a body among the wreckage. If true it gives him a bit more of a personal reason for trying to bring Supes down and could lead to interesting character development for both Bats and Supes. Granted this is a Snyder movie so I doubt that will actually happen, but the possibility is still there. That being said, I still doubt that the movie is going to be that good, but I still have some hope that it might at least be serviceable.

Oh and I think Jessie Eisenberg as Lex Luthor is a horrible, horrible casting choice.

[Zmeoaice]

I haven't seen the Social Network but I heard Jesse was good in it. However what I've seen from the trailers, I agree he's doing a horrible job.

[SaintRidley]

I don't expect it to be good. In fact, I'm going to pass on it hard.

If the Wonder Woman film that spins out of this is a straight adaptation of The Hiketeia, I will overlook this movie and be very, very happy.

[Metahuman1]

There is a rumor that Ben Aflicek (Yes I think I miss spelled his name.), after being brought on board, saw the script, threw an absolute conniption fit at how god awful it was, and demanded of WB executives to be put in charge of the project. Which they granted, and the then took over the movie set completely.


This is literally the only prayer this movie has of being passably decent, let alone good.

Everyone else in charge of this project is either contemptuous of comics and there fans, actively maliciously hates comics and there fans, doesn't even begin to GET comics and there fans, or is freaking coocoo for coco-puffs and a flaming bigot and lazy as can be to boot (I'm looking at you for that last one Frank Miller.).

And there going to ruin this movie, Wonder Woman, Any stand alone Batman or Superman projects coming down the line, Cyborg, Flash, and Probably Green Lantern. They MIGHT also ruin Aquaman, but that one I have a small amount of hope for since he NEEDS to perma-kill the "All the powers of sponge-bob"/"Superfriends Image." so dead it can't be recalled anyway. So, Dark and grim and gritty might be just the ticket. Oh, and Suicide Squad. That's always been a dark book and dark premise so that might actually be good.


Everything else I have no hope for.

[DiscipleofBob]

Remember that once upon a time we nearly had a standalone Wonder Woman movie directed by Joss Whedon.

[Eldritch Horror]

Remember that once upon a time we nearly had a standalone Wonder Woman movie directed by Joss Whedon.

We also almost had a Superman movie starring Nicholas Cage where Brainiac wrassled polar bears. Doesn't mean it would have been good.

[Metahuman1]

On the flip side, Nic cage did not go on to do good or successful things with super hero property's.

Joss Wheadon on the other hand.

[Legato Endless]

I really doubt it Metahuman.

Affleck is a much better writer-director than Snyder. That makes for an enticing idea. But I really doubt it. WB was pretty set initially on having Snyder give a unified vision to all this. That's not usually the kind of thing studios change course on just because an expert disagrees.

[Metahuman1]

It probably is. Which would tend to be a bad sign of DC movies for some time to come in that, well, there gonna suck.

[Peelee]

Oh please. About 90% of the first Avengers movie was the conflict between the heroes and everyone loved it.

"Everyone."

[Kyberwulf]

I hate how people complain about Man of Steel. I don't particularly care for the movie.

I don't see how people can complain about Superman's powers. How omnipotent he is supposedly.
Man of Steel was an origin movie. I wouldn't expect him to have control of his powers. I wouldn't expect him to know how to save everyone. He wasn't trained to do anything. He just moved from place to place. All his life he was told to hide his powers, not to expose himself.

Then he is thrown up against 3 people that have the exact save power set as him, and they are trained soldiers hellbent on destroying a planet.

Let me restate that. He had no training, none. He wondered the world trying to hide his abilities.

I know I might be the only one in this camp. I liked the story. It wasn't handled the greatest. I didn't realize it at the time. I like that for an origin story, superman essentially "failed". That never really happens. It was kind of funny, for a movie that "Sucked" People sure have a visceral reaction to it.

Yeah Metropolis got destroyed, and a lot of people got killed. But he SAVED the WORLD.
Yeah Metropolis got destroyed, and a lot of people got killed, But he SAVED HUMANITY from being destroyed to save his OWN SPECIES.

Let me restate that, He didn't save his own species to basically save a bunch of monkeys.

Now, to say this. He failed. Man of Steel is about superman failing. That isn't a bad thing. It also serves to show WHY he does things that he does, or well it could depending on how the series will go. He doesn't kill, which I don't think that was ever one of his "things." Before it was always some morally High ground reason. Now he has a reason not too. He knows what it is to kill someone. He knows there could be a better way.
He is always saving Metropolis. Over the rest of the world he seems to prioritize Metropolis over every other city. Now he has a reason. He is trying to atone for a past mistake.

Being a Hero, from nothing is easy. Just having superpowers, going around saving people is easy. It's one of the reasons Superman is failing as a character now a days. It's to easy. People say it's just Dc trying to copy Nolan's Dark Knight. Trying to make Superman darker. I think it's them trying to make him more real. Trying to give him motivations. I admit I was like that at first. Then I rewatched the Reeve's Superman. I liked it, but realized how cartoon-y the story was. How fairy tail-ish the story was.

I don't know how to say this. I don't like how Disney the Marvel universe has become. Everything always works out in the end. Sure buildings get destroyed, but people are always safe. What makes someone a hero isn't the amount of Property damage they prevent or how many lives they didn't save. It's what happens to them as a person and emotionally. Their ability to keep doing hero stuff, despite their losses.

Sure Superman failed. Metropolis got destroyed. A lot of people died. In the end he hugged Lois, and sat there in defeat. But you know what. The world was able to move on. It as able to move on.



Just for kicks though, Lets go back to the Cop thug shoot out thing. This was more like a bomb is in the city, the goons have the detonator and are going to push the button. The cops aren't around, so some guy who happens to have found a grenade has one choice. He has to make it now. Throw the grenade and take out the goons, but take out innocent people, and save the city. Or let the goons push the button and destroy the WHOLE CITY including the area they are in now, and save the innocents around him for like two seconds. Is the guy a hero? No, but he did make the choice he had to, to save the city.

I think Batman Vs Superman could be a good movie. No in the childish way of who would win in a fistfight. I don't think that was ever really the point of the original story. I think it's move of an Ideal vs and Ideal. If they do that right. It should be a good movie.

Do I think they need to make an origin story for all the characters in the movie? No. I think everyone knows the Origin story more or less for both the major players. Do I think there are going to be to many people in the movie? No. They aren't going to be major players in the movie itself, to the extent the characters in Avengers, were in Avengers. I think they are gonna be mostly just cameos.

I also think this is a good way to do the movies. Instead of of Copying Marvel. DC can just show you what happened, and build the hype off that. It already is working. People are wondering what happen to Robin. Speculating on how that happened. If they decided to that movie. Look at what that has already generated. Also, it would work on a different level. When watching that movie, knowing what you know. Then you know will always wonder, is this the moment Robin dies? Like how it kind of worked in The Amazing Spiderman. Everyone was wondering when Gwen would die.

[GloatingSwine]

Man of Steel was an origin movie. I wouldn't expect him to have control of his powers. I wouldn't expect him to know how to save everyone. He wasn't trained to do anything. He just moved from place to place. All his life he was told to hide his powers, not to expose himself.


That's exactly why it wasn't a Superman origin story.

That is not the upbringing and life which will create the character of Superman as he is recognisable from basically any other fiction.

And so it didn't.

People who criticise the movie don't expect him to save everyone, they expect him to try.

To actually act like Superman.

He doesn't.

It's a bad Superman film, it's not a logical origin for the character of Superman. And because it's structurally crippled by apparently needing to tell the fall of Krypton not once but twice, at length, it's also not a very good film all round.

[Devonix]

One of the things we hate is him being forced into the role of Superman. It's supposed to be a choice, not something where it's either be Superman or we take over and kill people.

Another thing is the idea of that whole " First time out" idea. Superman is Superman because he didn't just decide one day and then become Superman without practice. That would be irresponsible of him and so it's not what he does.

Superman makes the decision, then he travels the world not being a hobo, he travels the world training his abilities and his mind so that when he's ready to be a hero, stuff like Man of Steel doesn't happen. That's how it's always been done.

[MLai]

I hate how people complain about Man of Steel. I don't particularly care for the movie. [...]
Everything you said would have made a decent movie, but it all happened in your head it never happened onscreen. Onscreen, Supes didn't try to save ppl, fail, and then angst about it. No, in the climactic final battle... he didn't try, full stop.

And then did he angst about the destruction of a city, which meta-speaking was giving an entire nation of viewers grim flashbacks to real world events? Nope, he celebrated in the smoking crater while the asbestos-dust-coated mortal plebs went about in the streets helping each other, and then he got a job in that same city with a spotless suit and a bright smile on his face. Talk about dissonance; does the director even live in this country, or is he some foreign moviemaker in which case I can understand the utter psychological disconnect? It's directors like him who give a bad name to Hollywood "intellectuals".


At this point though, I'm just looking forward to the Rock as Shazam.
The Rock is going to be Black Adam, not Shazam.

[Legato Endless]

I think part of the issue is, (and I'm not the most informed about the character admittedly)I don't think most people are willing to accept having Superman forged in a horrific scenario like this one. It's not organic to most people's conception of the character. To take a counterpoint to Devonix, part of why there's a disconnect is Superman shouldn't need this experience because he didn't choose to be what he is. I'm not saying he didn't work, or that he didn't have to make his choices, but he's somewhat limited in what and more importantly how he struggles with life.

But whereas Batman is a child of circumstance, Clark isn't. There's an inherent greatness the character is supposed to exude. He's more than the average from day to day. It's in his name. Even in alternet timelines where things change, the character is still usually some monument to 19-20th century conceptions of greatness. He might end up perverting some of it, but the source is still there even if twisted, like in Red Son or the less than competently written Gods among us. Yeah, there's probably exceptions, but they aren't the default as far as I know.

I didnt really see that drive to excel or inspire in the film, which seems to be a big draw for the character's appeal. The character has a fundamental core of assured decency that's only shaken in exceptional scenarios. Seeing him constantly struggle with it is odd. It's like watching a Spider-man origin where Peter isn't endowed with a massive sense of guilt and duty from Uncle Bens death.

[jidasfire]

The movie could be good, theoretically, but it won't be. It's a very strong case of too many cooks, too much micromanaging, and too much attempt at playing catch-up with Marvel rather than trying to tell a good story.

As for the Man of Steel problems, I'll say this. The story did indeed put Superman in a situation he couldn't have won or done well in. So in that sense, it's not exactly fair to call him on failing, however calamitously he did. However, it is also true that the story is a work of fiction, which was written by someone, and could have been anything that person wanted. The fact that they chose to have a novice Superman be put up against an army of his own kind, long before even bothering to establish that he's something special or worth having around, and then show he's not ready for the first real thing he faces, is essentially not playing fair with the character. They could have done a story about Superman protecting people from natural disasters, or corrupt industrialists, or heck, even Intergang (I wish!), and shown that he wins most often not with just his muscle, but his brain, and his heart. But instead, they chose to have his first outing be an ugly, unearned and unsatisfying slugfest, which basically forces us to ask why we want this guy around at all. I mean, if there were no Superman, Zod wouldn't have shown up, right? Even with Supes stopping him, it's a net loss for the world. That is a bad, careless precedent to set when you're trying to make people love these characters, and from what I've seen, they're going to double down in the next movie. I doubt very much I'll see it.

[BannedInSchool]

I didn't really mind the idea of pre-Superman Clark just being a dude with powers and still helping people but being afraid of being found out to be so different in a world without superhero comics, but pretty much everything with Pa Kent just didn't work for me. Just blargh. I'm just going to pretend he didn't exist. :smalltongue: But let's say theoretically we have BvS incorporating "dude with powers" falling into a poor direction with backing up authority regardless of rightness, a previously used Superman gone bad scenario, and Bats smacking some sense of heroicness into him to make him Supes more properly. Eh, it's a thought.

[Kyberwulf]

He may not have tried to save people, because he was trying to stop a doomsday device. That would have taken out the world. He was going up against people that have the same power as him and where better trained. Even if he had spent 10 seasons in Smallville. People keep talking about how he let a city be destroyed. Seem to be forgetting that the whole world was in jeopardy. Once city versus the whole world. Again, people seem to hate that he is an omnipotent being. Yet, when he is put in a situation where he is pretty much a normal guy facing incredible odds. We fault him for not having the perfect outcome. We fault him for not having the perfect father, who gives out perfect sage advice. In the end, that's the sad thing. We want Superman to be perfect, to have no foibles. Yet when we are given that. We complain that he wasn't perfect, or has foibles.

I admit the movie wasn't the greatest movie ever made. It also, wasn't NEARLY half as bad as people make it out to be. People hate on this movie, just cause everyone else is hating on the movie. When I watched this movie, I went in with both the preconceived notion on Superman and what other people said about this movie. This Superman was a hard pill to swallow, but in the end. I didn't mind it so much. However, it wasn't nearly as dark and depressing as people made it out to be. It was a more realistic take on him, I think.

[Kitten Champion]

And then did he angst about the destruction of a city, which meta-speaking was giving an entire nation of viewers grim flashbacks to real world events? Nope, he celebrated in the smoking crater while the asbestos-dust-coated mortal plebs went about in the streets helping each other, and then he got a job in that same city with a spotless suit and a bright smile on his face. Talk about dissonance; does the director even live in this country, or is he some foreign moviemaker in which case I can understand the utter psychological disconnect? It's directors like him who give a bad name to Hollywood "intellectuals".

The ground-zero Lois Lane kiss was one of the most ill-considered moments in recent cinematic history. It's like they took the studio notes saying there had to be some romance between the two characters and, given all the options, choose the worst one I could conceive of on my worst and least imaginative day.


I think part of the issue is, (and I'm not the most informed about the character admittedly)I don't think most people are willing to accept having Superman forged in a horrific scenario like this one. It's not organic to most people's conception of the character. To take a counterpoint to Devonix, part of why there's a disconnect is Superman shouldn't need this experience because he didn't choose to be what he is. I'm not saying he didn't work, or that he didn't have to make his choices, but he's somewhat limited in what and more importantly how he struggles with life.

But whereas Batman is a child of circumstance, Clark isn't. There's an inherent greatness the character is supposed to exude. He's more than the average from day to day. It's in his name. Even in alternet timelines where things change, the character is still usually some monument to 19-20th century conceptions of greatness. He might end up perverting some of it, but the source is still there even if twisted, like in Red Son or the less than competently written Gods among us. Yeah, there's probably exceptions, but they aren't the default as far as I know.

I didnt really see that drive to excel or inspire in the film, which seems to be a big draw for the character's appeal. The character has a fundamental core of assured decency that's only shaken in exceptional scenarios. Seeing him constantly struggle with it is odd. It's like watching a Spider-man origin where Peter isn't endowed with a massive sense of guilt and duty from Uncle Bens death.

To quote

As Jor-El says in Man Of Steel, Superman represents “an ideal to strive toward.” But if Man Of Steel’s Superman is the ideal humanity needs to strive toward, then humanity is royally ****ed.

[Zrak]

Aside from all the logistical factors limiting Clark's ability to move the fight/directly save civilians/whatever, I think the main problem with that criticism is that it's rarely, if ever, made about other urban fight scenes in other Superman media, including those that result in extensive urban damage. For example, you never really hear the complaint that the Justice League cartoon is grimdark despair-wallowing murder porn with a cast of superpowered unheroes because it's had at least one fight in a city where a lot of buildings got blown up.

Same with the weird "9/11 imagery" complaints that don't get made when other movies feature similar types and levels of carnage set in actual fictional New Yorks, not a fictional city that is somewhat similar to New York.

EDIT: I don't think the Man of Steel Clark is such a bad ideal to strive for. He pretty consistently chooses to believe in the goodness of others and make the leap of faith to trust in that goodness and, when faced with hard choices, he almost always makes the choice that puts others before himself. I mean, really, he's a pretty good dude. He's a basically decent guy who is exceptional because he remains basically decent not only when it isn't convenient, or when the people to whom he's being basically decent fear or even seem to hate him just for who he is, but even in the face of seemingly certain death.

[McStabbington]

That's exactly why it wasn't a Superman origin story.

That is not the upbringing and life which will create the character of Superman as he is recognisable from basically any other fiction.

And so it didn't.

People who criticise the movie don't expect him to save everyone, they expect him to try.

To actually act like Superman.

He doesn't.

It's a bad Superman film, it's not a logical origin for the character of Superman. And because it's structurally crippled by apparently needing to tell the fall of Krypton not once but twice, at length, it's also not a very good film all round.

Not trying to nitpick, as we both agree fully in our assessment of the character, but I wanted to add on because I think the issue is even more fundamental than you suggest.

For the moment, step back for a moment and pretend that none of us know who this Superman guy is or why we should care. Pretend this is some random dude named Clark Kent who is secretly cosmically-powered in a manner similar to any other generic superhero from the comic book template.

Done that? Okay, now ask yourself one question: why does this guy named Clark Kent want to save humanity if it becomes threatened?

Go ahead, try and give me one scene, one bit of action, or dialogue, or shot specifically from this movie that tells you why this dude named Clark is in the business of superhero work. I'll wait.

It isn't his family. Boy howdy, is it not his family. His father not only spent every last moment telling this kid "Don't reveal yourself," not only incomprehensibly ran into the path of an incoming tornado and died rather than accept his son's help, but also utterly failed to step in to protect his child when Clark was being bullied, then offered a confused, meandering explanation why Clark shouldn't have defended himself.

It wasn't the other people. It was a running theme in the story that people reacted with fear and confusion after Clark does them a favor like saving their children from drowning.

So why does this Clark feel any connection to people that makes them worth saving if a Zod should come along? Why does this guy want what he wants?

And the only real answer is: well, c'mon, it's Superman.

That is why things like the neck snap, or the failure to save people in Metropolis, or the need to make out with Lois rather than, say, dig survivors out of the rubble grates so much. It has absolutely nothing to do with me just not being willing to accept another version of Superman, or being willing to accept that this Superman is completely unprepared for handling another Omega-level supervillain. It's that this movie gives me absolutely no reason other than callbacks to other, better stories about Superman to make me care about this Clark, and then yanks the rug out from under me when I expect, quite reasonably, that they carry through with those expectations. It's that this Clark doesn't learn, doesn't grow,doesn't develop save in the most superficial ways, because he quite literally has no rational justification for doing what he does. The closest this Clark ever comes to character development is reacting the exact same way to different scales of threats: first he selflessly saves a bus, then acts bumbling and conflicted, then he selflessly saves an oil rig and then acts bumbling and conflicted, then he selflessly saves the world and acts bumbling and conflicted. That. Is. Not. A. Character. Arc.

And I do not accept that the writers can have it both ways. If you want to introduce a newer, grittier Supes? Fine. Give me a reason why I should still care about him beyond brand loyalty. You want tell a story that leans on the established character? Fine. Don't break the pre-established rules. And above all else, don't halvsie it and expect me to praise the result.

[DiscipleofBob]

Aside from all the logistical factors limiting Clark's ability to move the fight/directly save civilians/whatever, I think the main problem with that criticism is that it's rarely, if ever, made about other urban fight scenes in other Superman media, including those that result in extensive urban damage. For example, you never really hear the complaint that the Justice League cartoon is grimdark despair-wallowing murder porn with a cast of superpowered unheroes because it's had at least one fight in a city where a lot of buildings got blown up.

Consider that in the Superman cartoon and other installments of the Timmverse, as well as other Superman stories, Superman frequently goes out of his way to save civilians and prevent disasters caused by the bad guys, often before taking the villains on themselves.

Also consider that a recurring theme throughout Justice League and especially Justice League Unlimited was for the superheroes to team up specifically so that while one hero is taking on the bad guy another can look out for civilians. There's an entire episode about B-list heroes Booster Gold and Elongated Man being constantly stuck on evacuation duty.

Superheroes save the day. That's what they do. That's the base model for which an entire genre has been built on for nearly a century, arguably more. The fact that a city is destroyed and its inhabitants mass-slaughtered on Superman's watch isn't by itself bad writing, but Superman's reaction, or lack thereof, in a story that's supposed to be about Superman, the one superhero who should be capable of saving everyone. Bad writing, poor decisions, and Superman constantly juggling idiot balls cause Metropolis to get destroyed and Superman to not care, not simply "Zod was too powerful." Because he wasn't. He was severely weakened until Clark told him how to adjust to Earth's atmosphere.

[Devonix]

Aside from all the logistical factors limiting Clark's ability to move the fight/directly save civilians/whatever, I think the main problem with that criticism is that it's rarely, if ever, made about other urban fight scenes in other Superman media, including those that result in extensive urban damage. For example, you never really hear the complaint that the Justice League cartoon is grimdark despair-wallowing murder porn with a cast of superpowered unheroes because it's had at least one fight in a city where a lot of buildings got blown up.

Same with the weird "9/11 imagery" complaints that don't get made when other movies feature similar types and levels of carnage set in actual fictional New Yorks, not a fictional city that is somewhat similar to New York.

EDIT: I don't think the Man of Steel Clark is such a bad ideal to strive for. He pretty consistently chooses to believe in the goodness of others and make the leap of faith to trust in that goodness and, when faced with hard choices, he almost always makes the choice that puts others before himself. I mean, really, he's a pretty good dude. He's a basically decent guy who is exceptional because he remains basically decent not only when it isn't convenient, or when the people to whom he's being basically decent fear or even seem to hate him just for who he is, but even in the face of seemingly certain death.

I can honestly only recall a single episode of Justice League where they didn't care as much about property damage. IE the fight with Darkseid and they flat out adress why Supes does so with his World of Cardboard speech.

Throughout the series they constantly show a care for the civilians and have people running interfearence to keep the normal folks safe.

[Zrak]

Consider that in the Superman cartoon and other installments of the Timmverse, as well as other Superman stories, Superman frequently goes out of his way to save civilians and prevent disasters caused by the bad guys, often before taking the villains on themselves.
Prevent disasters like world destruction, the disaster he prevents in the movie in question?


The fact that a city is destroyed and its inhabitants mass-slaughtered

We see exactly zero people die, or even implied to die. Every building they blast through is totally empty; in wide shots throughout the entire city, we see maybe a half dozen people on the streets, all of whom seem to get by just fine, incidentally. There's really no in-text reasons to believe there wasn't a successful evacuation effort before the battle started. People just assume there wasn't because it suits their preconceived notions, not because the film really gives us any reason to believe that that's the case.

[Kitten Champion]

We see exactly zero people die, or even implied to die. Every building they blast through is totally empty; in wide shots throughout the entire city, we see maybe a half dozen people on the streets, all of whom seem to get by just fine, incidentally. There's really no in-text reasons to believe there wasn't a successful evacuation effort before the battle started. People just assume there wasn't because it suits their preconceived notions, not because the film really gives us any reason to believe that that's the case.

Not according to the director, who wanted death on a massive scale to emulate classical heroic stories, or this very sequel were discussing which is framing Batman's vendetta against Superman around the causalities incurred. Then there's common sense from anyone who's lived in a city, ever, for that matter.

[Zmeoaice]

We see the gravity controller thing completely crush a car, and then lift people in the air and drop them. Pretty safe to say they got smooshed.

[Dragonexx]

But instead, they chose to have his first outing be an ugly, unearned and unsatisfying slugfest, which basically forces us to ask why we want this guy around at all. I mean, if there were no Superman, Zod wouldn't have shown up, right? Even with Supes stopping him, it's a net loss for the world. That is a bad, careless precedent to set when you're trying to make people love these characters, and from what I've seen, they're going to double down in the next movie. I doubt very much I'll see it.

The world being worse off with Superman isn't really anything new. A world with superpowers at all is a world that has just gotten worse. Don't get me wrong, I love the genre, but I recognize that if superheroes truly wanted to make the world a better place, they'd find a way to permanently remove all superpowers.

[Reddish Mage]

The most iconic moments of the Avengers movie weren't when the heroes were fighting, or pointlessly arguing. The most iconic moments are when everyone comes together to face the enemy. What's the one scene everyone pictures with the Avengers movie? All six Avengers, standing back to back, facing an alien horde in the heart of New York City.


Yeah, that makes a nice T-shirt, but what I remember is when Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America have their Battle Royale.







That's exactly why it wasn't a Superman origin story.

That is not the upbringing and life which will create the character of Superman as he is recognisable from basically any other fiction.

And so it didn't.

People who criticise the movie don't expect him to save everyone, they expect him to try.

To actually act like Superman.

He doesn't.

It's a bad Superman film, it's not a logical origin for the character of Superman.

Ah, I see we are now into the 972nd "Why did the Man of Steel really suck thread." I have my own pet theory


One of the things we hate is him being forced into the role of Superman. It's supposed to be a choice, not something where it's either be Superman or we take over and kill people.

Another thing is the idea of that whole " First time out" idea. Superman is Superman because he didn't just decide one day and then become Superman without practice. That would be irresponsible of him and so it's not what he does.

Superman makes the decision, then he travels the world not being a hobo, he travels the world training his abilities and his mind so that when he's ready to be a hero, stuff like Man of Steel doesn't happen. That's how it's always been done.

Nah, I recall the Donner movie, and the cartoon, and some other origin stories didn't have the training stuff at all.


I didn't really mind the idea of pre-Superman Clark just being a dude with powers and still helping people but being afraid of being found out to be so different in a world without superhero comics, but pretty much everything with Pa Kent just didn't work for me. Just blargh. I'm just going to pretend he didn't exist. :smalltongue: But let's say theoretically we have BvS incorporating "dude with powers" falling into a poor direction with backing up authority regardless of rightness, a previously used Superman gone bad scenario, and Bats smacking some sense of heroicness into him to make him Supes more properly. Eh, it's a thought.

Not this either.

No, basically, there's nothing problematic with a well done dark and alien and lonely Superman. I think Tim Burton's Superman Movie may have been in this mold, and it's the only mold in which Nicolas Cage gets to be Superman :smalltongue:

Man of Steel, just wasn't. It was too long, it was dark without a light side. Superman didn't really get a chance to BE Superman and have his moment when he saves everyone. The bit That grates on me most - it was too much blue color. I mean seriously, what's with blue-tinting every frame on the whole dang Earth? Whatever it was, it didn't work.



The world being worse off with Superman isn't really anything new. A world with superpowers at all is a world that has just gotten worse. Don't get me wrong, I love the genre, but I recognize that if superheroes truly wanted to make the world a better place, they'd find a way to permanently remove all superpowers.

Great now someone wants to argue get rid of all the Metahumans. Note that this storyline is usually the sort of things archvillians come up with, and gaining superpowers has long been a thinly veiled metaphor for self-realization and even racial self-identity,

Not sure the world is better off without those two things.

[Dragonexx]

I'm not saying the world is worse off with the concept of heroes. Heroes are a wonderful and inspiring concept. I'm saying that a world with superpowers is plainly worse off than a world without them.


Except that with superheroes, also comes supervillains. Say Doctor Meltdown strides into a bank and starts melting people with his acid powers. Then Captain Thunder flies in and fights him. Despite his best efforts there's extensive property damage, yet he triumphs in the end. Yay, the day is saved, except that there are several people who are now puddles of acid and building that are damaged. The superheroes are doing their best within the circumstances they have, but it's patently obvious that such things wouldn't happen if powers didn't exist.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love superpowers, but I recognize the unrealistic nature of how the whole thing is handled.

[Zmeoaice]

You could say that with any sort of power though, not just superpowers.

[MLai]

He may not have tried to save people, because he was trying to stop a doomsday device. That would have taken out the world.
As was said, this was a work of fiction written by somebody. If Superman "had no choice" but to act in an unpalatable dissonant way, it's because a writer wrote in circumstances which caused him to act that way. In which case, the fault still lies with the movie. There is no exoneration.


People keep talking about how he let a city be destroyed. Seem to be forgetting that the whole world was in jeopardy. Once city versus the whole world.
"The world in danger because giant bug-like spaceship" is a plot point. New York City being destroyed and New Yorkers running for their lives, is an emotional flashback for 318.9 million people. Yes, we care more about what was happening to NYC. If your movie features villains bringing down skyscrapers in NYC (or a city that is for all intents and purposes NYC), then yes you better treat your script very carefully.


I think the main problem with that criticism is that it's rarely, if ever, made about other urban fight scenes in other Superman media, including those that result in extensive urban damage. For example, you never really hear the complaint that the Justice League cartoon is grimdark despair-wallowing murder porn with a cast of superpowered unheroes because it's had at least one fight in a city where a lot of buildings got blown up.
That's a stylized cartoon with interstellar civilizations, supernatural monsters, and a fantastic Earth unlike our own. Blowing up cities in there is the same as blowing up cities in Godzilla.

MoS's Earth is a little too much like RL Earth, and the movie evoked 9/11 imagery a little too well.


EDIT: I don't think the Man of Steel Clark is such a bad ideal to strive for.
I like Cavill as Superman, but the movie writers screwed over the character so bad.

[Kitten Champion]

That's a stylized cartoon with interstellar civilizations, supernatural monsters, and a fantastic Earth unlike our own. Blowing up cities in there is the same as blowing up cities in Godzilla.

MoS's Earth is a little too much like RL Earth, and the movie evoked 9/11 imagery a little too well.
.

Except the original Godzilla of course, which took itself seriously and put the then fairly recent nuclear bombings at the core of its story.

Like that - the difference between Godzilla and the camp monster movies that would follow - is tone and focus. Man of Steel was unyielding in its severity. Is it any wonder people take the deaths and destruction more seriously than in the average Marvel movie? The movie wants you to. Just as the movie doesn't want you to believe the entire population of Metropolis was whisked away conveniently to the cornfield for the final act for the sake of personal convenience, because it's supposed to be about super-humans wrecking the world by their presence and not an episode of the Power Rangers.

The idea is fine, it's simply done dumbly (by people who apparently thought their Jesus allegory was too subtle without showing their protagonist in literal profile with Jesus' image - praying in Gethsemane no less) and its seriously questionable that such a perspective works for such an elaborately fanciful and unrealistic character.

Edit: Oh God, I'm debating Man of Steel again, I have to stop this now or so help me I'm going to see the Tears of Time.

[MLai]

Edit: Oh God, I'm debating Man of Steel again, I have to stop this now or so help me I'm going to see the Tears of Time.
LOL, in a few more months we will have the return of the Man Of Steel, and in addition we'll get Frank Miller's Goddamn Batman. Together. Tears, indeed.

[DiscipleofBob]

Prevent disasters like world destruction, the disaster he prevents in the movie in question?

The machine had two parts. One of which was doing precisely squat in the middle of the Indian Ocean.



We see exactly zero people die, or even implied to die. Every building they blast through is totally empty; in wide shots throughout the entire city, we see maybe a half dozen people on the streets, all of whom seem to get by just fine, incidentally. There's really no in-text reasons to believe there wasn't a successful evacuation effort before the battle started. People just assume there wasn't because it suits their preconceived notions, not because the film really gives us any reason to believe that that's the case.

Bull. Absolute bull. Go watch the movie again.

When the machine starts up in Metropolis, levitating the debris and slamming it back down again and again and again, see all those thousands of human body-shaped debris flying up and down again repeatedly.

Thats not debris.

And what is Superman doing while the doomsday machine is firing up and separating as one piece relatively slowly moves to the other part of the world? Watching and coming up with the most asinine plan to stop this ever. If he wasn't sitting around moping for half the movie he could have easily stopped the device before it started, instead waiting until after its already started leveling Metropolis to spring into action... And go after the part of the machine that's doing at this point zero casualties, except for maybe a few unlucky fishermen.

Never mind HISHE's point of why did he go to a church for guidance before confronting Zod instead of talking to his AI space-dad and finding out everything about what was going on and how to stop Zod before things start?

[BlueHerring]

Reading through this thread again and I just realized something.


At this point though, I'm just looking forward to the Rock as Shazam.

In this universe, there's someone who's superpower is to transform into Dwayne Johnson with the aid of magical lightning.

[Kitten Champion]

Reading through this thread again and I just realized something.



In this universe, there's someone who's superpower is to transform into Dwayne Johnson with the aid of magical lightning.

He's Black Adam though. I don't know much about the character, but I think he remains Dwayne Johnson regardless.

[DiscipleofBob]

He's Black Adam though. I don't know much about the character, but I think he remains Dwayne Johnson regardless.

Hes Dwayne Johnson with the power to use magical lightning to turn into a terrible CGI'd Scorpion King.

[McStabbington]

He's Black Adam though. I don't know much about the character, but I think he remains Dwayne Johnson regardless.

A pity, because the superpower to turn into Dwayne Johnson as your alter ego is pretty great as powers go. I would totally take that over . . . well, pretty much every superpower of the original 5 X-men aside from (maybe) Jean Grey. Given the choice between flying and being The Rock by touching the magic wishing machine/pebble/strange glowing alien device, it's really not a contest.

[Zmeoaice]

He's Black Adam though. I don't know much about the character, but I think he remains Dwayne Johnson regardless.

He was another guy before. If he changes back he'll age a few thousand years in a second though.

[Zrak]

Not according to the director, who wanted death on a massive scale to emulate classical heroic stories, or this very sequel were discussing which is framing Batman's vendetta against Superman around the causalities incurred. Then there's common sense from anyone who's lived in a city, ever, for that matter.

The director isn't the movie, the director is the guy who said the events of 300 are "about 90%" historically accurate. I'm going to trust the actual movie to tell me what happened in the movie, not Zack Snyder. The "common sense from anyone who's lived in a city, ever" applies equally to all other Superman media about which, again, that assertion is rarely made.


That's a stylized cartoon with interstellar civilizations, supernatural monsters, and a fantastic Earth unlike our own. Blowing up cities in there is the same as blowing up cities in Godzilla.

MoS's Earth is a little too much like RL Earth, and the movie evoked 9/11 imagery a little too well.
Man of Steel is a stylized cartoon with interstellar civilizations and a fantastic earth unlike our own. I really see no difference in verisimilitude between Man of Steel and Godzilla (or Cloverfield), and there's no meaningful difference in tone between Man of Steel and at the very least the newest Godzilla. If the scene bothered you, or brought back unpleasant memories, I'm sorry for that. I still don't think the actual text supports claims of 9/11 imagery that couldn't also be made about any number of other movies about which it is not made.


The machine had two parts. One of which was doing precisely squat in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
It was destroying the earth. That was the purpose of the machine. I am still amazed at the number of people who, by all appearances, dislike this movie because they were simply incapable of following its extremely blatant exposition.


Bull. Absolute bull. Go watch the movie again.

When the machine starts up in Metropolis, levitating the debris and slamming it back down again and again and again, see all those thousands of human body-shaped debris flying up and down again repeatedly.

Thats not debris.
Ah, I think we're talking about different points. I thought you were referring to the fight scene between Clark and Zod in Metropolis, specifically. If you were referring to people dying because Superman cannot or does not save them, generally, though, there are even more less-complained-about analogues in other Superman media. The massive blackout in Superman Returns, the aftershocks from the nuclear missile in the original 1978 Superman, the giant tornado in Superman III, every single moment of every single cartoon or comic where Superman is doing something besides saving peoples' lives, and so forth. Why is just this one example the problem?


And what is Superman doing while the doomsday machine is firing up and separating as one piece relatively slowly moves to the other part of the world? Watching and coming up with the most asinine plan to stop this ever. If he wasn't sitting around moping for half the movie he could have easily stopped the device before it started, instead waiting until after its already started leveling Metropolis to spring into action... And go after the part of the machine that's doing at this point zero casualties, except for maybe a few unlucky fishermen.

He really doesn't mope that much, and there's nothing he could do to stop Zod's plant for the vast majority of the time before the plan was put into motion, whether he was moping or not. I get that you're being snarky, but inaccurate snark is still bad criticism.
He stops the other half of the device because it's relatively unguarded and he can thus stop it faster. This choice, and why it's a totally reasonable choice, are very clearly and reasonably explained.

[DiscipleofBob]

The director isn't the movie, the director is the guy who said the events of 300 are "about 90%" historically accurate. I'm going to trust the actual movie to tell me what happened in the movie, not Zack Snyder. The "common sense from anyone who's lived in a city, ever" applies equally to all other Superman media about which, again, that assertion is rarely made.

Problem is that Snyder is the one who gets the final say on MoS, unless someone else gets to be director later and retcons it.



It was destroying the earth. That was the purpose of the machine. I am still amazed at the number of people who, by all appearances, dislike this movie because they were simply incapable of following its extremely blatant exposition.

How's this for blatant:

You're Superman. The bad guy has a doomsday machine which, for some reason, you stand there and watch while the doomsday machine separates into two parts and surround the planet.

Because of your inaction, you now have two targets:

Target one is in the middle of the Indian Ocean and is firing energy blasts into the water, and is also across the world from you are.

Target two is in the middle of a major U.S. Metropolis and has already started firing (again while you, as Superman, stand there looking dumb and mopey) and has already slaughtered hundreds of not thousands while you're formulating your brilliant plan to save the day with only a few million casualties. It's also closer by about a planet's diameter.

Which target do you go after? If you said Target One, congratulations, you've followed this movies train wreck logic and now millions of people are dead. But hey, you've technically saved the planet even at the expense of a city, so glass half full, right?


Ah, I think we're talking about different points. I thought you were referring to the fight scene between Clark and Zod in Metropolis, specifically.

Nah, I'd completely given up on the movie at that point. Actually I'd given up on it earlier, but the other people in the theater were complaining my yelling at the movie for being stupid was being disruptive.


If you were referring to people dying because Superman cannot or does not save them, generally, though, there are even more less-complained-about analogues in other Superman media. The massive blackout in Superman Returns, the aftershocks from the nuclear missile in the original 1978 Superman, the giant tornado in Superman III, every single moment of every single cartoon or comic where Superman is doing something besides saving peoples' lives, and so forth. Why is just this one example the problem?

In Superman Returns and the original Superman movie, they make a HUGE deal about Superman going to deal with the aftershocks and saving as many people as possible.

I don't honestly expect Superman to save everyone in every scenario to the point where you can confirm zero casualties, but I at least expect him to make an effort and save as many people as he possibly can, like he did in the original Superman movie and Superman Returns, and not like in Man of Steel, where he takes the dumbest course of action to the point where I'm pretty sure even Batman could have saved more people in that scenario.




He really doesn't mope that much, and there's nothing he could do to stop Zod's plant for the vast majority of the time before the plan was put into motion, whether he was moping or not. I get that you're being snarky, but inaccurate snark is still bad criticism.
He stops the other half of the device because it's relatively unguarded and he can thus stop it faster. This choice, and why it's a totally reasonable choice, are very clearly and reasonably explained.

First of all, if the movie had bothered explaining that Superman absolutely had to go after the other device first, then it'd still be bull, but at least I'd give the movie credit for trying.

That's not what happens though. Superman watches the doomsday machine get set up, even though there's no reason he can't immediately go out to stop it then and there, barks some orders to the military, and goes after the one in the Indian Ocean.

There's no logical reason why Superman couldn't have stopped the doomsday machine before it separated, or at least stopped the part that was killing thousands per second. Even if your explanation was right, it would still be lazy and grossly negligent.

But, hey, maybe there was a reason he had to go after the one in the middle of the ocean first. Maybe he was trying to score brownie points with Aquaman before the next movie ripped off Civil War. That's as equally plausible as every other justification people give for this movie.

[Zrak]

Problem is that Snyder is the one who gets the final say on MoS, unless someone else gets to be director later and retcons it.

Eh, I disagree. Death of the Author is a thing, and people who think otherwise are pretty much just wrong. I mean, do you think Zack Snyder saying 300 was about 90% historically accurate magically changed the entire plot of the movie so that it matched history? If not, why does him saying something about Man of Steel magically change what happened on screen in that movie?


How's this for blatant:

You're Superman. The bad guy has a doomsday machine which, for some reason, you stand there and watch while the doomsday machine separates into two parts and surround the planet.

Because of your inaction, you now have two targets:

Target one is in the middle of the Indian Ocean and is firing energy blasts into the water, and is also across the world from you are.

Target two is in the middle of a major U.S. Metropolis and has already started firing (again while you, as Superman, stand there looking dumb and mopey) and has already slaughtered hundreds of not thousands while you're formulating your brilliant plan to save the day with only a few million casualties. It's also closer by about a planet's diameter.

This is a disingenuous framing of the situation.

Both "targets" are required for the machine as a whole to work; if you shut one down, you stop the entire process of global destruction. While one target is closer, and in a more populated area, it's also extremely well-guarded because it's the target the bad guys expect him to go after. The fastest way to stop the entire world-destroying terraforming process is to stop the unguarded machine, because it takes Superman like five extra seconds to fly to that machine and he doesn't have to fight anybody to stop it. Also, stopping one machine not only stops the terraforming process, but also turns off the other machine. So, in fact, the fastest way to stop the machine in the more populous area is, again, probably to go stop the other machine first, since you don't have to fight a bunch of dudes pretty much exactly as powerful as you in a heavily armed spacecraft who are trying to stop you from stopping it.
So, from both a perspective of taking a totally justifiable better-safe-than-sorry attitude towards averting global destruction and from a perspective of limiting immediate casualties, stopping the machine in the Indian ocean makes more sense. All of this was explained pretty directly and literally in the movie. Perhaps if you had been listening, instead of yelling over the film and ruining the experience of your fellow moviegoers, you would know this.


In Superman Returns and the original Superman movie, they make a HUGE deal about Superman going to deal with the aftershocks and saving as many people as possible.
What? No they don't, at least in Superman Returns. They show him stopping one, plot-relevant plane crash. They don't do anything to show him saving as many people as possible, and certainly don't make a huge deal out of it; they make a pretty goofy setpiece out of him saving Lois while some other people happen to kind of be there. Meanwhile, he does literally nothing to stop the tornado in Superman III. Unless you're the world's sole exponent of the thesis that Superman III's central failing its overwhelming bleakness, this complaint just really doesn't hold up.

Also, again, there's every scene of him ever doing anything other than saving someone's life in any Superman media ever. Like that time in Superman II where he's chilling with Lois in the Fortress of Solitude while General Zod conquers the entire planet. Or that time in Superman Returns where he's busy brooding during every crime and natural disaster that happens on Earth for five straight years. There are plenty of other examples, but those two really stand out in terms of self-absorbed negligence. I mean, seriously, the Man of Steel Superman takes like five minutes to deal with a lot of pretty heavy stuff and formulate a plan to face legitimately overwhelming odds and he's some sort of inept crybaby Sad Clown figure, but the Superman Returns Superman takes five years and it ain't no thing?

[AvatarVecna]

What? No they don't, at least in Superman Returns. They show him stopping one, plot-relevant plane crash. They don't do anything to show him saving as many people as possible, and certainly don't make a huge deal out of it;

While the rest of your argument seems alright, I take issue with this particular point: when the blackout knocks a bunch of stuff out, he does a lot of stuff in the city that was affected before flying off to deal with the plane; the Daily Planet hood ornament fell off the building, and he kept it from crushing people; he vaporized falling glass before it could cut the people below, and he contained a mini-fire storm sweeping through the underground with nothing but lung power...and that's just the stuff that immediately leaped to my mind. Still, there's definitely issues in the film (such as Superman disappearing for several years), but pointing out how Superman has failed elsewhere doesn't change how he appears to have failed in MoS.

[DiscipleofBob]

Eh, I disagree. Death of the Author is a thing, and people who think otherwise are pretty much just wrong. I mean, do you think Zack Snyder saying 300 was about 90% historically accurate magically changed the entire plot of the movie so that it matched history? If not, why does him saying something about Man of Steel magically change what happened on screen in that movie?

It is Zack Snyder's movie. He has Word of God power on the movie. Maybe if this cinematic universe thing goes through a future director will retcon things, but until then, a director/writer/whatever establishing things in his movie is how movies work. It's how they've always worked. If Snyder says 300 is historically accurate he's hilariously wrong, but as far as the content of 300 the movie he absolutely gets to say what happened in the movie.



This is a disingenuous framing of the situation.

No it's pretty much exactly what happens in the movie.


Both "targets" are required for the machine as a whole to work; if you shut one down, you stop the entire process of global destruction.

Directly contradicted by the movie and the whole effort with Lois and the military having to try and stop the one machine on their own.

If you were correct, that'd be even more reason for Supes to go after the one that's actually causing damage as opposed to the one that's just splashing around.


While one target is closer, and in a more populated area, it's also extremely well-guarded because it's the target the bad guys expect him to go after. The fastest way to stop the entire world-destroying terraforming process is to stop the unguarded machine, because it takes Superman like five extra seconds to fly to that machine and he doesn't have to fight anybody to stop it. Also, stopping one machine not only stops the terraforming process, but also turns off the other machine. So, in fact, the fastest way to stop the machine in the more populous area is, again, probably to go stop the other machine first, since you don't have to fight a bunch of dudes pretty much exactly as powerful as you in a heavily armed spacecraft who are trying to stop you from stopping it.
So, from both a perspective of taking a totally justifiable better-safe-than-sorry attitude towards averting global destruction and from a perspective of limiting immediate casualties, stopping the machine in the Indian ocean makes more sense. All of this was explained pretty directly and literally in the movie. Perhaps if you had been listening, instead of yelling over the film and ruining the experience of your fellow moviegoers, you would know this.

Except none of that is actually in the movie. Maybe it was your interpretation, but no, none of those justifications are present.

If I'm wrong, and there are bits of dialogue I missed because the rest of the movie was making me cringe with its stupidity, quotes please.

Maybe I am wrong. I only saw the movie once, but nothing explaining ANY of the above occurred when I saw this in theaters.



What? No they don't, at least in Superman Returns. They show him stopping one, plot-relevant plane crash.

At this point all you're doing is convincing me you haven't watched any of these movies and are just making things up. Because half the action in the latter half of Superman Returns was him averting disasters caused by Luthor's expanding land mass thing.


Meanwhile, he does literally nothing to stop the tornado in Superman III. Unless you're the world's sole exponent of the thesis that Superman III's central failing its overwhelming bleakness, this complaint just really doesn't hold up.

I have never made any arguments for or against Superman III, because I've never seen it, and do not intend to in the near future. It could be legitimately worse than Man of Steel for all I know.


Also, again, there's every scene of him ever doing anything other than saving someone's life in any Superman media ever. Like that time in Superman II where he's chilling with Lois in the Fortress of Solitude while General Zod conquers the entire planet. Or that time in Superman Returns where he's busy brooding during every crime and natural disaster that happens on Earth for five straight years. There are plenty of other examples, but those two really stand out in terms of self-absorbed negligence. I mean, seriously, the Man of Steel Superman takes like five minutes to deal with a lot of pretty heavy stuff and formulate a plan to face legitimately overwhelming odds and he's some sort of inept crybaby Sad Clown figure, but the Superman Returns Superman takes five years and it ain't no thing?

Expecting Superman to save everyone everywhere every time is ridiculous. Expecting him to save Metropolis and the rest of the world from the immediate threat, when he has ample opportunity to do so, for Superman, is bare minimum.

Other Superman movies have had plenty of problems. Returns had Superman's deadbeat dad storyline. (Though he had been traveling through space to find the remains of Krypton, NOT moping for 5 years).

But usually these are personal character conflicts that are resolved before the end of the movie and Superman actually does do what it takes to stop the bad guy and save the world. MoS Superman does not. Ever. He completely fails at being Superman.

[Devonix]

Nah, I recall the Donner movie, and the cartoon, and some other origin stories didn't have the training stuff at all.





Actually both the Donner movie and the Timmverse animated series have him training as part of his origin. The entirety of the Fortress of Solitude scenes are to establish where he's going to train and gather the knowledge he'll need to become Superman, by using the combined knowledge of the Kryptonian people as well as what they have on Earth.

It's why there's this huge Timeskip after it's built Years take place between that and him arriving in Metroplis and he goes from a Farmboy, to someone who's an expert engineer, physicist, knows human anatamy and can speak just about every language on the planet.

The guy knew that if he was going to be a beacon and protect the planet, that he'd have to be up on these things.

The same thing happens in Superman the Animated series. Though without the Fortress, the comics that adapt and go into greater detail about the cartoon show even show some of his world travels, hell one of them has him and Bruce Wayne end up studying under the same master under different aliases

[Zrak]

While the rest of your argument seems alright, I take issue with this particular point: when the blackout knocks a bunch of stuff out, he does a lot of stuff in the city that was affected before flying off to deal with the plane; the Daily Planet hood ornament fell off the building, and he kept it from crushing people; he vaporized falling glass before it could cut the people below, and he contained a mini-fire storm sweeping through the underground with nothing but lung power...and that's just the stuff that immediately leaped to my mind. Still, there's definitely issues in the film (such as Superman disappearing for several years), but pointing out how Superman has failed elsewhere doesn't change how he appears to have failed in MoS.

Isn't that later in the movie, during the second giant blackout?

The reason I bring up Superman's other failings is to illustrate just how disingenuous the criticism of Man of Steel is. All the fridge logic and snarky intentional misunderstandings of plot points that people apply to Man of Steel could be applied as easily, if not even more easily, to a ton of other Superman media. Yet, not only do those criticisms hardly ever get made about those other movies, when they are brought up, people give those Supermen every benefit of the doubt in their interpretation. While people at the time complained about Superman Returns's "emo Superman," I really only see that complaint brought up nowadays in the context of its folly; "imagine that people thought that Superman was emo," and the like. Yet, that Superman really was angsty compared to Man of Steel; from Superman's five-year grieving period to having double Man of Steel's number of massive urban catastrophes to featuring a little kid killing a dude rather than a little kid saving a bus full of other children, Superman Returns was a way, way darker movie and its Superman not only has a much better case for being whiny and self-absorbed, but is a deadbeat dad to boot.

My problem is that people go out of their way to misunderstand, misinterpret, and even misremember Man of Steel to make its Superman less heroic, while they do the same with basically every other Superman movie to make their Supermen more heroic. It's not just Superman's heroism, either, the same combination of totally inexplicable misinterpretations, outright fabrications, and arbitrary double-standards backgrounds the vast majority of a ton of the common criticisms of Man of Steel. Whether or not Man of Steel is ultimately a good movie, or even a good Superman movie, that's just bad criticism.


Directly contradicted by the movie and the whole effort with Lois and the military having to try and stop the one machine on their own.

If you were correct, that'd be even more reason for Supes to go after the one that's actually causing damage as opposed to the one that's just splashing around.
Huh, in the actual scene from the actual movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSjI7gwuKtg), the machine in Metropolis shuts off when he destroys the one in the Indian Ocean. Chris Meloni even goes "He did it," when the giant, obvious, glowing blue beam disappears, in case you were confused at whether the giant, obvious, glowing blue beam was important.

Also, no it wouldn't. That doesn't even make sense. If destroying one machine stops both, there is no reason to prioritize destroying one machine over the other, since destroying either machine will have the same end result. As such, he should go to whichever machine will take him less time to destroy. Which is, again, the machine in the Indian Ocean because that one isn't guarded.


Except none of that is actually in the movie. Maybe it was your interpretation, but no, none of those justifications are present.

If I'm wrong, and there are bits of dialogue I missed because the rest of the movie was making me cringe with its stupidity, quotes please.
I'm willing to do a fair amount of hand-holding to help you understand super blatant exposition that you missed the one time you sort of watched the movie, but I'm not going to pay to rent and spend the time to re-watch an entire film to provide exact quotes from one scene to convince you you might have missed something in a movie you watched once.


Maybe I am wrong. I only saw the movie once, but nothing explaining ANY of the above occurred when I saw this in theaters.
You mean when you were admittedly yelling over the movie and didn't even watch the entire thing?

[Kyberwulf]

Okay, then by your logic. Superman is responsible for all the deaths and destruction that happens while his is training in the Fortress of Solitude. He should be fast enough to train either Right now... or save people while he is training. He is responsible for all the deaths when he is sleeping. Or eating. Or pretending to be hoomman. He is responsible for all the death and destruction on all the alien planets. In the whole universe.

The reason I brought up and am talking about Man of Steel, is because there is no other movie to compare Batman Vs Superman too. If there as a Batman movie I would be using that in this comparison. Man of Steel wasn't a Horrible movie. It gets too much flak.

Could Batman vs Superman be a good movie. Depends on if you judged Man of Steel to Harshly. I am looking forward to watching it, I don't think it will be the film for the ages.

I also wanted to point out, in Superman. Superman went back in time, and undid all the saving he did, just to save Lois.

[Devonix]

Okay, then by your logic. Superman is responsible for all the deaths and destruction that happens while his is training in the Fortress of Solitude. He should be fast enough to train either Right now... or save people while he is training. He is responsible for all the deaths when he is sleeping. Or eating. Or pretending to be hoomman. He is responsible for all the death and destruction on all the alien planets. In the whole universe.

The reason I brought up and am talking about Man of Steel, is because there is no other movie to compare Batman Vs Superman too. If there as a Batman movie I would be using that in this comparison. Man of Steel wasn't a Horrible movie. It gets too much flak.

Could Batman vs Superman be a good movie. Depends on if you judged Man of Steel to Harshly. I am looking forward to watching it, I don't think it will be the film for the ages.

I also wanted to point out, in Superman. Superman went back in time, and undid all the saving he did, just to save Lois.


I'm not saying it's Superman's Fault in Man of Steel. I'm saying that this portrayal of the character gets rid of one of his defining characteristics. That Becoming Superman isn't something he decided to do lightly, or was forced into. It's a choice he makes and one he dedicates himself to. He forged himself into Superman just as certainly as Bruce Wayne Forged himself into being Batman.

[Squark]

Okay, then by your logic. Superman is responsible for all the deaths and destruction that happens while his is training in the Fortress of Solitude. He should be fast enough to train either Right now... or save people while he is training. He is responsible for all the deaths when he is sleeping. Or eating. Or pretending to be hoomman. He is responsible for all the death and destruction on all the alien planets. In the whole universe.Nobody's going that far. Superman can't save everyone. What people object to is that he doesn't appear to try to save bystanders, and this is very out of character for Superman. Superman stopping to help even when it's a bad idea is practically a trope, actually.

The reason I brought up and am talking about Man of Steel, is because there is no other movie to compare Batman Vs Superman too. If there as a Batman movie I would be using that in this comparison. Superman: TAS's World's Finest would work, no? Also, for the record, people did complain about Superman returns. I've stumbled across a fair bit of complaining as I trawled the past of the internet. Granted, people moved on and just occasionally grumbled until Man of Steel and Superman Vs. Batman came along.

I also wanted to point out, in Superman. Superman went back in time, and undid all the saving he did, just to save Lois.As I understand it, Superman didn't undo anything; if he had, the California coast would have fallen into the sea. I believe as Future superman was saving Lois, past superman is doing everything else, then goes into the future to save Lois. Look, time Travel is weird, and most fans will admit you just need to smile and nod during that point*

*It makes more sense to have Superman go back in time instead of reverse time on Earth, but that still brings up Time Paradoxes. And why he never did that again.

[Kyberwulf]

If you watch the movie, then you should realize this isn't something he just. Fell into. It was his choice. He as always walking around doing good and saving people. He was just trying to stay under the radar. Even as a little kid, he always wanted to stand up to bullies, and do the right thing. Pa Kent didn't want him exposing himself. As far as I know, he always objected to Clark making himself known. This movie just distilled it into the few scenes it could have. What Clark did, was step out of his dad's shadow and become his own man by the end of the movie. He didn't want to sit in the shadows and be safe. He chose to expose himself so that he didn't have to hide in the shadows anymore. When he told the Army that he is here to stay. He is accepting his dad's death and moving on in his own way.

And Clark being happy and joining The Daily Planet. Moving to Metropolis. I said it before, he could have just accepted his responsibility for protecting the city he failed. He is going to start a new chapter in his life. To atone for past mistakes he did. I suppose he could have been more mopey about it.. but that would have felt more like Batman's territory. Clark's reaction felt more like Supermans. Optimistic.

I still maintain this is an Origin story. So Superman isn't able to be the perfect being we are all used to. It's to be expected. He is just starting out. Nobody would watch a Batman origin story, and complain that he isn't kicking badguy butt and saving people, when he hasn't even put on his Batsuit. In thirteen movies, if this iteration of superman is still going on. If he is still letting city fall and people die. Then yes. You have have grounds for him not being any incarnation of Superman.

I like how you can handwave Superman's act of Time travel to save one life, vs The country as a plot hole. Yet, Man of Steel is judge by the most harshest of standards.

[DiscipleofBob]

Huh, in the actual scene from the actual movie (httpsr://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSjI7gwuKtg), the machine in Metropolis shuts off when he destroys the one in the Indian Ocean. Chris Meloni even goes "He did it," when the giant, obvious, glowing blue beam disappears, in case you were confused at whether the giant, obvious, glowing blue beam was important.

Fine. I concede that destroying one piece of the machine works on the whole, apparently, even though that's never actually explained and then makes the whole thing Lois and the military does pointless. My impression when watching the movie was that destroying one only delayed the destructive power of the other machine and interrupted the whole terraforming process, but that was admittedly an interpretation, because again, they never explained that. I was asking for the part of he movie where Superman or someone explains why he has to go after the one in the Indian Ocean and not go after the immediate threat, since now the one in the ocean is even less of a priority. It only makes even less sense for Superman to go after the one in the ocean then. Because...


Also, no it wouldn't. That doesn't even make sense. If destroying one machine stops both, there is no reason to prioritize destroying one machine over the other, since destroying either machine will have the same end result. As such, he should go to whichever machine will take him less time to destroy. Which is, again, the machine in the Indian Ocean because that one isn't guarded.

No, it makes even LESS sense to fly across the world and go after the one in the ocean when it's not doing any real harm when every second wasted kills another wave of Metropolites. It makes even less sense than that to allow the device to go through its transformation process to begin with. My point still stands.



I'm willing to do a fair amount of hand-holding to help you understand super blatant exposition that you missed the one time you sort of watched the movie, but I'm not going to pay to rent and spend the time to re-watch an entire film to provide exact quotes from one scene to convince you you might have missed something in a movie you watched once.


You mean when you were admittedly yelling over the movie and didn't even watch the entire thing?

In case you need it to be made absolutely clear to you, no, I was not actually yelling at the movie, that was exaggeration, and yes I stayed through the credits. If I could sit through Batman and Robin and Catwoman this isn't going to faze me. I did throw my hands up several times and mouthed obscenities at the terrible writing and poor choices of the characters, but yes, I had the patience and fortitude necessary to sit through the entirety of the movie, beginning to end.

I'm willing to agree to disagree. There are fans of the movies who can either ignore the films' many flaws or don't see them as flaws. But what I can't stand is fans who get so defensive about the movie they deride its critics as hypocritical or ignorant because they have negative things to say about Snyder's Passion of the Superman.

[Zrak]

Nobody's going that far. Superman can't save everyone. What people object to is that he doesn't appear to try to save bystanders, and this is very out of character for Superman. Superman stopping to help even when it's a bad idea is practically a trope, actually.
He saves, like, thirty or forty bystanders over the course of the movie, just counting individuals we actually see on screen. I think there's even a youtube video counting them. I think this impression mostly comes from the final battle with Zod, where we don't really see Superman try to save any bystanders because we don't really see any bystanders; it's not like he's ignoring the endangered civilians all around him, there just aren't any endangered civilians around for the vast majority of the fight. He saves bystanders (and outmatched friendly combatants) pretty frequently throughout the rest of the movie.


It makes more sense to have Superman go back in time instead of reverse time on Earth, but that still brings up Time Paradoxes. And why he never did that again.
Well, obviously because he was a negligent monster who had no real desire to save anyone, duh. Oh, wait, sorry, that was in Superman, not Man of Steel. My bad. In that case, it must just be an innocuous oversight which is amusing but doesn't reflect seriously on the moral character of the Superman depicted.

[DiscipleofBob]

I'm just going to leave this honest trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sge5sUNJkiY) and everything wrong with the movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Cl5FzEIjY) here. Even if these are made for humor purposes, the points they raise are valid.

[Kyberwulf]

I watched it, and to be honest. Most of the points are mostly just snarky comments that could be leveled at most movies. Going through a movie and looking for ANYTHING to complain about. I think you should watch it without your biases. Most of the "sins" are just small errors, that happen in Most movies. I suppose I could link the one for Avengers, and say how crappy that movie really is.

It has also been pointed out, that the one in the ocean was the one with the least amount of protection. I mean, what are you going to do. Go for the death star with it's shields up, or go to the forest moon to take out the shields then go for the death star? You're saying we should just through everything we have against the death star because it poses the biggest threat.

[Cizak]

Fine. I concede that destroying one piece of the machine works on the whole, apparently, even though that's never actually explained and then makes the whole thing Lois and the military does pointless. My impression when watching the movie was that destroying one only delayed the destructive power of the other machine and interrupted the whole terraforming process, but that was admittedly an interpretation, because again, they never explained that. I was asking for the part of he movie where Superman or someone explains why he has to go after the one in the Indian Ocean and not go after the immediate threat, since now the one in the ocean is even less of a priority. It only makes even less sense for Superman to go after the one in the ocean then. Because...

I'm pretty sure they explained this. I've also only seen it once, but I can't remember ever wondering how the machine worked.


No, it makes even LESS sense to fly across the world and go after the one in the ocean when it's not doing any real harm when every second wasted kills another wave of Metropolites. It makes even less sense than that to allow the device to go through its transformation process to begin with. My point still stands.

Flying to the unguarded one takes less time than fighting through the guards to the guarded one. Flying across the world isn't exactly a difficult time-consuming task for Superman.

[Zrak]

Fine. I concede that destroying one piece of the machine works on the whole, apparently, even though that's never actually explained and then makes the whole thing Lois and the military does pointless. My impression when watching the movie was that destroying one only delayed the destructive power of the other machine and interrupted the whole terraforming process, but that was admittedly an interpretation, because again, they never explained that. I was asking for the part of he movie where Superman or someone explains why he has to go after the one in the Indian Ocean and not go after the immediate threat, since now the one in the ocean is even less of a priority. It only makes even less sense for Superman to go after the one in the ocean then. Because...
It actually is explained, and pretty directly, sadly just not in a scene available as a free promo clip. If you got the wrong impression, it's on you.


No, it makes even LESS sense to fly across the world and go after the one in the ocean when it's not doing any real harm when every second wasted kills another wave of Metropolites. It makes even less sense than that to allow the device to go through its transformation process to begin with. My point still stands.
Okay, look. Imagine there are two subway lines you can take to get to work, the A line and the B line. Are you following me so far? You normally take the A line, because it's a more direct route that gets you there about fifteen minutes faster than the B line. Still with me? Now imagine that, one morning, a tree has fallen over on the aboveground part of the A line's track and delayed the A line by at least forty-five minutes without affecting the B line's schedule. Which train would you take to work? If you said "the B line, because even though it's a longer route, it would be faster under the given conditions," congratulations, you made the reasonable choice. Coincidentally, you also figured out why Superman went to the machine in the Indian Ocean even though it was a longer trip. As I've said several times, and as the movie explains, Clark goes to the Indian Ocean because the World Engine there is unguarded, so he doesn't have to fight a bunch of dudes before destroying it. If he goes straight for the one in Metropolis, he has to fight all the dudes, then destroy it. The difference in flight time is less than the amount of time he would have to spend fighting dudes, the same way the difference between our two hypothetical subway lines is smaller than the delay caused by the hypothetical fallen branch.


In case you need it to be made absolutely clear to you, no, I was not actually yelling at the movie, that was exaggeration, and yes I stayed through the credits.
I mean, yeah, it did need to be made clear. When you said you yelled at the movie and left before it was finished, I assumed you yelled at the movie and left before it was finished.


I'm willing to agree to disagree. There are fans of the movies who can either ignore the films' many flaws or don't see them as flaws. But what I can't stand is fans who get so defensive about the movie they deride its critics as hypocritical or ignorant because they have negative things to say about Snyder's Passion of the Superman.
I wouldn't really say I'm a fan of the movie. I thought it was okay, I guess. I wouldn't really say its critics are hypocrites, either, I just think many of their criticisms are unfounded and pretty disingenuous.

[AvatarVecna]

For what it's worth (very little, apparently, but whatever), what it comes down to for me is suspensions of disbelief: when watching Superman, or Superman Returns, I didn't notice the flaws in the story, because the rest of the story was so good at keeping my attention awayfrom nitpicky bull**** like that; watching Man of Steel, it struck me as a more flawed movie, with plot holes are little nitpicks easier to see than in the other movies. Whether it was the writing, the acting, the twists and turns of the plot, or some combination of the three, MoS did not keep me under the movie's spell the way a lot of movies can do.

Do the other movies have problems? Sure, all movies have problems, things that take us out of the movie; no matter how good the movie is, it's acting, not real life, and fiction stories like this haveto put in the extra effort to convince us they aren't ridiculous concepts. And of these three movies about Space Jesus fighting crime in his pajamas, two of them did a much better job of making me overlook the problems this kind of story has.

Hell, the thing that tppk me out of Avengers 2 was that the movie tried to make me take Hawkeye seriously, but that was the only thing that damaged the illusion.

[Anteros]

I don't really get the "punched the villain through a skyscraper" criticism. Superman does that in like, every Superman story I've ever read. It's just this time they made it look realistic.

[Zrak]

I'm just going to leave this honest trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sge5sUNJkiY) and everything wrong with the movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Cl5FzEIjY) here. Even if these are made for humor purposes, the points they raise are valid.

Eh, not really. In terms of the "Honest Trailer" video, the stuff about the tone is hugely exaggerated (as I've already addressed), the stuff about Henry Cavill's nationality is just random xenophobia, the stuff about Superman causing carnage involves out-of-context or even disingenuously recontextualized clips, the stuff about Krypton is mostly pretty fair except for an apparently total misunderstanding of what "sepia tone" is, and the rest is really more of the same.

I don't really even understand what's "sinful" about the vast majority of the sins in the "Everything Wrong With. . . " video. Like, what's the problem with the 3-D model showing the baby? I mean, it might seem a little unnecessary, but given the problems a lot of the audience apparently had with telling where babies weren't later on in the movie, I find it hard to fault them for playing it safe. What's the actual complaint behind the "John Carter of Krypton" quip? That there are other science fiction films in which dudes ride on things? Heaven forbid. "Carla Gugino is heard and not seen"? Huh, this dude must have some serious problems with all animated films. Oh, wait, I just got to the "Diane Lane isn't my wife in this scene" sin. Got it, he meant "This scene does not sufficiently sexually objectify Carla Gugino." Valid points indeed. Although, to be fair, "Fifteen minutes and we're still on Krypton" is totally fair. The Krypton segment was just brutal to sit through.


For what it's worth (very little, apparently, but whatever), what it comes down to for me is suspensions of disbelief: when watching Superman, or Superman Returns, I didn't notice the flaws in the story, because the rest of the story was so good at keeping my attention awayfrom nitpicky bull**** like that; watching Man of Steel, it struck me as a more flawed movie, with plot holes are little nitpicks easier to see than in the other movies. Whether it was the writing, the acting, the twists and turns of the plot, or some combination of the three, MoS did not keep me under the movie's spell the way a lot of movies can do.

I'm sure the writing and directing are both parts of it, especially the latter, but I think another huge part is that people were basically primed to nitpick the hell out of it. People were nitpicking the movie before it even came out, even before the trailer came out. It wasn't like the normal neutral-to-positive dissection of genre movie trailers, either, where people look for clues and generally get excited about the coming movie, or at least a lot of it wasn't; there was a huge torrent of negativity about it on the internet before there was even any real information to be negative about, and that colored the mainstream reaction to every piece of information that was released in a giant spiral of largely arbitrary negativity.

[AvatarVecna]

I'm sure the writing and directing are both parts of it, especially the latter, but I think another huge part is that people were basically primed to nitpick the hell out of it. People were nitpicking the movie before it even came out, even before the trailer came out. It wasn't like the normal neutral-to-positive dissection of genre movie trailers, either, where people look for clues and generally get excited about the coming movie, or at least a lot of it wasn't; there was a huge torrent of negativity about it on the internet before there was even any real information to be negative about, and that colored the mainstream reaction to every piece of information that was released in a giant spiral of largely arbitrary negativity.

I've no doubt that general nitpicking wasn't a huge part of it at the time, but all movie's get nitpicked, even before coming out; Man of Steel stands out because the nitpickery was more blatant than normal because what little info there was about the movie wasn't very...inspiring, to say the least, but less-than-inspiring build-up does not make people hate a good movie. It's hard to say how well the movie would've done if the pre-movie nitpicking had been less blatant, and even review sites are kind of split on it.

At the end of the day, though, what I took away from the the movie is that I didn't really think of it as a Superman superhero movie, but rather as an almost generic action movie that happened to star Superman, and that's not what I was looking for from a movie about Superman. I mean, I still think Man of Steel is a better movie than Superman IV, but that's setting the bar low enough to trip over.

[t209]

http://orig15.deviantart.net/3170/f/2012/081/c/b/dcnu__billy_batson_by_magickmaker-d4tmkvi.jpg
Since there will be a Shazam movie, this might be the version the DC might use to make it "darker and edgier".
:smallfrown: poor Marvel Family.

[Zrak]

I agree, to an extent. Sure, some of it was the usual nitpicking, like the sky-is-falling reaction to every costuming decision that accompanies every comic book movie since forever, but a lot of it was fairly unusual in its largely unwarranted negativity. While some details really were less than inspiring (Snyder), other information that could have been pretty inspiring, or at least met with cautious optimism, (Nolan, Goyer, Cavill, Adams) was basically assumed to be a worst-case scenario largely arbitrarily. Even if blatant, excessive nitpicking can't make people hate a good movie (though I would argue it can), it can certainly make them hate a generally decent, basically mediocre movie, which is what Man of Steel ultimately ended up being. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't good enough to save itself from the preconceived notions so much of its primary audience went in with. Which, honestly, is what I expect will happen with Batman vs Superman. It won't actually be the sort of what-did-I-just-watch fiasco any number of past superhero movies have been, but it almost certainly won't be good enough to change the minds of people going into the theater believing they're about to watch an irredeemable train wreck.

[Bobb]

fwiw, I enjoyed Superman Returns. Thought it needed more action but it was good.


I watched MOS with no preconceptions or negative connotations.

I did not like MOS. I did not like it at all.


I think the part where I began to wonder wth I was watching was when Superman was getting sucked into the skull-sand.


IMO

[Legato Endless]

I mean, I still think Man of Steel is a better movie than Superman IV, but that's setting the bar low enough to trip over.

All of the Superman films after the first two aren't much of anything to write homeabout. MoS wasn't good, but it's not exactly worse than the cringe worthy slapstick comedy of 3 which features the world's most inane tutorial on significant figures. Even arguments like tactical mistakes in MoS, valid or no, can be comfortably placed along side the fact everything in Superman Returns could have been averted were Superman not an idiot.

[Eldan]

I think the part where I began to wonder wth I was watching was when Superman was getting sucked into the skull-sand.

Oh, come on. That was hilarious. Our entire cinema was laughing their asses off at that.

[MLai]

Man of Steel is a stylized cartoon with interstellar civilizations and a fantastic earth unlike our own. I really see no difference in verisimilitude between Man of Steel and Godzilla (or Cloverfield), and there's no meaningful difference in tone between Man of Steel and at the very least the newest Godzilla. If the scene bothered you, or brought back unpleasant memories, I'm sorry for that. I still don't think the actual text supports claims of 9/11 imagery that couldn't also be made about any number of other movies about which it is not made.
Superman Returns is a godawful movie I couldn't sit through, and never intend to watch to completion. It is in fact worse imo than MoS, just in a different way. I don't think anyone here who criticized MoS ever praised Superman Returns in direct comparison, so it's kind of a strawman to keep bringing it up.

Nor did anyone praise Superman 3 and 4, for that matter. Nobody is singling out MoS.

Now, regarding verisimilitude... It is a big difference. Metropolis has always been the not-NYC. Its destruction in MoS was explicitly using real footage of 9/11 as reference, down to the white dust covering everything. You don't see that dust in other movies such as Cloverfield or Pacific Rim or Avengers; it's practically a Pavlovian trigger for 9/11 imagery.

I lived in NYC during both times the WTC was attacked. I don't have any PTSD about it, and I don't begrudge seeing stuff alluding to it onscreen. But I do acknowledge what Snyder was specifically going for. I would say Snyder captured that specific feel the absolute best, out of all other recent movies featuring city destruction.

[DiscipleofBob]

For the record, I went into MoS expecting at least a good movie, and was hoping for the best Superman movie to date. I didn't have any reason to doubt the movie from anything is heard about it beforehand. I mean Amy Adams, possibly my favorite modern actress, as Lois Lane. How can that possibly go wrong? For me at least, it wasn't a matter of preconceived notions of it definitely going to suck. That mindset came after this movie for me, and in fact for me this movie caused that mindset.

I went out of MoS with a new appreciation for how much bad writing can ruin a movie. I mean I was certainly disappointed with Superman Returns and Green Lantern, but I didn't think either were nearly as bad as people seem to remember. I was just more baffled that MoS was the one they finally decided to base a cinematic universe off of.

And I can't honestly call MoS the worst Superman movie. Hell, I think all of the live action movies have at least one thing that's blatantly wrong with them. For what it's worth, MoS's casting was absolutely perfect. I just wouldn't let Snyder to direct traffic much less a superhero movie.

[lord_khaine]

Nor did anyone praise Superman 3 and 4, for that matter. Nobody is singling out MoS.


I honestly though 3 and 4 were good enough, and certainly better than anything else i have seen so far that has not been animated.
(except for smallville i guess, that were certainly miles above the last to movies, despite having only a fragment of the budget)

[Mystic Muse]

How this movie can be any good: Get Bruce Timm in charge. :smalltongue: (Ship has sailed for that obviously, but it'd have been nice...)

[lord_khaine]

I kinda thought getting someone who is not ashamed of super heroes in charge first were a good start.

[Zrak]

Superman Returns is a godawful movie I couldn't sit through, and never intend to watch to completion. It is in fact worse imo than MoS, just in a different way. I don't think anyone here who criticized MoS ever praised Superman Returns in direct comparison, so it's kind of a strawman to keep bringing it up.

Nor did anyone praise Superman 3 and 4, for that matter. Nobody is singling out MoS.

Except, by just bringing up Man of Steel, they're doing exactly that. That's what "singling out" means. Even if a direct comparison isn't being made (which at least some direct comparisons have been), an implicit, indirect comparison is. Moreover, whether or not anybody else made direct or indirect comparisons between Man of Steel and other Superman media, I made direct comparisons, and people have responded to them with the exact type of interpretive double-standard I was describing. Including, in fact, specifically praising Superman Returns in direct comparison; DiscipleofBob's comments emphasizing all the efforts Superman Returns goes to to show Superman saving people in other scenes while ignoring all the efforts Man of Steel's Superman makes to save people in scenes other than the one example he picked (where Superman is actually still taking the course of action likely to save the most lives), excusing Superman's five-year absence in Superman Returns while lambasting five minutes of indecision in Man of Steel, and so on.

[Tyndmyr]

Except, by just bringing up Man of Steel, they're doing exactly that. That's what "singling out" means. Even if a direct comparison isn't being made (which at least some direct comparisons have been), an implicit, indirect comparison is. Moreover, whether or not anybody else made direct or indirect comparisons between Man of Steel and other Superman media, I made direct comparisons, and people have responded to them with the exact type of interpretive double-standard I was describing. Including, in fact, specifically praising Superman Returns in direct comparison; DiscipleofBob's comments emphasizing all the efforts Superman Returns goes to to show Superman saving people in other scenes while ignoring all the efforts Man of Steel's Superman makes to save people in scenes other than the one example he picked (where Superman is actually still taking the course of action likely to save the most lives), excusing Superman's five-year absence in Superman Returns while lambasting five minutes of indecision in Man of Steel, and so on.

Uh, how could we not? It's the last movie, and it's the one that'd be connected into, yknow, Batman vs Superman.

Even though it won't be the same Batman, people referenced Dark Knight, not, yknow, the old Batman movies(some of which were indeed awful).

Current stuff is the best guide for if the next thing will suck or not. I'm gonna go with yes.

[Legato Endless]

So after people complained (apparently) about Superman and Zodd's hair remaining perfectly coiffed during their final scrape WB released an image that confirms Clark's hair will be rumpled in his tussle with Bruce.





So that's progress.

[AvatarVecna]

So after people complained (apparently) about Superman and Zodd's hair remaining perfectly coiffed during their final scrape WB released an image that confirms Clark's hair will be rumpled in his tussle with Bruce.





So that's progress.

So they acknowledge that they know about the issues their product has, or at least that they know what people are complaining about...and then they went out of their way to assure us that the stupidest complaint we could possibly have had about MoS won't be a problem in the next movie.

Why does that feel less like progress or more like "eh, **** your complaints, we do what we want"?

I don't know, maybe that's just me...

[Zrak]

Uh, how could we not? It's the last movie, and it's the one that'd be connected into, yknow, Batman vs Superman.

Even though it won't be the same Batman, people referenced Dark Knight, not, yknow, the old Batman movies(some of which were indeed awful).

Current stuff is the best guide for if the next thing will suck or not. I'm gonna go with yes.

Batman Begins is a year older than Superman Returns; while The Dark Knight is newer than Superman Returns, it's three years closer to it than Man of Steel. So putting the relevance cutoff between The Dark Knight and Superman Returns is pretty arbitrary. That said, my complaint wasn't even that Man of Steel was being singled out (while it was, that makes sense in context given that it is the most relevant of the movies) but that when the other movies were brought up, the very same "flaws" constantly attacked in Man of Steel were shrugged off.

I'm not trying to say everybody's a big mean bully picking on poor wittle Man of Steel just because, I'm trying to illustrate why many of the primary "criticisms" of Man of Steel aren't the best guide for whether the next thing will suck or not, because they aren't actually the best guide for whether Man of Steel sucks or not.

To illustrate the point with a non-DC example, what I'm basically saying is that Rex Reed's review of Cabin in the Woods would not be a good basis for guessing whether Cabin in the Woods 2 will suck or not, because it's not really the best guide for whether Cabin in the Woods sucks or not, because its claims about the basic events depicted on screen are inaccurate enough that it is essentially a review of a totally different movie.


So after people complained (apparently) about Superman and Zodd's hair remaining perfectly coiffed during their final scrape WB released an image that confirms Clark's hair will be rumpled in his tussle with Bruce.





So that's progress.

But will he have a spit curl? Because that's super important.

[Jothki]

I think it might actually be possible to drag a good origin story out of Superman accidentally devastating Metropolis. Have it be the first time Superman has ever used his powers to their full extent, and due to his inexperience and lack of awareness of his own strengths and limitations, he ends up horribly screwing it up and accidentally killing a bunch of people. Horrified by what he did, he dedicates himself to being the best that he can be rather than just coasting on his powers.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor's family is among the victims, and he devotes himself to getting revenge. He refuses to believe that so much suffering could have come from someone with good intentions, and that Superman isn't fundamentally a reckless jerk who is just acting like he's nice in order to make people like him.

Build it into an arc where Lex Luthor becomes exactly who he thinks that Superman is, and ultimately ends up devastating Metropolis again himself trying to kill Superman while Superman desperately works to save people. In the end, he's faced with the question of whether he himself is a good person whose mistakes harmed others more than he intended, or a monster who is willing to let others suffer to get what he wants.

[Reddish Mage]

You could say that with any sort of power though, not just superpowers.

You know the thing about superpowers, is somehow they never improve the world so much as excuse the people from electing politicians who don't spend enough on fire stations, and ERs, and infastructure. Basically Superheroes are a good 9-1-1 when villains aren't around.



I watched it, and to be honest. Most of the points are mostly just snarky comments that could be leveled at most movies. Going through a movie and looking for ANYTHING to complain about. I think you should watch it without your biases. Most of the "sins" are just small errors, that happen in Most movies. I suppose I could link the one for Avengers, and say how crappy that movie really is.

Agreed, forget all that stuff about redefining who superman is and what his capabilities are. It's really the color blue being to predominant in the background.



http://orig15.deviantart.net/3170/f/2012/081/c/b/dcnu__billy_batson_by_magickmaker-d4tmkvi.jpg
Since there will be a Shazam movie, this might be the version the DC might use to make it "darker and edgier".
:smallfrown: poor Marvel Family.

That is hilarious,I'd watch it.

[Infernally Clay]

fwiw, I enjoyed Superman Returns. Thought it needed more action but it was good.

It had a lot going for it.

Brandon Routh was a great Superman and he played Superman playing Clark Kent really well. Kevin Spacey would've been even better if he played the role seriously, since House of Cards showed he can play one nasty guy when he wants to. Lifting up that huge Kryptonite-laced island was really impressive for an finale, much better than the usual Superman vs generic supervillain fare we get.

It's actually sad that they never continued with it. Bryan Singer legitimately knows how to make a good superhero movie, but Warner Bros obviously cared more for the grounded Nolan style. The style that doesn't really work, mind, when you've got a team that consists of more than just Batman.

[SaintRidley]

My problem with Man of Steel really boils down to one thing that's entirely subjective. I just didn't enjoy any of it.

I self-select out of a lot of movies when I go to theaters, so it's rare for me to see one and not enjoy it at least a bit. It's very rare for me to actually dislike a movie when I go to see it. I'm pretty good at suspending my disbelief and just letting the movie wash over me. Jurassic World isn't perfect by any stretch, but I sure as hell enjoyed the mosasaur (I was more excited about that than anything else, really) and raptor training bits. I avoided the Nolan Batman movies entirely because while I'm sure they're very good, I am just not interested in Batman unless we have Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy running around together (and it needs to be both). I even enjoyed all three parts of The Hobbit even though they weren't terribly good and I thought it was asinine to break it into three parts, mostly because I found a lot of unintentional humor that made me very happy (also I will watch Evangeline Lily in almost anything).

MoS was the first movie I saw in theaters since Spider-Man 3 and maybe Knocked Up (I can't remember if I saw it in theaters or on DVD that I just did not enjoy at all. In both superhero cases, I thought I would enjoy them, too. But when I walked out of MoS I felt like I had wasted my money. My friends and I proceeded to sneak in to see This Is the End (the Seth Rogen one, which after having seen Knocked Up I was extremely pessimistic about seeing another Rogen film). Turns out This Is the End was absolutely, completely idiotic but I loved it anyway. Primarily because of Emma Watson breaking Rogen's nose with the butt of an axe and stealing their stuff. I wound up wishing I'd paid for that one and snuck into MoS.

MoS just never gave me anything to hold onto and say "Hey, this part was fun." Or something humorous that I could remember by the end of it. Or even anything unintentionally funny. What I got was a movie where the action didn't thrill, where Pa Kent walks into a tornado, where Superman is apparently the living version of the Codex (which seemed really dumb), Zod was an uninteresting character (and the other Kryptonians didn't really qualify as characters), and so on. I did think Henry Cavill with a beard looked cool and would make a cool bearded Superman, so maybe there's something. But then the character shaved.

[MLai]

I did think Henry Cavill with a beard looked cool and would make a cool bearded Superman, so maybe there's something. But then the character shaved.
You're right. That would have been the most hilarious thing ever in a Superman movie.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EPfVAoz9R6o/Ubsp9UoJhLI/AAAAAAAADMY/tsa1eOXNyAM/s1600/jesus_christ_superman.jpg

[Avilan the Grey]

If I am watching this it's only because of WW. She is the only character in the movie I find interesting (I got tired with Bats a loooong time ago, and I got tired of Superman long before that).

As for the expected quality of the movie? It's a DC movie, which means it will be mediocre. Especially since they have Superman in it. Also, they are stressing the "Look we are being like Marvel!" thing.

[Legato Endless]

So they acknowledge that they know about the issues their product has, or at least that they know what people are complaining about...and then they went out of their way to assure us that the stupidest complaint we could possibly have had about MoS won't be a problem in the next movie.

Why does that feel less like progress or more like "eh, **** your complaints, we do what we want"?

They've actually given other assurances, my usage here was more to make a snarky comment about how myopic the whole debacle has gotten.

Other things promised include: (minor spoilers)

Superman will take saving civilian lives more seriously.

Superman will be better adjusted.

Superman's moral code and character will be significantly affected by killing Zodd.

Superman and Batman's fight therefor will 'logically' take place in an abandoned district. So Metropolis is basically Detroit in the next movie.

Man of Steel 2 is in preproduction and will follow Justice League. (Since this isn't considered a proper sequel to some)

The many cameos and references that have been widely decried here are actually part of an effort to meet a divergent fan response that called for more DC universe establishment that was absent in Man of Steel. If Smallville taught us anything, it's that fans will gobble up any allusions, no matter how obnoxious.

Jesse Eisenberg is actually playing Lex Luthor Jr as it's apparently it's better to use a more polemic choice on a less iconic character. Note that by all accounts he's still doing Luthor-y things, he's just not besmirching classic Lex's 'dignity.'

[Traab]

I can honestly only recall a single episode of Justice League where they didn't care as much about property damage. IE the fight with Darkseid and they flat out adress why Supes does so with his World of Cardboard speech.

Throughout the series they constantly show a care for the civilians and have people running interfearence to keep the normal folks safe.

The doomsday fight is a big one. Holy CRAP is that a bad one! I am willing to ignore the damage done by 99% of the fight due to the way it all went down, but the grand finale? He flies doomsday into orbit, then proceeds to powerbomb him back to earth. Does he alter his descent by 1 degree and land outside the city? Hell no, he pile drives doomsday almost directly back to where he lifted off from in downtown metropolis, coincidentally probably obliterating the little girl he pulled this move off to save, and the crater encompasses probably several square blocks of utterly destroyed buildings. There is no way in hell there was time to evacuate, the battle went everywhere in the city and the army was probably blocking all the roads trying to bring in enough heavy gear to die trying to fight doomsday. Here it is (https://youtu.be/_n1DGFpWRKc?t=6m38s) Now too be fair, he was struggling to keep control of the fall, but come on, he doesnt exactly need to move at a right angle from that distance to avoid landing in metropolis. Just the slightest deviation from straight up and down would have landed him outside the city limits and stopped billions in damage and possibly tens of thousands of lives getting snuffed out in an instant.

[DiscipleofBob]

The doomsday fight is a big one. Holy CRAP is that a bad one! I am willing to ignore the damage done by 99% of the fight due to the way it all went down, but the grand finale? He flies doomsday into orbit, then proceeds to powerbomb him back to earth. Does he alter his descent by 1 degree and land outside the city? Hell no, he pile drives doomsday almost directly back to where he lifted off from in downtown metropolis, coincidentally probably obliterating the little girl he pulled this move off to save, and the crater encompasses probably several square blocks of utterly destroyed buildings. There is no way in hell there was time to evacuate, the battle went everywhere in the city and the army was probably blocking all the roads trying to bring in enough heavy gear to die trying to fight doomsday. Here it is (https://youtu.be/_n1DGFpWRKc?t=6m38s) Now too be fair, he was struggling to keep control of the fall, but come on, he doesnt exactly need to move at a right angle from that distance to avoid landing in metropolis. Just the slightest deviation from straight up and down would have landed him outside the city limits and stopped billions in damage and possibly tens of thousands of lives getting snuffed out in an instant.

Pretty sure that movie isn't canon with the rest of the Timmverse Justice League and related series.

[GloatingSwine]

It isn't.

Doomsday in the Timmverse cartoons appears and is immediately lobotomised by the Justice Lords version of Superman (then once he gets better blown up by a kryptonite infused nuke out over the ocean).

The only time Justice League/Unlimited shows that kind of property damage from Supes is when he is specifically being manipulated into doing it (fighting Captain Marvel) and it's being specifically shown as being a bad thing.

[Zmeoaice]

Funny how a cartoon intended for children is better than the "serious" movie for adults.

[Zrak]

Doomsday in the Timmverse cartoons appears and is immediately lobotomised by the Justice Lords version of Superman (then once he gets better blown up by a kryptonite infused nuke out over the ocean).

The only time Justice League/Unlimited shows that kind of property damage from Supes is when he is specifically being manipulated into doing it (fighting Captain Marvel) and it's being specifically shown as being a bad thing.

Wait, an actual nuclear weapon? Over the ocean or not, that's, like, way more irresponsible than property damage.

[MLai]

Wait, an actual nuclear weapon? Over the ocean or not, that's, like, way more irresponsible than property damage.
Are you still trying to compare a major Hollywood movie with a TV cartoon show?
Just stick with comparing MoS with Superman movies and other superhero films.

[lord_khaine]

The doomsday fight is a big one. Holy CRAP is that a bad one! I am willing to ignore the damage done by 99% of the fight due to the way it all went down, but the grand finale? He flies doomsday into orbit, then proceeds to powerbomb him back to earth. Does he alter his descent by 1 degree and land outside the city? Hell no, he pile drives doomsday almost directly back to where he lifted off from in downtown metropolis, coincidentally probably obliterating the little girl he pulled this move off to save, and the crater encompasses probably several square blocks of utterly destroyed buildings. There is no way in hell there was time to evacuate, the battle went everywhere in the city and the army was probably blocking all the roads trying to bring in enough heavy gear to die trying to fight doomsday. Here it is Now too be fair, he was struggling to keep control of the fall, but come on, he doesnt exactly need to move at a right angle from that distance to avoid landing in metropolis. Just the slightest deviation from straight up and down would have landed him outside the city limits and stopped billions in damage and possibly tens of thousands of lives getting snuffed out in an instant.

Hey.... :smallannoyed:

How clearly do you think you are going to be thinking after being slugged a few times in the head by Doomsday?
Because not having the fight is clearly not an option, that would just mean Doomsday destroying the entire town, and moving on to the next.

[GloatingSwine]

Wait, an actual nuclear weapon? Over the ocean or not, that's, like, way more irresponsible than property damage.

Yes. But then it was the shadowy government agency of evil that did it.

(They were also the ones who had kept Doomsday around in his lobotomised state so they could have a weapon against Superman).

[Traab]

Hey.... :smallannoyed:

How clearly do you think you are going to be thinking after being slugged a few times in the head by Doomsday?
Because not having the fight is clearly not an option, that would just mean Doomsday destroying the entire town, and moving on to the next.

I... I never said to NOT have the fight. I said to aim just slightly to the left on the way back down. He did the equivalent of going straight up and down with his orbital powerbomb and destroyed probably a few square miles of the city with that last move. With the sheer distance involved, it wouldnt have taken much of a deviation on the return trip to miss the whole city with that final attack. As for the other replies, sorry, didnt realize it was noncannon. I stumbled across the video awhile back, think I was looking for epic fights or something, and it always stuck with me.

[Bobb]

Wait, an actual nuclear weapon? Over the ocean or not, that's, like, way more irresponsible than property damage.


The bad guy secret government people shot the nuke. Superman did nothing wrong.


You're showing a lack of openness here by assuming the worst of other portrayals of Superman

A second good example is you doing exactly what you've been complaining about another poster doing by disregarding (or forgetting) scenes of Superman saving people in Superman Returns.

[Anteros]

Are you still trying to compare a major Hollywood movie with a TV cartoon show?
Just stick with comparing MoS with Superman movies and other superhero films.

I think people can compare whatever mediums they choose.

[McStabbington]

Except, by just bringing up Man of Steel, they're doing exactly that. That's what "singling out" means. Even if a direct comparison isn't being made (which at least some direct comparisons have been), an implicit, indirect comparison is. Moreover, whether or not anybody else made direct or indirect comparisons between Man of Steel and other Superman media, I made direct comparisons, and people have responded to them with the exact type of interpretive double-standard I was describing. Including, in fact, specifically praising Superman Returns in direct comparison; DiscipleofBob's comments emphasizing all the efforts Superman Returns goes to to show Superman saving people in other scenes while ignoring all the efforts Man of Steel's Superman makes to save people in scenes other than the one example he picked (where Superman is actually still taking the course of action likely to save the most lives), excusing Superman's five-year absence in Superman Returns while lambasting five minutes of indecision in Man of Steel, and so on.

Zrak, I get the sense that you feel backed up against the wall on this one, but there is a very good reason why people keep citing other, worthier examples of superhero films as an example of this film's failings: because even those films worked better as films than Man of Steel did. It really is not a good superhero film because it isn't a good film period. It has a main character who never has a clear character motivation, nor story arc, and because of that lack of clarity, all people pay attention to is the tangible details that feel off. As a consequence, you can argue about those tangible details till the cows come home, and it won't change the fact that the details aren't the fundamental issue why this film fails as a story.

Let me let you in on a little secret of film scripts: every script has plot holes. Toy Story is one of the most quintessential buddy comedies of all time. It's story centers around a toy who doesn't realize he's a toy . . . yet still falls immobile every single time he's within sight of a child. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the two most influential action films of all time. One of it's most memorable action scenes, the one where Marion and Indy try and capture the plane, can be cut entirely from the film and lose nothing from the plot. The scene only happens because Indy thinks the Ark will be loaded on the plane, which is incorrect, and which he will be told within a minute of the scene concluding.

So why does nobody complain about that when talking about those films? Because the characters and story involve us enough emotionally that we don't notice and don't care. Roger Ebert famously described movies as vehicles of empathy, and that is exactly how we evaluate films: not with Vulcan attention to plot details, but with human attachment to characters. And if people start nitpicking details, it's a very, very good sign that the movie didn't emotionally engage them.

That is exactly what is happening with Man of Steel. It isn't that it doesn't work as a Superman film. It's that it doesn't work as a film. And the reason is very simple: the main character's story doesn't make sense. He quite literally is exactly the same person at age 8 or so that he is at age 33. When he's eight, he saves a bus, only to feel conflicted when he talks with an absolutely terrible father. At age 33, he saves an oil rig, then feels conflicted enough to continue being homeless. The closest we get to a character transition is that at the end of the film, Clark no longer feels conflicted, a transition that comes out of nowhere, is not prompted by anything that actually happens in the fight with Zod, and actually implies something downright horrible: we just saw a city destroyed in a manner uncomfotably reminiscent of 9/11, but it's all okay because Clark Kent resolved his daddy issues. You know, the ones the writer clearly never meant to have Jonathan actually give his son.

That's . . . that's awful storytelling. It's a sign that the writer clearly had no command of the character arc he intended to convey. And when you compare it not with other masterpieces of superhero films, but plain, basic paint-by-numbers films, it stacks up horribly. And when that's what you leave your audience with, it should come as no surprise that people react viscerally to it, even if they have difficulty pointing to the exact part of the plot where it went wrong.

[lord_khaine]

we just saw a city destroyed in a manner uncomfotably reminiscent of 9/11

No offence, but it is sounding a little self-centered to continue to bring out that date again and again.

[MLai]

I think people can compare whatever mediums they choose.
But in the context of comparing audience demographics, audience expectations, story structure, story conventions, etc etc it is completely off. It's comparing apples and oranges because both have the same company sticker on it.


No offence, but it is sounding a little self-centered to continue to bring out that date again and again.
We call a duck a duck.

[Kyberwulf]

People are hating on Man of Steel, because it's "cool" to hate on Man of Steel. I don't think anyone is saying that Man of Steel was a great movie. It wasn't the worse of the Series of movies with Superman. I think it at most it was a mediocre movie.

Of the two, Superman Returns, and Man of Steel. I hated Superman Returns more. It was boring. So boring, I don't remember anything that happens in it.
And I seen it twice.

The only thing I problem I had with Man of Steel, was that they rehashed Superman II. Which I think they are doing with a lot of remakes and redos. So it's not entirely only Man of Steel's fault.

Say what you want, I think it's a good thing that they are changing some concepts of Superman. People's constants complaints about Superman is that he is too perfect. Yet when you try to change some of that to make him more relatable, everyone loses their minds.

Also, I think people keep wanting Superman to be the Perfect Hero. When this is the origin story of him. He should make mistakes. Especially sense he is fighting people with the exact power sets as him, but better trained.

[Reddish Mage]

People are hating on Man of Steel, because it's "cool" to hate on Man of Steel. I don't think anyone is saying that Man of Steel was a great movie. It wasn't the worse of the Series of movies with Superman. I think it at most it was a mediocre movie.

Of the two, Superman Returns, and Man of Steel. I hated Superman Returns more. It was boring. So boring, I don't remember anything that happens in it.
And I seen it twice.

The only thing I problem I had with Man of Steel, was that they rehashed Superman II. Which I think they are doing with a lot of remakes and redos. So it's not entirely only Man of Steel's fault.

Say what you want, I think it's a good thing that they are changing some concepts of Superman. People's constants complaints about Superman is that he is too perfect. Yet when you try to change some of that to make him more relatable, everyone loses their minds.

Also, I think people keep wanting Superman to be the Perfect Hero. When this is the origin story of him. He should make mistakes. Especially sense he is fighting people with the exact power sets as him, but better trained.

I liked the "Gods and Monsters" elseworld that makes Superman the son of General Zod, at least the trailer shows Superman's forced moral choice and inability to save people with great pathos and clear heroic ambition that is tragically stymied by a cruel reality.

Man of Steel could have been that, it wasn't.

[Traab]

People want the perfect hero because thats who he is supposed to be. Or at least as close to it as possible. Thats what superman IS. You can make batman dark and gritty because dark and gritty is already a large part of his character. Wonder woman? Sure, she is a warrior born and bred, you could easily make her dark and gritty. She was trained to fight and kill when needed. Superman is the polar opposite of dark and gritty. Making him dark and gritty is like making The Punisher an advocate for gun control. It just makes no freaking sense. If you want to make a movie where a super powered man spends his life hiding his abilities and it plays out like man of steel did, thats fine, that can make for an awesome film. But that isnt a superman film.

[Anteros]

People want the perfect hero because thats who he is supposed to be. Or at least as close to it as possible. Thats what superman IS. You can make batman dark and gritty because dark and gritty is already a large part of his character. Wonder woman? Sure, she is a warrior born and bred, you could easily make her dark and gritty. She was trained to fight and kill when needed. Superman is the polar opposite of dark and gritty. Making him dark and gritty is like making The Punisher an advocate for gun control. It just makes no freaking sense. If you want to make a movie where a super powered man spends his life hiding his abilities and it plays out like man of steel did, thats fine, that can make for an awesome film. But that isnt a superman film.

A film where Superman is a perfect hero who makes no mistakes is just bad in a different way.

Supes just doesn't make for good movies, because if he's perfect it's boring and if he's not perfect everyone whines that they "don't get the character." It's one of the reasons I don't particularly like the character. He's good as a plot device for other characters to bounce off of, but his own stories are incredibly boring and repetitive.

[AvatarVecna]

A film where Superman is a perfect hero who makes no mistakes is just bad in a different way.

Supes just doesn't make for good movies, because if he's perfect it's boring and if he's not perfect everyone whines that they "don't get the character." It's one of the reasons I don't particularly like the character. He's good as a plot device for other character's to bounce off of, but his own stories are incredibly boring and repetitive.

Seconded. Superman works well in the cartoons because the other heroes and the stories they're all in are larger-than-life to the point that Superman isn't orders of magnitude beyond them all, but...well, let's just put it this way: one of the multiple reasons why the currently-running live-action Supergirl show isn't working out so well is because Superman exists in the same world; his mere existence is a plot hole for that show, and the show itself calls attention to his awesomeness too often for the audience to forget his presence in this world.

[BeerMug Paladin]

You can make batman dark and gritty because dark and gritty is already a large part of his character.

Someone needs to watch the original Batman movie.

[lord_khaine]

We call a duck a duck.

And i try to be polite when people might be sounding horribly self centered without knowing it.

[Infernally Clay]

Someone needs to watch the original Batman movie.

I'll have you know shark repellent is very gritty. It gets in your eyes and everything.

[Traab]

Someone needs to watch the original Batman movie.

That the Keaton batman movie? Cause that was pretty dark and gritty.

[Legato Endless]

Burton's Batman can be pretty jarring depending on how you feel about all the people Batman casually murders in those films.

[Traab]

Burton's Batman can be pretty jarring depending on how you feel about all the people Batman casually murders in those films.

True, even though the older batman comics had plenty of casual murder done by batman, even with guns.

[Anteros]

True, even though the older batman comics had plenty of casual murder done by batman, even with guns.

No it didn't, that's just one of those internet myths.

[The Glyphstone]

No it didn't, that's just one of those internet myths.

So are the screenshots of said comics faked?

[Zmeoaice]

It was a few of the early comics, but not much after the tenth or so.

There's one guy he killed with a gun, although he was an undead vampire.

[Traab]

No it didn't, that's just one of those internet myths.

Feh, Here are 6 brutal batman murders.l (http://www.cracked.com/article_20111_the-6-most-brutal-murders-committed-by-batman.html)

[Anteros]

Feh, Here are 6 brutal batman murders.l (http://www.cracked.com/article_20111_the-6-most-brutal-murders-committed-by-batman.html)

You'll notice that pretty much everything on that list is either explicitly an accident, or just the author assuming someone off screen dies, which is not default behavior for comics.



So are the screenshots of said comics faked?

There's a few times he holds a gun. The whole "Batman used to kill people all the time" thing is a myth.

[The Glyphstone]

You'll notice that pretty much everything on that list is either explicitly an accident, or just the author assuming someone off screen dies, which is not default behavior for comics.




There's a few times he holds a gun. The whole "Batman used to kill people all the time" thing is a myth.

Sure, no one thinks he was actually a proto-Punisher. But 'Batman never kills' is also a myth, which is more the point of the counter-argument.

[Traab]

You'll notice that pretty much everything on that list is either explicitly an accident, or just the author assuming someone off screen dies, which is not default behavior for comics.




There's a few times he holds a gun. The whole "Batman used to kill people all the time" thing is a myth.

Like the thug he hung with a steel cable and dragged below his jet plane? (While shooting up the vehicle with the machine gun mounted on his bat plane) Or the guy he pretty clearly intentionally stabbed through the neck with his own sword? Or when he set a bunch of thugs on fire, beat them down while they were burning to death, and had sex with Canary right there by their burning corpses?

[Zmeoaice]

Or when he set a bunch of thugs on fire, beat them down while they were burning to death, and had sex with Canary right there by their burning corpses?

That was Crazy Steve, not Batman

[Legato Endless]

Sure, no one thinks he was actually a proto-Punisher. But 'Batman never kills' is also a myth, which is more the point of the counter-argument.

That a character with 75 years of burgeoning history under dozens and dozens of writers across nearly all mediums endured a brief process before solidifying and has a rare inconsistency that has been tacitly ignored does not make their iconic trait a myth. By that argument, any character could do anything and it would be valid, despite the broken versimilitude droves of your audience would call you on. Unless we are speaking less of the character's identity and more as a some amalgated psychological gestalt, which is sort of absurd outside the silliness of versus debates.

[Devonix]

It was a few of the early comics, but not much after the tenth or so.

There's one guy he killed with a gun, although he was an undead vampire.

And him shooting Darkseid.

The whole thing of Batman being pathologically afraid of using or holding guns is a thing that only really exists in the Timmverse Batman.

He doesn't want to use them. And will always find another way if possible. But if there's no way out other than the person dieing, he'll do it.

[Kyberwulf]

Yeah, Bats is like Obi wan that way.

[Reddish Mage]

This whole Batman thing got going because it was said Superman is the "Perfect Hero." But what does that mean?

Superman is meant to be a Shining Beacon of Virtue, fighting for Truth, Justice, and Something in basically every incarnation, including MoS.

Man of Steel doesn't show case his abilities as enabling him to do so. Perhaps it accidentally suggests his perception is a bit lacking, I want to see those clips as I seem to recall Supes saving people in the middle of his fight with Zod.

MoSupes is dark, lonely, a bit depressive, who seems a bit like a doormat/martyr the way he basically just mopes around after his father dies. But still he saves people.

A MoS dark story doesn't require MoSupes to tell it. Any incarnation of Superman be used in a story in which he is presented with untenable forced moral choices, and of confronting the limits of his power.

I don't see why "the perfect hero" has to be the strongest and smartest thing in the universe, never presented with a challenge he can't overcome.

It just seems to me the arguments people are making is that certain Superman stories can't be told, certain challenges can't be presented, and Superman has always has to be able to win without compromise.

[Bobb]

It seems to me that you're arguing against things people haven't said.



One of my favorite superman stories on screen is on JL when he gets time-zapped to the future when Earth has a run sun, thus losing all his powers.

[McStabbington]

This whole Batman thing got going because it was said Superman is the "Perfect Hero." But what does that mean?

Superman is meant to be a Shining Beacon of Virtue, fighting for Truth, Justice, and Something in basically every incarnation, including MoS.

Man of Steel doesn't show case his abilities as enabling him to do so. Perhaps it accidentally suggests his perception is a bit lacking, I want to see those clips as I seem to recall Supes saving people in the middle of his fight with Zod.

MoSupes is dark, lonely, a bit depressive, who seems a bit like a doormat/martyr the way he basically just mopes around after his father dies. But still he saves people.

A MoS dark story doesn't require MoSupes to tell it. Any incarnation of Superman be used in a story in which he is presented with untenable forced moral choices, and of confronting the limits of his power.

I don't see why "the perfect hero" has to be the strongest and smartest thing in the universe, never presented with a challenge he can't overcome.

It just seems to me the arguments people are making is that certain Superman stories can't be told, certain challenges can't be presented, and Superman has always has to be able to win without compromise.

Um, well, no. Actually, I'm complaining about Man of Steel quite specifically because the main character has no character arc. But part of why that irks me so much is because they had all the tools laid out to create such an arc right there. Don't believe me? Let's create a story out of parts of the MoS script and see if I can create a better arc than they can.

Clark is raised by an incompetent father who never teaches him how to accept who he is. With a bit of polishing (to say nothing of making that deliberate rather than accidental). Then he gets introduced to a father figure in Zod who tempts him with a might-makes-right philosophy. Then we reveal that Zod has (gasp!) evil plans for the entirety of the human race, and through treachery, Zod incapacitates our hero. Then we have Supes escape and stumble across a means of talking with Jor-El, who informs him that the only way to win is to truly, fully embrace your abilities. Clark does so, saves the day, and delivers what very while might have been a fatal beatdown to Zod who is unable to control his abilities, but chooses to abide by a different moral code than Zod and Phantom Zones him and the other Kryptonians.

Now that story isn't perfect, and to be honest, as a John Byrne fan I don't like what that story does with Jonathan Kent. Yet I still have a better story than anything actually in MoS using nothing but parts that were in the MoS script. It's all right there, and yet somehow I, a random commenter on the internet, can create a better character arc with the scraps of their story than they can.

That's why I'm frustrated.

[lord_khaine]

It just seems to me the arguments people are making is that certain Superman stories can't be told, certain challenges can't be presented, and Superman has always has to be able to win without compromise.

Yeah... actually some of the best stories have come out those few times when Superman were forced to compromise something. Best example i can come up with is when he killed 3 kryptonian criminals because he could not find any other solution to stop them.

[Traab]

Yeah... actually some of the best stories have come out those few times when Superman were forced to compromise something. Best example i can come up with is when he killed 3 kryptonian criminals because he could not find any other solution to stop them.

I would agree to that. See, supermans character has virtually always been the ultimate boy scout. Truth Justice and the American Way (yes I know he dropped that last part awhile back) So a story where he gets faced with that sort of impossible choice or a moral dilemma is an awesome thing. With superman its less about the bad guy he has to face, and more about the choices he makes. In MoS they didnt do that, they created a character with a very different personality and called him superman. That is what, in my opinion, upset so many superman fans. Its why so many pick at all the details of the film, because bottom line, he isnt superman, and here (insert dozen examples) is why. If this had been a movie about some new super powered fella it probably would have been better received. Instead its like they created a superhero movie, called it superman to draw in a crowd, and now are acting surprised people are ticked that superman never showed up in it. I felt the same way about an animated movie I watched years ago, Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within. This was supposed to be a final fantasy movie, and yet after watching it, I dont recall a single thing that had to do with final fantasy in the entire film. The film itself wasnt that bad, but I hated it because it wasnt final fantasy.

[Anteros]

What I don't get with the new Superman movies is why they're so dead set on making the Kents terrible people who continually try to talk their son out of being a hero.

[Hopeless]

Instead of Dark Knight Returns go World's Finest so you have the new Joker working with Lex and Batman gets to meet Superman properly instead of grimdark everything must be gritty!

Leave Doomsday as a teaser at the end for the Sequel and no its not Zod its why they were desperate to terraform Earth preparing for Doomsday's arrival since ancient Krypton sent it to quell the colonies but lost control and they isolated Krypton as its environment is Doomsday's sole perceived weakness.

Have Lex create Bizarro however would work better and reverse engineer kryptonian tech for his battlesuit please!

[DiscipleofBob]

What I don't get with the new Superman movies is why they're so dead set on making the Kents terrible people who continually try to talk their son out of being a hero.

I get what the writers were trying to do with them. Teach Clark not to flaunt his powers because people wouldn't understand and think he was a monster/god/devil or want to dissect him or have him captured by the military or any number of things that could happen, but at the same time have Jonathan Kent be indecisive on just how to do that and not be a horrible person. It just didn't come out that way in the movie and turned into him rather getting killed by a tornado pointlessly.

[Anteros]

I get what the writers were trying to do with them. Teach Clark not to flaunt his powers because people wouldn't understand and think he was a monster/god/devil or want to dissect him or have him captured by the military or any number of things that could happen, but at the same time have Jonathan Kent be indecisive on just how to do that and not be a horrible person. It just didn't come out that way in the movie and turned into him rather getting killed by a tornado pointlessly.

Plus the part where they suggested Clark should have let a bus full of children drown. Plus the part in the current trailer where Ma Kent is going on about how he "doesn't owe this planet anything". They're just terrible, terrible human beings.

If Clark's characterization is off by a few feet, they missed the characterization on the Kents by a mile.

[AvatarVecna]

Plus the part where they suggested Clark should have let a bus full of children drown. Plus the part in the current trailer where Ma Kent is going on about how he "doesn't owe this planet anything". They're just terrible, terrible human beings.

If Clark's characterization is off by a few feet, they missed the characterization on the Kents by a mile.

The second one is definitely true (it's part of why Superman's so awesome, because he helps anyway), but having the Kents point it out to him shouldn't be done...and shouldn't be necessary: it's a great example of "show, don't tell", where Superman saving the world despite having the choice to do otherwise because that' one of the high points of the character.

[L Space]

Yeah... actually some of the best stories have come out those few times when Superman were forced to compromise something. Best example i can come up with is when he killed 3 kryptonian criminals because he could not find any other solution to stop them.

One of the most memorable Superman stories (for me anyways) had to do with the Royal Flush Gang. After some of her group is arrested, Ten of Diamonds wants to find a way to hurt Superman. After a bit of a chase, Superman follows her to a Royal Flush Gang hideout and offers to help her get out of the gang. She refuses and Supes detains both her and a large number of the gang. While the police are congratulating Superman on a job well done, she yells at him that he didn't solve anything, as they will always have more members and that he will never be able to save everyone, especially those who don't want to be saved. It ends with Ten of Diamonds being punished for leading Superman to the HQ, but still happy that she's part of the gang. Meanwhile, Superman is looking sadly at a newspaper headline about a number of people being killed in a drive by, before he puts his cape on and flies over the city.

I don't expect Superman to be perfect and solve everything, but he should do everything in his power to protect as many people as he can. Superman will try to save that person falling off a bridge, even if he's in the middle of a fight with a world-level threat. Superman can't save everyone, but he sure as hell will try.

[BeerMug Paladin]

What I don't get with the new Superman movies is why they're so dead set on making the Kents terrible people who continually try to talk their son out of being a hero.

I would guess it's to make the choice between being a hero and living a normal life more up front and apparent to an audience watching. It's conflict. Without characters to toss that idea out via dialog, there's not many other ways that the information could be communicated fast enough to still fit in all the action scenes.

Overcoming that upbringing makes him more of a heroic character, ultimately. But who knows, I haven't watched that movie.

[L Space]

What I don't get with the new Superman movies is why they're so dead set on making the Kents terrible people who continually try to talk their son out of being a hero.

Yea, the biggest problem that I had with the movie was how they portrayed Jonathan Kent. The Kents taught him how important it was to do the right thing and be selfless when it came to helping people. Instead of how they handled Jonathan, they should have had him tell Clark how proud he was that he saved those people, maybe while also stating that he needed to be careful about others knowing what he could do. If they would of had a part like that, they could have kept the scene where Jonathan died trying to help others, but with the twist that Clark was else where and didn't arrive in time to save Pa Kent. Then both scenes combined is a great set-up on why he decided to put on the cape.

I didn't hate the movie. It's an origins story and it should have Superman making mistakes, but it should also show him constantly trying to do better. In the end the movie just didn't seem to contain the heart of what makes Superman who he is.

[Anteros]

Overcoming that upbringing makes him more of a heroic character, ultimately. But who knows, I haven't watched that movie.

It certainly makes for a heroic character. It's just that it doesn't make Superman.

[lord_khaine]

Yea, the biggest problem that I had with the movie was how they portrayed Jonathan Kent. The Kents taught him how important it was to do the right thing and be selfless when it came to helping people. Instead of how they handled Jonathan, they should have had him tell Clark how proud he was that he saved those people, maybe while also stating that he needed to be careful about others knowing what he could do. If they would of had a part like that, they could have kept the scene where Jonathan died trying to help others, but with the twist that Clark was else where and didn't arrive in time to save Pa Kent. Then both scenes combined is a great set-up on why he decided to put on the cape.

I loved all the fights and action scenes, i just wish they had cut anything involving Jonathan kent out of the movie...

[McStabbington]

I loved all the fights and action scenes, i just wish they had cut anything involving Jonathan kent out of the movie...

I couldn't help but feel the exact same way, if for no other reason than it's a completely self-inflicted gunshot wound. If I had any money, I would consider it a very safe bet that the flashbacks were a studio decision in order to avoid telling the same origin story again. Now this is problematic partly because it reveals an ignorance of how malleable the steps of the hero's journey can be, and that if you know what you are doing, you can use the same steps to tell wildly different stories.

But there's also the problem that if you introduce flashbacks, you have to know how to use them to augment the present story. The flashback structure of Batman Begins doesn't work because they use flashbacks; it's just a structural technique. It's that they layered the information to show exactly what we needed to know to inform the present situation and tell the story of Bruce Wayne. So when they were presented with a directive to use flashbacks here, they then realized that they really had nothing to inform Clark's character.

Honestly, if I were doing the writing, and the producers insisted on flashbacks, I'd have written it so that young Clark was angry and quick to vengeance, and Jonathan had to teach him to be forgiving and kind. It doesn't fit with Superman mythos at all, but it does make for a more compelling narrative arc, and it automatically sharpens the conflict for the film: Zod is also quick to anger and vengeful, and therefore is both a representation of everything Clark could become and a devil on his shoulder tempting him to do the wrong thing he wants to do. And it's the human Jonathan and Martha Kent who pull him back, calling him to make the right choice of the option that Jor-El provided him.

[Zrak]

Zrak, I get the sense that you feel backed up against the wall on this one, but there is a very good reason why people keep citing other, worthier examples of superhero films as an example of this film's failings: because even those films worked better as films than Man of Steel did. It really is not a good superhero film because it isn't a good film period. It has a main character who never has a clear character motivation, nor story arc, and because of that lack of clarity, all people pay attention to is the tangible details that feel off. As a consequence, you can argue about those tangible details till the cows come home, and it won't change the fact that the details aren't the fundamental issue why this film fails as a story.
I disagree on a few levels. First, about the other movies necessarily being worthier; I don't think Superman Returns necessarily is and I'd pretty confidently say, even as an almost unconditional Pryor fan, Superman III pretty much necessarily isn't. Second, and with the caveat that I'm not trying to say that it is a good movie, I thought the main character's motivations and character arc were pretty clear. He's primarily motivated by the conflicting guidance of his father's words and the example his father set with his actions; his character arc is basically, through meeting Space Dad and running into a situation where he couldn't maintain anonymity and save the day, learning to reconcile the two motivations. I even think, while Jonathan Kent's concerns weren't stated as well as they could be, they're basically sensible, relateable concerns, especially if you remember that he doesn't know everything the audience does.
Lastly, and most importantly, the issue of tangible details. First, however understandable it is, citing tangible details rather than the actual problems remains bad criticism, which is all I've been saying all along. Bad criticism is bad both because there's no reason to be wrong when you could not be, but also because it leads to situations like the myopia Legato_Endless lampooned by bringing up the studio's solemn vow that dudes' hair will get messy when they fight; because the problems cited by the largest and loudest bodies of fan criticism are basically inane trivialities, the number one priority in future entries is often going to end up being addressing those inane trivialities.
Moreover, a ton of people aren't actually complaining about tangible details; for the details they complain about to be tangible, those details have to exist, and a ton of details that anchor the most common complaints just do not exist. They simply are not in the movie. Take DiscipleofBob's basically total misreading of the world engine scene, the common complaint about Superman killing kryptonian babies/fetuses, the exaggeration-turned-"fact" that the entire city of Metropolis was leveled, and even the truly bizarre notion that Clark never smiles.
None of these things are tangible details, let alone valid complaints, because their central premise simply is not true. I don't care if people like the movie, and I don't have anything against honest, thoughtful criticism, however harsh it may be. However, the people involved in a film put time, effort, and care into making it and I think propping up one's already ill-considered criticism with outright fabrications goes beyond being disrespectful, and I do object to that.


Let me let you in on a little secret of film scripts: every script has plot holes.
What? No they don't. Plenty of movies don't have plot holes. A number of movies, by their very nature, basically can't have plot holes. I mean, what's the plot hole in My Dinner with Andre? Or, you know, basically any movie with a sufficiently unreliable narrator or where it's otherwise ambiguous how much of what we see is real. If the whole point of the movie is that the story probably isn't true or isn't really happening as it's being depicted, there isn't really a plot hole even when the narrative doesn't really add up, because that's kind of the whole point.


Toy Story is one of the most quintessential buddy comedies of all time. It's story centers around a toy who doesn't realize he's a toy . . . yet still falls immobile every single time he's within sight of a child.
I think an even bigger problem is that it makes the idea of Sid as a villain largely inexplicable. I mean, even if we assume the falling immobile thing is somehow hard-wired into toys so they might not be aware that they do it or what it entails (and thus Buzz's confusion is explicable), it makes it impossible for Sid to know he's harming animate beings any way you slice it. So really, Sid isn't mean or even callous, since he thinks he's just having creative (if visually macabre) fun with unfeeling hunks of plastic. Yet he's not really presented like a dinosaur in Jurrassic Park, a hostile force of nature generally unaware of its "villainy"; he's presented as a bad, mean kid, yet he has no way of knowing that what he's doing is wrong.


Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the two most influential action films of all time. One of it's most memorable action scenes, the one where Marion and Indy try and capture the plane, can be cut entirely from the film and lose nothing from the plot. The scene only happens because Indy thinks the Ark will be loaded on the plane, which is incorrect, and which he will be told within a minute of the scene concluding.
A character being mislead or making a wrong turn isn't a plot hole, it's a plot device. Not all scenes in a movie have to service the plot; some provide characterization, while others set up memorable visuals or, in this case, wacky action setpieces.


What I don't get with the new Superman movies is why they're so dead set on making the Kents terrible people who continually try to talk their son out of being a hero.

I don't think this really makes them terrible people. Plenty of real life parents, who are basically decent people, try to talk their children out of dangerous professions that involve helping others. I know a lot of people whose parents weren't comfortable with them becoming firefighters or choosing to do aid work in dangerous places. It may not be the most noble, selfless outlook, but I think it's an understandable, human outlook that certainly doesn't make you a bad person. While Clark is admittedly considerably more durable than the average kid going off to do relief work in dangerous places, the Kents don't really know exactly how invulnerable he is, because they haven't read Superman comics and don't go around shooting their kid just to see what happens.
The actual dialogue could've been handled considerably better, and Jonathan's reservations seem weird to us because dramatic irony is against him, but from an actual perspective of what the character would know and the actual gist of the points he's not doing a great job of making, I don't really think anything really unreasonable or terrible is going on. If you wanted to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, not that you should, I don't think it's out of the question to read the bad job Jonathan does conveying his argument, combined with his actions later in the movie, as indicative of the fact that he's trying to protect his son but doesn't actually believe what he's saying.


The second one is definitely true (it's part of why Superman's so awesome, because he helps anyway), but having the Kents point it out to him shouldn't be done...and shouldn't be necessary: it's a great example of "show, don't tell", where Superman saving the world despite having the choice to do otherwise because that' one of the high points of the character.

In theory, I think this is a totally fair criticism. I really wished we didn't have people just flatly stating their motivations and character dynamics, or at least that it didn't happen so constantly. In practice, though, it's hard to blame them for leaning away from "show, don't tell" when the audience apparently cannot be trusted to follow plots that are blatantly, directly explained to them. I mean, apparently, they needed to tell more.

[Bobb]

....In practice, though, it's hard to blame them for leaning away from "show, don't tell" when the audience apparently cannot be trusted to follow plots that are blatantly, directly explained to them. I mean, apparently, they needed to tell more.



Poor little misunderstood MoS. If only people understood what was happening they'd stop being so irrational.





:smallannoyed: Just because you found a poster who didn't remember the movie correctly doesn't mean you get to broadside that at MoS critics.

[Anteros]

I don't think this really makes them terrible people. Plenty of real life parents, who are basically decent people, try to talk their children out of dangerous professions that involve helping others. I know a lot of people whose parents weren't comfortable with them becoming firefighters or choosing to do aid work in dangerous places. It may not be the most noble, selfless outlook, but I think it's an understandable, human outlook that certainly doesn't make you a bad person. While Clark is admittedly considerably more durable than the average kid going off to do relief work in dangerous places, the Kents don't really know exactly how invulnerable he is, because they haven't read Superman comics and don't go around shooting their kid just to see what happens.
The actual dialogue could've been handled considerably better, and Jonathan's reservations seem weird to us because dramatic irony is against him, but from an actual perspective of what the character would know and the actual gist of the points he's not doing a great job of making, I don't really think anything really unreasonable or terrible is going on. If you wanted to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, not that you should, I don't think it's out of the question to read the bad job Jonathan does conveying his argument, combined with his actions later in the movie, as indicative of the fact that he's trying to protect his son but doesn't actually believe what he's saying.


No, I'm sorry. I don't care how worried you are about your kid, when you utter the sentence "maybe you should have let that bus full of children drown to protect your secret" you're a monster.

Besides, they fully know how powerful he is by the second movie and they're still playing up Ma Kent's "you don't owe this planet anything." Yes, he does. He lives here. He owes the planet just as much as any one else who lives on it you terrible, terrible excuse for a mother.

Also, what kind of person just stands there and lets his perfectly healthy father die to protect himself from becoming a celebrity? Forget the city destruction, the scenes with the Kents are far more out of character for Superman than anything else.

That's really the problem with the movie as a whole. The story is fine, and the characters are fine, but they're not Superman, and they're not Ma and Pa Kent. Not on the fundamental level that has defined these characters for decades.

[L Space]

I don't think this really makes them terrible people. Plenty of real life parents, who are basically decent people, try to talk their children out of dangerous professions that involve helping others. I know a lot of people whose parents weren't comfortable with them becoming firefighters or choosing to do aid work in dangerous places. It may not be the most noble, selfless outlook, but I think it's an understandable, human outlook that certainly doesn't make you a bad person. While Clark is admittedly considerably more durable than the average kid going off to do relief work in dangerous places, the Kents don't really know exactly how invulnerable he is, because they haven't read Superman comics and don't go around shooting their kid just to see what happens.
The actual dialogue could've been handled considerably better, and Jonathan's reservations seem weird to us because dramatic irony is against him, but from an actual perspective of what the character would know and the actual gist of the points he's not doing a great job of making, I don't really think anything really unreasonable or terrible is going on. If you wanted to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, not that you should, I don't think it's out of the question to read the bad job Jonathan does conveying his argument, combined with his actions later in the movie, as indicative of the fact that he's trying to protect his son but doesn't actually believe what he's saying.
The problem for me wasn't that Jonathan was worried about Clark's physical safety, it's that Jonathan told Clark that people wouldn't trust him and they would alienate him if they found out. Jonathan and Martha were supposed to be the ones to teach Clark to have hope and to think the best of people. Instead Jonathan hinted that maybe Clark should have let a bus full of kids die, just to protect his secret.

Edit: Anteros beat me to it :smalltongue:.

[Tyndmyr]

I couldn't help but feel the exact same way, if for no other reason than it's a completely self-inflicted gunshot wound. If I had any money, I would consider it a very safe bet that the flashbacks were a studio decision in order to avoid telling the same origin story again. Now this is problematic partly because it reveals an ignorance of how malleable the steps of the hero's journey can be, and that if you know what you are doing, you can use the same steps to tell wildly different stories.

But there's also the problem that if you introduce flashbacks, you have to know how to use them to augment the present story. The flashback structure of Batman Begins doesn't work because they use flashbacks; it's just a structural technique. It's that they layered the information to show exactly what we needed to know to inform the present situation and tell the story of Bruce Wayne. So when they were presented with a directive to use flashbacks here, they then realized that they really had nothing to inform Clark's character.

Honestly, if I were doing the writing, and the producers insisted on flashbacks, I'd have written it so that young Clark was angry and quick to vengeance, and Jonathan had to teach him to be forgiving and kind. It doesn't fit with Superman mythos at all, but it does make for a more compelling narrative arc, and it automatically sharpens the conflict for the film: Zod is also quick to anger and vengeful, and therefore is both a representation of everything Clark could become and a devil on his shoulder tempting him to do the wrong thing he wants to do. And it's the human Jonathan and Martha Kent who pull him back, calling him to make the right choice of the option that Jor-El provided him.

There was like...part of an interesting sci-fi space opera about created humans and destiny and roles in society just sort of grafted onto a superman movie.

It could have been something actually really interesting in a different context, explored more fully. In this movie, it was just odd, and superman's parents beliefs in this regard are...ultimately kind of unimportant. Ultimately, Zod's after the McGuffin, which is here because...poorly explained reasons...and wants to make THIS world, instead of any other, into Krypton because....reasons, I guess. The whole connection of all this feels like it's straight BS.

Does this scout ship just HAPPEN to have space dad's AI embedded in it? That's a helluva convenience. And odd, given his original's fate. When would he have arranged that? Before, presuambly. Which, if you're gonna set him up as some kind of mastermind, kinda dumb to have a beacon to bring Zod to your son who you are trying to save from...Zod. There's just no way that this all hangs together. The movie feels like it's different things poorly pasted together, rather than a cohesive whole.

[Kyberwulf]

I think the Kents where okay. I mean, most of what Pa Kent was trying to teach him could be read on his face. It's called acting. You can tell what he was telling Clark was eating at him. I don't think we need to be force feed the Kents are the perfect American family. We didn't really need to be told that in the original movies.

Clark not doing anything to save Pa Kent from the tornado, was an important scene. It showed that he did what he was told. Which sets up why he hadn't tried to become a superhero for most of the rest of the movie. Again transitioning to him becoming something more at the end.

Truth be told. Superman doesn't owe the world anything. No body owes the world anything. We should be helping the world because it's the right thing to do, which I suspect is the reason Superman will be thing to help the world. But, owing the world means there is a debt.

[McStabbington]

I disagree on a few levels. First, about the other movies necessarily being worthier; I don't think Superman Returns necessarily is and I'd pretty confidently say, even as an almost unconditional Pryor fan, Superman III pretty much necessarily isn't.

. . . Where exactly do I say that it is bad compared to Superman Returns and Superman 3? I don't recall speaking about them at all, and if you had asked me about them, I'd have said that they were terrible films also, both as films and as Superman films.

I do recall editing my post for length at that part where I compared MoS rather unflatteringly to Captain America: The First Avenger. Captain America 1 is also not a great film; even if you by Howard Hawks' definition of a classic film (3 great scenes, no bad scenes), that film doesn't even approach great (2 great scenes, a bunch of meh that roughly equals out to 1 or 2 outright bad scenes). What it does do, however, is absolutely nail the central character because it engages in excellent, meat-and-potatoes character arcing to build a satisfying story. Scene by scene, we see Steve Rogers as a man with a lot of spirit and courage gradually build himself not simply into a great warrior, but an outstanding leader of men and an inspiration, while still staying decent and humble. It's the best on-screen depiction of integrity in a superhero film since the original Superman film, and they do it with simple, plain A to B storytelling. Man of Steel did not have that.


Second, and with the caveat that I'm not trying to say that it is a good movie, I thought the main character's motivations and character arc were pretty clear. He's primarily motivated by the conflicting guidance of his father's words and the example his father set with his actions; his character arc is basically, through meeting Space Dad and running into a situation where he couldn't maintain anonymity and save the day, learning to reconcile the two motivations. I even think, while Jonathan Kent's concerns weren't stated as well as they could be, they're basically sensible, relateable concerns, especially if you remember that he doesn't know everything the audience does.

And this is why we both feel that MoS doesn't deserve defense as a great film, because even if you are correct and aren't stretching like crazy not to condemn the plot of this film, you do realize that this makes Jonathan Kent the antagonist of the film, right? In this formulation, Zod is purely incidental; he merely happens to be the thing that first threatened Earth in a way that Clark couldn't stop and maintain his place as handsome hobo savior. It's Jonathan Kent that causes the change in action that Clark must defeat to become a hero.

Now tell me that this was the intent of the writers.


A character being mislead or making a wrong turn isn't a plot hole, it's a plot device. Not all scenes in a movie have to service the plot; some provide characterization, while others set up memorable visuals or, in this case, wacky action setpieces.


All right, I cut a bunch of sophistry there, because this demonstrates that you're more interested in arguing for the sake of arguing than for actually countering the point. Your argument can be reduced to "a scene that serves no story function and contributes nothing to the plot doesn't fit the definition of a 'plot hole'." Indy isn't misled in that scene. He doesn't make a wrong turn. He comes to a conclusion with no prompting, action cul-de-sac, immediate negation of the importance of that scene, next action scene. In any ordinary usage of the term, that's a plot hole.

Moreover, you are so interested in debating me line by line that you are simply ignoring that the entire reason Raiders of the Lost Ark was mentioned was as an example in a larger argument about the importance of creating strong, overarching themes and character arcs that resonate with people. Raiders of the Lost Ark did, so the average viewer will roll with the film plot holes and all. Man of Steel did not, so the average viewer will pick on the plot elements without mercy. Whether the airplane scene is a plot hole or a mere plot device? Irrelevant to that argument.

When and if you want to argue about the forest rather than the trees, come back to me.


I don't think this really makes them terrible people.

Zrak, the father you are defending in this film watched kids beating on his son, and instead of doing something just stood there gawping before offering some vague profundities. Now any normal parent would be cringing at that behavior, I don't care how indestructible their child is. And any good person would be pulling those kids apart, if for no other reason than because if Clark gets angry, he will kill those kids, and not in the metaphorical sense. I'm sorry man, but your argument just does not, and cannot survive that scene. It is an appalling and morally indefensible scene. If that were the one time Jonathan Kent did something like that, it would be grounds for removing Clark from the Kent's custody. And the writers completely failed to notice it.

[MLai]

And the writers completely failed to notice it.
This can be the 1-line summary of all condemnations directed at this movie.

[Zrak]

:smallannoyed: Just because you found a poster who didn't remember the movie correctly doesn't mean you get to broadside that at MoS critics.
It's not just the one criticism by one guy; enough of the most common criticisms (such as the ones I mentioned in response to McStabbington, or the claim that Superman doesn't save anyone) basically hinge on misunderstanding or outright ignoring the events unfolding on screen that I'm pretty comfortable with that facetious comment as a general observation.


No, I'm sorry. I don't care how worried you are about your kid, when you utter the sentence "maybe you should have let that bus full of children drown to protect your secret" you're a monster.
Eh, I disagree. The idea that one should let other people die to protect one's own well being isn't something people often vocalize, but it's something basically everyone tacitly accepts. Almost all of us could do a lot more than we do to save others' lives, but we don't, and our reasons for not doing so are often far pettier than Pa Kent's well-founded concern for Clark's safety and well-being. It seems pretty callous to say it ouright, but it's something basically everyone does and I'm not ready to call Jonathan Kent a monster because he's a straight shooter about it.


. . . Where exactly do I say that it is bad compared to Superman Returns and Superman 3? I don't recall speaking about them at all, and if you had asked me about them, I'd have said that they were terrible films also, both as films and as Superman films.
You brought up why people compare Man of Steel to "other, worthier" superhero films on the heels of a discussion that primarily involved comparing it to other Superman movies. What else was I to assume? How would I know you were making a point about why people "keep citing" movies that haven't yet come up in the conversation?


And this is why we both feel that MoS doesn't deserve defense as a great film, because even if you are correct and aren't stretching like crazy not to condemn the plot of this film, you do realize that this makes Jonathan Kent the antagonist of the film, right? In this formulation, Zod is purely incidental; he merely happens to be the thing that first threatened Earth in a way that Clark couldn't stop and maintain his place as handsome hobo savior. It's Jonathan Kent that causes the change in action that Clark must defeat to become a hero.
Personally, I don't really see what's wrong with Jonathan Kent being, in a strictly screenwriting sense, the antagonist. I think people get too hung up on the (false) equivalence between antagonist and "bad guy."


Now tell me that this was the intent of the writers.
Authorial intent is fundamentally unknowable. As such, I do not concern myself with it.


All right, I cut a bunch of sophistry there, because this demonstrates that you're more interested in arguing for the sake of arguing than for actually countering the point. Your argument can be reduced to "a scene that serves no story function and contributes nothing to the plot doesn't fit the definition of a 'plot hole'." Indy isn't misled in that scene. He doesn't make a wrong turn. He comes to a conclusion with no prompting, action cul-de-sac, immediate negation of the importance of that scene, next action scene. In any ordinary usage of the term, that's a plot hole.
Actually, it isn't. A plot hole isn't a scene which fails to contribute to the plot, or turns out to be basically extraneous upon closer scrutiny, it's a logical inconsistency within the story—like when an internal chronology doesn't add up, or a character knows something they couldn't possibly know. The Raiders of the Lost Ark scene doesn't qualify because its inclusion doesn't make the overall plot make any less sense. It might have turned out to be a waste of time for the characters, or the wrong guess about where the arc was being housed, but there's nothing inherently inconsistent about Indy going to look for the Arc in the place he already knows the Nazis are camped, since he also already knows the Nazis have the Arc.


Moreover, you are so interested in debating me line by line that you are simply ignoring that the entire reason Raiders of the Lost Ark was mentioned was as an example in a larger argument about the importance of creating strong, overarching themes and character arcs that resonate with people. Raiders of the Lost Ark did, so the average viewer will roll with the film plot holes and all. Man of Steel did not, so the average viewer will pick on the plot elements without mercy. Whether the airplane scene is a plot hole or a mere plot device? Irrelevant to that argument.
I didn't really address the broader point because, unless I misunderstood, it's basically an elucidation/rehash of the general "tangible details" argument you made earlier, which I addressed then. I didn't really see a reason to reiterate my sentiments on the subject. I corrected you about your misuse of "plot hole" not to be contentious but because you were misusing the term and, generally, correcting misunderstandings is the right course of action. For instance, if I've misapprehended your line of argument, here, please correct me. :smallwink:


Zrak, the father you are defending in this film watched kids beating on his son, and instead of doing something just stood there gawping before offering some vague profundities. Now any normal parent would be cringing at that behavior, I don't care how indestructible their child is. And any good person would be pulling those kids apart, if for no other reason than because if Clark gets angry, he will kill those kids, and not in the metaphorical sense. I'm sorry man, but your argument just does not, and cannot survive that scene. It is an appalling and morally indefensible scene. If that were the one time Jonathan Kent did something like that, it would be grounds for removing Clark from the Kent's custody. And the writers completely failed to notice it.
I think this really depends on where you came from. I came up in a relatively rural part of Colorado, and while the attitude was changing somewhat by the time I was hitting adolescence (or was simply different in the more urban area where I went to high school), I think the prevailing outlook on this sort of thing was basically "boys will be boys." I think my dad probably would've broken up a fight like that, but I don't think a lot of my friends', relatives', and neighbors' dads would have and I don't really think they all deserved to lose custody of their children. For what it's worth, I honestly didn't think twice about Jonathan Kent's behavior in that scene. I still don't really get what the big deal is. If he breaks up one fight, there are just going to be more. He's not going to be there all the time, and nothing puts blood in the water of childhood bullying like parental intervention.

[Hopeless]

From what I recall Zod and his crew transmitted a signal causing the scout ship to reply.

They were literally jumping system to system searching for the lost colonies of Krypton and quite possibly on the run from whatever destroyed them when they got the reply from the ship on Earth.

Kal-el discovered the ship and upon boarding used his key with the dad AI which turned off the beacon alerting Zod that someone had accessed the ship and quite probably from dissecting the information gleaned prior to the beacon being turned off discovered whoever or whatever turned it off registered as being of the HOuse of El.

Given they assumed everyone on Krypton barring on child was dead when they were released from the Phantom Zone its a no brainer they realised Jor-El's son was on Earth and Zod being already deranged from surviving Krypton's destruction and knowing whatever was responsible for the destruction of those colonies might be coming after them wasn't likely to behave remotely sane at that point!

Yes bad writing, only differentce between this and the Spiderman 2 movie was one was truly appalling and the other really should have watched Smallville and taken notes!

[GloatingSwine]

I do recall editing my post for length at that part where I compared MoS rather unflatteringly to Captain America: The First Avenger. Captain America 1 is also not a great film; even if you by Howard Hawks' definition of a classic film (3 great scenes, no bad scenes), that film doesn't even approach great (2 great scenes, a bunch of meh that roughly equals out to 1 or 2 outright bad scenes).


TFA is 80 minutes of a really good film with 30 minutes of a rather unfortunate set of Wolfenstein cutscenes awkwardly bolted on to the end.

[MLai]

(1) Pa Kent tells his child that he should have let an entire busload of kids drown. Not as a thought experiment, but really.
(2) Pa Kent watches some kids bully his child and does nothing, knowing that his child basically packs a Magnum in each finger if he gets angry and retaliates.
(3) Pa Kent screws up his child for years by committing suicide in front of him.

Zrak responds:

it's something basically everyone does and I'm not ready to call Jonathan Kent a monster because he's a straight shooter about it.

Personally, I don't really see what's wrong with Jonathan Kent being, in a strictly screenwriting sense, the antagonist. I think people get too hung up on the (false) equivalence between antagonist and "bad guy."

I honestly didn't think twice about Jonathan Kent's behavior in that scene. I still don't really get what the big deal is. If he breaks up one fight, there are just going to be more. He's not going to be there all the time, and nothing puts blood in the water of childhood bullying like parental intervention.
I personally think that you've lost most of your credibility in positioning yourself as the unbiased party.


And the writers completely failed to notice it.
This basically applies to you too, Zrak. I think MoS was basically written by ppl who on some levels think like you.

I'm not trying to get a rise out of you; I really don't care that much about Superman (or American comic books in general). It's just funny to me how gaping this gulf between mindsets are. But you can't chalk it up to other ppl being stupid, when you're so incapable of seeing what many others are seeing.

[Zrak]

Zrak responds:
This is really a pretty disingenuous framing of the conversation. You've decontextualized quotes from larger posts, left out previous posts on the same subject entirely, and even presented the quotes in a way that could easily the impression they're responding to points they aren't. They're not really even responses to the three bullet points you listed; none of the quotes come from a response to your third bullet point, while the quote about Jonathan Kent as the narrative's antagonist isn't a direct response to any of the bullet points. You basically just listed three points and pulled out three quotes, apparently at random. It's one thing to pull out a sentence (or part of a sentence) if you have a response to a point it raises, specifically, but it's pretty disingenuous to pull out essentially random sentences and quote them as though they summarized the entire argument.


I personally think that you've lost most of your credibility in positioning yourself as the unbiased party.
You say, as someone generally on the other side of the debate. Nobody is ever the unbiased party.


This basically applies to you too, Zrak. I think MoS was basically written by ppl who on some levels think like you.
I think it's more that I'm generally more willing or able to put myself in others' headspace, whether it's the writers of the movie or the fictional Kents. Rather than just accept my initial reaction as completely correct and justified, I think about where people/characters are coming from and why they might behave as they do. I had the same initial reaction to the "busload of kids" line most people did, until I thought about how actual parents actually behave; not just in the big-picture sense that they'll do anything to protect their children, but also in the small-scale sense that parents say "I don't know, maybe," whether they really mean it or not when they get backed into a corner while trying to give a lecture. Like I said in a part of my response you didn't bother to quote, the dialogue could've been handled a lot better, because I think everyone's initial reaction is basically going to be horror. I just don't think that reaction is really justified, on closer examination.


I'm not trying to get a rise out of you; I really don't care that much about Superman (or American comic books in general). It's just funny to me how gaping this gulf between mindsets are. But you can't chalk it up to other ppl being stupid, when you're so incapable of seeing what many others are seeing.

In terms of reading scenes which are actually in the movie differently, I'm capable of seeing what they're seeing. I just think they're wrong. In terms of common complaints based upon scenes or details which weren't actually in the film (or the lack of details which were in the film), of course I can't see what they're seeing. What they're seeing straight up doesn't exist.

[Bobb]

@Zrak, fair enough.

I don't think we can form any more common ground than we already have so I'm out.

[Legato Endless]

Eh, I disagree. The idea that one should let other people die to protect one's own well being isn't something people often vocalize, but it's something basically everyone tacitly accepts. Almost all of us could do a lot more than we do to save others' lives, but we don't, and our reasons for not doing so are often far pettier than Pa Kent's well-founded concern for Clark's safety and well-being. It seems pretty callous to say it ouright, but it's something basically everyone does and I'm not ready to call Jonathan Kent a monster because he's a straight shooter about it.

I'm not sure if those two postulates are quite equivalent. The altruistic paradox of not doing all one can is an unfortunate reality, but it's a different chestnut whether balancing one's life and selfish desires is the same as incidental societal duty. Is altruism morally obligatory? The scope is not just a difference in size, but of nature.

That I take a month off from the constant fight against systemic problem x is probably not treated the same as seeing a person drowning in a lake and simply walking away and letting them die. That I do based off a fairly ethereal existential fear is also not something I would wager a lot of people would functionally equate.

Whether you should run a few feet into a burning house* and risk your own skin is one argument. Jonathan appears to not even endorse calling 911, as he frames the entire issue in universal language in the film. And that's arguably rather unsympathetic. People in disaster movies are often killed for doing such missteps as giving into survival instincts and not helping their fellows in distress.

While it's true that characters who don't fail are boring, Clark isn't a normal character. He has a longstanding association with the messianic archetype. Messiahs aren't allowed to fail in certain ways or they break the concept. That Clark is framed as one, but doesn't seem to embody some notion of the concept is a problematic structurally depending on ones definitions. Being a decent person isn't good enough here. And if this were a deconstruction, it wasn't a very deft one.

So when Ms. Kent states that he doesn't owe the world anything, a world that has shepherded him for his entire life and to which he is minimally indirectly responsible for heaping a massive amount of pain and suffering upon, I'm not sure if the issue is as cut and dry as she wants to think. Granted, my upbringing stressed societal responsibility, so I might be a conditioned outlier.

*This is a random illustrative metaphor, please don't nitpick proper fire safety.

[AvatarVecna]

Sure, I don't try and stop a bus from falling off a cliff, even when it's happening right in front of me. Sure, I don't throw myself in between a bus and an unsuspecting pedestrian. Sure, I don't try and steal guns away from criminals before they can shoot their hostages. Would I try if it was my job? Probably, but I'd know how easy it would be for me to fail. Hostage negotiators are careful because them screwing up means somebody dies; they know how easy failure might be, but they still have to at least try.

There's an important distinction between me and Clark Kent, though, between a hostage negotiator and Clark Kent: if a bus is falling off a cliff in front of me, or is some gunman's got a pistol to a hostage's head, I am physically incapable of doing jack diddly to save anybody, no matter how much I may wish I could; meanwhile, Clark Kent is the goddamned Superman. "More powerful than a locomotive" to pull up the bus full of children; "faster than a speeding bullet" to save the hostage before the bullet can leave the barrel. When I fail to act, it's partly concern for me own safety, and partly knowing how useless my "help" would be. Superman has neither excuse, not really.

Oh, the government's going to kidnap him? Tie him down, cut him open, full-on dissection? He's Superman! He'll only be captured if he lets them do so, he'll only stay tied down because he doesn't feel like breaking out, and even if he wanted to he couldn't let them cut him open.

[McStabbington]

I do not know that I would say he is full-bore Messianic figure, Legato (though admittedly, I don't think you either intended or were arguing for this position). Obviously, we can't go too deeply into this, forum rules being forum rules and all, but it has struck me for years now that iconography that portrays Clark as a Messianic character is a dead giveaway that the people producing this work really don't understand Superman. Now partly this is because if there's one story that two young immigrants named Seigal and Schuster are probably not telling, it's the story of Jesus.

But there's the much larger fact that Messianic figures are interested in, well, religious themes. What happens with you when you die, what is the nature of the immortal soul, that sort of thing. Superman has none of that. He's not concerned with people's souls; he just wants people to be nicer and more just to one another. He's closer to Mr. Rogers than he is any religious figure. I mean sure, his character is typically seen as influenced by religion (IIRC, he's mostly portrayed as Methodist or Lutheran depending on the author), but that doesn't make him go full-on Messianic except in the alternate universes where he's gone nuts.

Consequently, I can't help but look at Supes in those standard iconographic poses and think that this only shows that the writers and directors don't understand either religion or Superman. It's kind of the religious equivalent of one of those technobabble scenes on later versions of Star Trek where anyone who actually knows what those words mean rolls their eyes and prays that Janeway orders Torres to get checked in Sickbay for what's causing her aphasia.

[Kyberwulf]

That's the problem though. He isn't Superman yet. He is just the Man of Steel. Clark has the problem of being judged for who he will be, against who he is now. "He should have saved the bus, because he is Superman" No, he is BOY, with superpowers. "He should have saved his dad" No, he is a teenager who is used to listening and respecting his fathers wishes. "He should have been training for the day he will be Superman" No, he was just a dude with superpowers. Personally I am glad Pa Kent was so hard on the boy. Think of it, if he just let the boy do whatever his whims wanted him to do. How much different Clark could have been. Personally, I question the validity of anyone who just says, "He has superpowers! He is Invincible! He should be saving the WORLD.!" He may have the powers, but does he have the knowledge or experience to use them responsibly?


People went into this movie expecting a Saturday morning cartoon. What they got was an attempt at a more realistic attempt at a story. People judged this movie, not on it's own merit, but on it's popularity. I think this movie would have gotten flak if it was as cartoony in the way everyone seems to want it. I had the same reaction at first. I didn't like it, but then I started to think about things in this movie. By the time it was over, I was thinking this movie wasn't as bad as people where making it out to be. I wasn't my favorite movie. I just never saw all the bad things this movie was hyped out to be.

All I have been trying to say, is Batman vs Superman could be good, if you don't go into expecting something. Then holding it down because it's not the perfect photocopy match of what you thought the movie should be.

[Anteros]

No, what we got was a story that completely misses the point of the character under the guise of "realism". It's certainly reasonable for a character to have an origin story like the one in MoS, but that character isn't going to be Superman.

It's like if you gave Batman an origin where the Waynes don't die and he has a happy childhood. Sure, you can tell a good story about a hero with that origin, and it might even be an interesting subversion...but it's not the same character.

[Kyberwulf]

I fail to see that analogy, They didn't really change much. Clark came from another planet, landed in Kansas. Was raised by a good family. Which I am willing to extrapolate judging from the fact that Clark is still a good guy. His father died, which sent him wondering the world looking for his place in life.

The equivalent of changing Batman's origins would be that of what happens in Gotham.

Unlike most people, I am waiting to see what they do with the character. How he becomes Superman. This is the beginning. I am willing to allow that Superman isn't perfect at the beginning.

[L Space]

That's the problem though. He isn't Superman yet. He is just the Man of Steel. Clark has the problem of being judged for who he will be, against who he is now. "He should have saved the bus, because he is Superman" No, he is BOY, with superpowers. "He should have saved his dad" No, he is a teenager who is used to listening and respecting his fathers wishes. "He should have been training for the day he will be Superman" No, he was just a dude with superpowers. Personally I am glad Pa Kent was so hard on the boy. Think of it, if he just let the boy do whatever his whims wanted him to do. How much different Clark could have been. Personally, I question the validity of anyone who just says, "He has superpowers! He is Invincible! He should be saving the WORLD.!" He may have the powers, but does he have the knowledge or experience to use them responsibly?
It's not about Pa Kent letting him do whatever he wants. It's about the fact that Pa Kent was supposed to be someone that taught Clark to see the good in everyone and to help them however he could, but MoS Pa Kent seemed to teach him the exact opposite of that.

[MLai]

This is really a pretty disingenuous framing of the conversation. You've decontextualized quotes from larger posts,
No it's not. I've linked your original post in my post; anyone who wants to read the full thing can click on it. It was obvious from my spacing that I only took snips out of a longer post, and I never said it was in straight Q&A format. They were quotes illustrative of your overall opinion on the topic of Pa Kent. That is not "out of context".

I am not willing to Omnislash people's posts into illegibility in my replies. Some forums ban that deceptive reply method, and I'm surprised this strict forum doesn't do so. I take the time to summarize somewhat.


I think it's more that I'm generally more willing or able to put myself in others' headspace, whether it's the writers of the movie or the fictional Kents. Rather than just accept my initial reaction as completely correct and justified,
Your initial reaction was in fact completely correct and justified.

Sure, there are fathers who tell their kids "Don't help people because then you'd have to stay for the police report" and "Fight your own battles, son. I ain't stepping in even when multiple kids push and shove you." Both those type of fathers do not end up raising a son like Superman.

Most people are not born good or evil. They're raised that way. Clark is not a reincarnation of Buddha from birth. He's good only because he was raised by genuinely good people, people who will try to pull you from a burning car despite risk to themselves, without a second thought. Pa Kent did not represent that American ideal of simple decency in this movie; we had to convince ourselves of it based on what we know of the Superman mythos. The writers completely lost sight of who they're writing about, for the sake of "realism". That's why (1 of many reasons) ppl say this is not Superman.

[Zrak]

I'm not sure if those two postulates are quite equivalent. The altruistic paradox of not doing all one can is an unfortunate reality, but it's a different chestnut whether balancing one's life and selfish desires is the same as incidental societal duty. Is altruism morally obligatory? The scope is not just a difference in size, but of nature.

That I take a month off from the constant fight against systemic problem x is probably not treated the same as seeing a person drowning in a lake and simply walking away and letting them die. That I do based off a fairly ethereal existential fear is also not something I would wager a lot of people would functionally equate.

Whether you should run a few feet into a burning house* and risk your own skin is one argument. Jonathan appears to not even endorse calling 911, as he frames the entire issue in universal language in the film. And that's arguably rather unsympathetic. People in disaster movies are often killed for doing such missteps as giving into survival instincts and not helping their fellows in distress.

While it's true that characters who don't fail are boring, Clark isn't a normal character. He has a longstanding association with the messianic archetype. Messiahs aren't allowed to fail in certain ways or they break the concept. That Clark is framed as one, but doesn't seem to embody some notion of the concept is a problematic structurally depending on ones definitions. Being a decent person isn't good enough here. And if this were a deconstruction, it wasn't a very deft one.

So when Ms. Kent states that he doesn't owe the world anything, a world that has shepherded him for his entire life and to which he is minimally indirectly responsible for heaping a massive amount of pain and suffering upon, I'm not sure if the issue is as cut and dry as she wants to think. Granted, my upbringing stressed societal responsibility, so I might be a conditioned outlier.

*This is a random illustrative metaphor, please don't nitpick proper fire safety.

While I agree that the two aren't equivalent, I also don't think they're altogether separable; any kind of categorical obligation to altruism is ultimately made up of a series of incidental societal/moral duties. If we accept that you can never even suggest personal safety and well-being come before any one incident of societal duty without being a monster, and that is the premise to which I was responding, I think we must also accept that you can never actually let personal safety or well-being come before any given incident of societal duty without being a monster; yet, I'd pretty confidently say all of us have let our selfish desires come before not just one, but a number of incidences of societal responsibility. Some are more immediate and observable, others are more diffuse or abstract, but we've all put ourselves first at least once in our life, and if even once suggesting that makes somebody a monster, I think doing so has to, as well.

Now, to be clear, that alone doesn't establish that what Jonathan Kent says in that scene is right, or justifiable, and I didn't really intend it to; I only intended to convey that I didn't think it was tenable to say the mere fact that the phrase has passed somebody's lips makes them a monster. I mean, putting aside a whole host of other objections, like the fact that I don't know how fair it is to base a totalizing moral assessment based upon one remark somebody makes in a pretty stressful situation, I just don't think the actual reasoning behind the indictment holds up. Whether the remark was ultimately justifiable in the specific situation we see in the film is a different matter, but that wasn't really what the remark to which I responded was about. It didn't deal with the specifics of the situation or the extent to which we're really supposed to believe Jonathan means what he says, it just said that no-matter how worried you are about your kid, you're a monster for suggesting they put their well-being ahead of others' lives. No-matter how you come down on that scene, specifically, I think as a categorical claim, that's really just untenable.

As far as making Jonathan unsympathetic, you're absolutely right. On a scale from cat-saving to dog-kicking, it definitely comes out much closer to the latter. Audiences' hearts are generally swayed by immediacy and visual accessibility more than long-term considerations of moral implications, and whichever side of the latter you feel Pa Kent's remarks fall on, they're definitely on the wrong end of the former. This is exacerbated by some pretty poor phrasing choices, which are themselves exacerbated by us not really spending enough time with Jonathan to get a sense of his speech patterns or rhetorical style to have a context in which to judge those poor phrasing choices. Ultimately, I think Jonathan's character is coming from pretty reasonable motivations, and makes an unreasonable but ultimately understandable argument, but pretty much everything about the set-up and execution of the scene does its best to alienate the viewer from the sympathetic, understandable parts of his position.

This is perhaps just different expectations for the character, but I have to disagree that being a decent person isn't really enough for Superman. I think the Superman stories that tend to work the best are the ones in which, although as messianic a figure as ever, he's basically presented as a messianic apotheosis of basic decency. At least when I think of a Kansas farm boy who's supposed to embody Truth, Justice, and an idealized version of the American way, that's what I imagine. The "loftier" the moral code one attempts to assign a character, the more likely it is to go totally sideways. Part of this is because individuals tend to have pretty different higher-order moral codes, and thus whatever "lofty" morality they assign Superman is more likely to clash (and often clash harshly) with a given individual's moral valuation. Part of it is because, even when the reader is on board with the moral code, that sort of thing tends to require a defter hand; pretty much every time Man of Steel tries to make some grander moral point, usually involving a pretty ham-fisted self-sacrifice, it trainwrecks pretty hard. Part of it is that a certain degree of moral rectitude is not just boring, but off-putting; it's ever-so-easy to cross over from righteousness into self-righteousness. The vague fundaments of basic decency, though, tend to be fairly agreeable, relatable, and simple to write.

I haven't said a lot about Ms. Kent because I can see both sides of the argument; ultimately, I would agree that he does owe the world something, but I don't think it's really clear-cut either way. Like you, I think my upbringing has a lot to do with that. On the one hand, like you, my upbringing stressed societal responsibility (and that's probably why I ultimately come down on that side), especially in the context of being aware of the advantages afforded me as a light-skinned male from a basically financially stable home. On the other hand, it was a hard to feel a debt to a society I could never really feel I belonged to; while being pale enough to pass for fully white and not having grown up on a reservation meant I was rarely directly treated as an outsider, I was nonetheless beset by reminders that I was one, and it can be hard to feel I owe society a debt based upon its failure to notice the traits it would've discriminated against if it had. While the situation is different because Clark's Otherness isn't embroiled in a messy history of colonialism (or, well, it's embroiled in a different history of colonialism that's only messy from a narrative perspective :smallwink:), I can see part of where she's coming from; it can be hard to justify a sense of responsibility to a world that has so often only accepted him for who it believes him to be, and so often rejected him for who he really is.


Sure, I don't try and stop a bus from falling off a cliff, even when it's happening right in front of me. Sure, I don't throw myself in between a bus and an unsuspecting pedestrian. Sure, I don't try and steal guns away from criminals before they can shoot their hostages. Would I try if it was my job? Probably, but I'd know how easy it would be for me to fail. Hostage negotiators are careful because them screwing up means somebody dies; they know how easy failure might be, but they still have to at least try.

There's an important distinction between me and Clark Kent, though, between a hostage negotiator and Clark Kent: if a bus is falling off a cliff in front of me, or is some gunman's got a pistol to a hostage's head, I am physically incapable of doing jack diddly to save anybody, no matter how much I may wish I could; meanwhile, Clark Kent is the goddamned Superman. "More powerful than a locomotive" to pull up the bus full of children; "faster than a speeding bullet" to save the hostage before the bullet can leave the barrel. When I fail to act, it's partly concern for me own safety, and partly knowing how useless my "help" would be. Superman has neither excuse, not really.

Oh, the government's going to kidnap him? Tie him down, cut him open, full-on dissection? He's Superman! He'll only be captured if he lets them do so, he'll only stay tied down because he doesn't feel like breaking out, and even if he wanted to he couldn't let them cut him open.

Ultimately, I think this is why the scene doesn't work. As I said earlier, part of the reason what Jonathan Kent says sounds ludicrous is because it's terribly phrased, but another big part of why it sounds ridiculous is because dramatic irony is against him. Sure, he has some idea of Clark's abilities, but he doesn't know all of the stuff you mention, or even enough of it not to worry about Clark pushing himself past his limits. The problem is that we, the audience, do know all of this stuff, and playing it for drama is always going to ring hollow because there's no suspense in it for us. The audience knowing something the characters don't only ever really serves drama if what the characters don't know makes the situation more dramatic or dangerous; we know the dude in Psycho shouldn't go into that basement, so every blissfully ignorant step he takes towards his doom increases the tension. When the information the characters don't know removes the danger, though, it takes all the suspense out of the scene; unless it's specifically played for laughs, it's going to fall flat.

Jonathan's worries are basically like basically like having a guy point a gun at Clark; unless there's something else going on for us to worry about, it doesn't really work to play the scenario for drama. It's not the random mugger's fault, he doesn't know this guy with glasses is Superman. His actions in the scene make perfect sense; from his perspective, this is a totally viable threat. From the audience's perspective, though, the scene is basically laughable. And that's the real problem with the Jonathan Kent scene: at best, its drama falls totally flat; at worst, it comes off in the various terrible ways people have complained about here.


No it's not. I've linked your original post in my post; anyone who wants to read the full thing can click on it. It was obvious from my spacing that I only took snips out of a longer post, and I never said it was in straight Q&A format. They were quotes illustrative of your overall opinion on the topic of Pa Kent. That is not "out of context".
I wouldn't really say those quotes were illustrative of my overall opinion, though. Hence my objection.



Your initial reaction was in fact completely correct and justified.

Sure, there are fathers who tell their kids "Don't help people because then you'd have to stay for the police report" and "Fight your own battles, son. I ain't stepping in even when multiple kids push and shove you." Both those type of fathers do not end up raising a son like Superman.
I don't think it's fair or tenable to reduce a father's character, or a child's upbringing, to a single remark, either in the case of this movie or categorically.


Most people are not born good or evil. They're raised that way. Clark is not a reincarnation of Buddha from birth. He's good only because he was raised by genuinely good people, people who will try to pull you from a burning car despite risk to themselves, without a second thought. Pa Kent did not represent that American ideal of simple decency in this movie; we had to convince ourselves of it based on what we know of the Superman mythos. The writers completely lost sight of who they're writing about, for the sake of "realism". That's why (1 of many reasons) ppl say this is not Superman.

So, if that car Pa Kent risks his life to pull a little girl out of in the tornado scene had been on fire, you'd be totally cool with his presentation? :smalltongue:
More seriously, I think there were a lot of things about Pa Kent that did showcase that ideal of simple decency. While it'd be wrong to pretend there aren't scenes which fail dismally at giving that impression, it's just as inaccurate to pretend there aren't scenes that, whatever their other problems are, illustrate that exact kind of decency.

[MLai]

Now, to be clear, that alone doesn't establish that what Jonathan Kent says in that scene is right, or justifiable, and I didn't really intend it to; I only intended to convey that I didn't think it was tenable to say the mere fact that the phrase has passed somebody's lips makes them a monster.

I don't think it's fair or tenable to reduce a father's character, or a child's upbringing, to a single remark, either in the case of this movie or categorically.
That is a good rule of thumb for real life, but this is a movie. Every scene in a movie is meant to inform; all the scenes strung together are meant to tell a coherent narrative.

Your defense of a movie cannot be "Well, IRL this man is complex. Sure he said something off-the-wall to his son in this scene, but he probably raised his son well in all the years offscreen." We do not see those years offscreen. We can, and should, only judge a character by what is presented in the 2 hrs of screentime.

Your defense also cannot be "Well this was an unwinnable situation; there was no perfect answer he could have given to make himself look good." The problem is the writer wrote Kent into that corner, without being able to write him out. That's not our fault, that's again the movie's own fault.


Ultimately, I think Jonathan's character is coming from pretty reasonable motivations, and makes an unreasonable but ultimately understandable argument, but pretty much everything about the set-up and execution of the scene does its best to alienate the viewer from the sympathetic, understandable parts of his position.
In other words, the movie was written badly, and a character was butchered.


So, if that car Pa Kent risks his life to pull a little girl out of in the tornado scene had been on fire, you'd be totally cool with his presentation? :smalltongue:
Problem is he immediately ruins it by committing suicide in front of his son and forcing his son to not intervene, hence screwing up Clark's head for years.
Your son became a homeless vagrant because of the trauma. You happy now, pops?

I'm glad you chose not to go on and on about my method of replying rather than addressing the movie itself, because I would've just ignored it.

[Zrak]

That is a good rule of thumb for real life, but this is a movie. Every scene in a movie is meant to inform; all the scenes strung together are meant to tell a coherent narrative.

Your defense of a movie cannot be "Well, IRL this man is complex. Sure he said something off-the-wall to his son in this scene, but he probably raised his son well in all the years offscreen." We do not see those years offscreen. We can, and should, only judge a character by what is presented in the 2 hrs of screentime.
While this is true, I think it's also true that we can and should judge that character by what is presented in the entire two hours of screen time, as a whole. There are a number of scenes of Jonathan Kent being the type of totally decent, level-headed dude we've come to expect, and I think it's important not just to consider those scenes when making a claim about his characterization overall, but also when looking at other individual scenes. The bus lecture reads a lot differently in the context of other scenes than it does in isolation.
Now, the fact that the audience doesn't readily connect the scene to that context is a problem, but I think it's mostly a structural, narrative problem, rather than a problem of characterization. Even then, the fact that a lot of the scenes that provide the most helpful context come after it or the fact that flashbacks were interrupted by extended forays back into the present probably wouldn't have been problems in a better directed movie, but this wasn't that movie.


Your defense also cannot be "Well this was an unwinnable situation; there was no perfect answer he could have given to make himself look good." The problem is the writer wrote Kent into that corner, without being able to write him out. That's not our fault, that's again the movie's own fault.
Well, yes and no; it depends what I'm trying to defend. If I were trying to say it's a good scene, I'd be in trouble. It's a much more viable defense if I'm just arguing that the characterization in and of itself isn't really the problem; I think the problem is more with the situation, and how the disparity between the audiences' and characters' knowledge of the situation influences the audience's reaction to it, than with the way the characters react to it.


In other words, the movie was written badly, and a character was butchered.
I know this may seem like splitting hairs, but I don't think the character was butchered, I think the scene was butchered in a way that reflected poorly on the character. While writing is certainly a component of that, direction or even editing might actually be more central to the problem, which is why I think the distinction is important to make.
Plus, just going by track records, it's a ball Snyder is more likely to drop than Goyer.


Problem is he immediately ruins it by committing suicide in front of his son and forcing his son to not intervene, hence screwing up Clark's head for years.
I really don't like it when people refer to that scene as Jonathan committing suicide. That isn't what happened in the scene, and I think framing it like that is tasteless and exploitative.


Your son became a homeless vagrant because of the trauma. You happy now, pops?
Isn't a period of homeless vagrancy a pretty typical part of the Superman origin package? It's not as central as getting sent from Krypton to Kansas, but I feel like it's hardly unique to this telling of the story.

[MLai]

Isn't a period of homeless vagrancy a pretty typical part of the Superman origin package? It's not as central as getting sent from Krypton to Kansas, but I feel like it's hardly unique to this telling of the story.
Really? Is that canon to the Superman comic book mythos? That Supes became a homeless bum for a number of years after he graduated? I thought that's for Bats?

I thought Supes graduated (from community college, I guess), went to North Pole and built the Fortress of Solitude, and then went to Metropolis to become a reporter?

My impression was that the 2nd segment was short (not years), and he wasn't being a homeless vagrant (with the listless mindset of one). A better analogy would be a man who goes into the countryside, rents himself a cabin, and then lives in it for several months while writing his novel.

[lord_khaine]

Problem is he immediately ruins it by committing suicide in front of his son and forcing his son to not intervene, hence screwing up Clark's head for years.
Your son became a homeless vagrant because of the trauma. You happy now, pops?


Yeah i think suicide by tornado is a pretty good term. Still cant get past the fact that he got killed before his family trying to save a dog, or that in all that confusion Clark could easily have saved him without revealing anything.
It was total chaos, so jump up, grab dad, vanish into the sky and then land in a nearby lake. Job done, and a story only the tabloids would pick up because it is so unlikely.
And thats one of the reasons for why i think that scene is so stupid, and the movie deserves all the flack it gets for it.

Though the part about Superman running around like a bum is completely alien for me as well, i am pretty sure its just another stupid thing added by the movie.

[Mystic Muse]

Calling it suicide might be wrong, but it's still by far one of the silliest things oin the whole movie.

Especially since Mr. Kent traditionally isn't dead, IIRC.

[Traab]

Really? Is that canon to the Superman comic book mythos? That Supes became a homeless bum for a number of years after he graduated? I thought that's for Bats?

I thought Supes graduated (from community college, I guess), went to North Pole and built the Fortress of Solitude, and then went to Metropolis to become a reporter?

My impression was that the 2nd segment was short (not years), and he wasn't being a homeless vagrant (with the listless mindset of one). A better analogy would be a man who goes into the countryside, rents himself a cabin, and then lives in it for several months while writing his novel.

Honestly, im as far from a superman expert outside the generics as its possible to be, but I have read more than a few fanfics that mention clark doing a globe trotting thing before he became "superman" I have no idea if he was just doing the superman version of backpacking across europe, or if there was a deeper reason for it, or if it even actually happened. It may be another one of those things that varied from incarnation to incarnation. This was based off the justice league unlimited cartoon iirc.

[Devonix]

Really? Is that canon to the Superman comic book mythos? That Supes became a homeless bum for a number of years after he graduated? I thought that's for Bats?

I thought Supes graduated (from community college, I guess), went to North Pole and built the Fortress of Solitude, and then went to Metropolis to become a reporter?

My impression was that the 2nd segment was short (not years), and he wasn't being a homeless vagrant (with the listless mindset of one). A better analogy would be a man who goes into the countryside, rents himself a cabin, and then lives in it for several months while writing his novel.

Actually Superman had up until New 52 rebooted the origin traveled the world for years after leaving Smalville studying and learning things so that when he became Superman officialy he'd be ready. There are even some stories of him and Batman ending up studying in the same places under different aliases.

Superman never just fell into being Superman, he trained for the job.

[Tyndmyr]

Honestly, im as far from a superman expert outside the generics as its possible to be, but I have read more than a few fanfics that mention clark doing a globe trotting thing before he became "superman" I have no idea if he was just doing the superman version of backpacking across europe, or if there was a deeper reason for it, or if it even actually happened. It may be another one of those things that varied from incarnation to incarnation. This was based off the justice league unlimited cartoon iirc.

Not really like the movie. Being superman, he could always travel pretty easily, so it's not at all odd for superman to visit other places, but he doesn't really do it homeless bum style. He's got way more of an everyman vibe. Gotta keep in mind that he's got an older origin, and thus, don't really involve a ton of soul-searching.

[Zrak]

Yeah i think suicide by tornado is a pretty good term. Still cant get past the fact that he got killed before his family trying to save a dog, or that in all that confusion Clark could easily have saved him without revealing anything.

It was total chaos, so jump up, grab dad, vanish into the sky and then land in a nearby lake. Job done, and a story only the tabloids would pick up because it is so unlikely.
And thats one of the reasons for why i think that scene is so stupid, and the movie deserves all the flack it gets for it.
It's really not a good term. Calling it that is, again, extremely tasteless and exploitative. It's kind of like calling things "rape" for rhetorical effect when those things are not rape. It exploits real tragedy, and real trauma, for a cheap and mendacious rhetorical effect.

Personally, I've risked my life to save a dog, and I'd do it again; I ran into a busy intersection to get it out of the road before it got killed. It wasn't even my dog, just, like, a dog, but it was a living, feeling thing and saving it was the right thing to do. Also, if Jonathan Kent left the dog, people would complain even more about that.

Again, I think it's important to remember when considering Jonathan Kent's decision-making that the character doesn't know what we do. He's seen Clark do a lot of impressive things, but even if you recognize your son has superhuman strength, it doesn't necessarily and inevitably follow that he can step to a tornado (you know, the thing colloquially called the Finger of God) and come out on top. So not only does Jonathan not know that Clark can move fast enough to save him without revealing his powers, he doesn't really know that Clark can save him at all.

The problem is that we, as an audience, can't buy the danger or drama in the situation because we know a lot of things Jonathan Kent doesn't. That still makes it a bad scene, and it still deserves flak in general, but it's not a bad for the reason everyone says; Jonathan Kent isn't acting like an idiot. The scene absolutely doesn't deserve flak, on any level, for his motivations being nonsensical or unclear. The reason we wouldn't do what he does is because we know a lot of things he doesn't know. That knowledge disparity is a problem because it makes his sacrifice feel pointless to us, since we know Clark could've gone through the tornado unscathed and probably saved Jonathan unnoticed. A better movie could've spun that into some productive pathos, but this wasn't that movie so the scene just fell flat and felt off. I'm not arguing that. I'm just arguing that, from a perspective of what his character knows in the scene, Jonathan's actions are generally sensible and, at the very least, justifiable. The scene, however, is neither of those things.

[Bobb]

That's %$#% zrak. Seriously, Clark might have been able to save his dad in that scene even if he didn't have superpowers.
There are already people alive in their neighborhood who have seen the Kent boy performing feats of strength.

Telling your son not to save you because there is a chance he might be discovered is asinine.






What exactly is so wrong with anyone making any unanswered criticism of MoS? Did you write the thing?

[Reddish Mage]

It's really not a good term. Calling it that is, again, extremely tasteless and exploitative. It's kind of like calling things "rape" for rhetorical effect when those things are not rape. It exploits real tragedy, and real trauma, for a cheap and mendacious rhetorical effect.

Personally, I've risked my life to save a dog, and I'd do it again; I ran into a busy intersection to get it out of the road before it got killed. It wasn't even my dog, just, like, a dog, but it was a living, feeling thing and saving it was the right thing to do. Also, if Jonathan Kent left the dog, people would complain even more about that.

Again, I think it's important to remember when considering Jonathan Kent's decision-making that the character doesn't know what we do. He's seen Clark do a lot of impressive things, but even if you recognize your son has superhuman strength, it doesn't necessarily and inevitably follow that he can step to a tornado (you know, the thing colloquially called the Finger of God) and come out on top. So not only does Jonathan not know that Clark can move fast enough to save him without revealing his powers, he doesn't really know that Clark can save him at all.

The problem is that we, as an audience, can't buy the danger or drama in the situation because we know a lot of things Jonathan Kent doesn't. That still makes it a bad scene, and it still deserves flak in general, but it's not a bad for the reason everyone says; Jonathan Kent isn't acting like an idiot. The scene absolutely doesn't deserve flak, on any level, for his motivations being nonsensical or unclear. The reason we wouldn't do what he does is because we know a lot of things he doesn't know. That knowledge disparity is a problem because it makes his sacrifice feel pointless to us, since we know Clark could've gone through the tornado unscathed and probably saved Jonathan unnoticed. A better movie could've spun that into some productive pathos, but this wasn't that movie so the scene just fell flat and felt off. I'm not arguing that. I'm just arguing that, from a perspective of what his character knows in the scene, Jonathan's actions are generally sensible and, at the very least, justifiable. The scene, however, is neither of those things.

That's the most thoughtful and nuanced analysis of the tornado scene of MoS, or Man of Steel generally, that I've read in the hundreds of pages that have been devoted to the topic.

[Zrak]

That's %$#% zrak. Seriously, Clark might have been able to save his dad in that scene even if he didn't have superpowers. There are already people alive in their neighborhood who have seen the Kent boy performing feats of strength. Telling your son not to save you because there is a chance he might be discovered is asinine.
He's telling his son not to save him because there is a chance me might be discovered or killed by the giant tornado. Without knowing the exact extents of his strength and durability, running straight for a huge tornado is pretty risky business. If there were scenes of little Clarky playing in tornadoes the way other kids play in rain puddles, Jonathan's worries would be silly. Since there weren't, though, his worry (that no-matter how strong his son seems, a huge tornado might be stronger) is actually pretty well-founded, especially from a perspective of parental protective impulses.


What exactly is so wrong with anyone making any unanswered criticism of MoS? Did you write the thing?

I didn't write it, but someone who is a person and put time and effort into their work did write it. I feel that it's basic decency to offer thoughtful, considered criticism (however harsh or even flippantly phrased it may be) rather than shallow, petty jeering propped up by outright fabrications about the text. Moreover, it's just bad criticism from a practical perspective; it doesn't identify the actual problem with the scene, so can't lead to addressing the actual causes of the viewers' dissatisfaction.


That's the most thoughtful and nuanced analysis of the tornado scene of MoS, or Man of Steel generally, that I've read in the hundreds of pages that have been devoted to the topic.

Thanks, buddy. I try.

[LokeyITP]

Lindelof frankensteined together a few other scripts that existed for the film and it was supposedly terrible. The final writing team that tried to fix that was discussed earlier. They wrote it for money, someone paid them that money and while it's not great for LA money, it's more than lots of cancer researchers see. I think they can stand some vitriol.

I'd really like to see someone try and defend the editing of MoS, that'll take some heroic measures.

[lord_khaine]

It's really not a good term. Calling it that is, again, extremely tasteless and exploitative. It's kind of like calling things "rape" for rhetorical effect when those things are not rape. It exploits real tragedy, and real trauma, for a cheap and mendacious rhetorical effect.

You call it tastelss, i call it the only fitting word i could find to descripe something that deserves a Darvin Award...


Personally, I've risked my life to save a dog, and I'd do it again; I ran into a busy intersection to get it out of the road before it got killed. It wasn't even my dog, just, like, a dog, but it was a living, feeling thing and saving it was the right thing to do. Also, if Jonathan Kent left the dog, people would complain even more about that.

And there are degree's of risk, i dont really think a busy intersection compares to a tornado in most cases.


Again, I think it's important to remember when considering Jonathan Kent's decision-making that the character doesn't know what we do. He's seen Clark do a lot of impressive things, but even if you recognize your son has superhuman strength, it doesn't necessarily and inevitably follow that he can step to a tornado (you know, the thing colloquially called the Finger of God) and come out on top. So not only does Jonathan not know that Clark can move fast enough to save him without revealing his powers, he doesn't really know that Clark can save him at all.

The problem is that we, as an audience, can't buy the danger or drama in the situation because we know a lot of things Jonathan Kent doesn't. That still makes it a bad scene, and it still deserves flak in general, but it's not a bad for the reason everyone says; Jonathan Kent isn't acting like an idiot. The scene absolutely doesn't deserve flak, on any level, for his motivations being nonsensical or unclear. The reason we wouldn't do what he does is because we know a lot of things he doesn't know. That knowledge disparity is a problem because it makes his sacrifice feel pointless to us, since we know Clark could've gone through the tornado unscathed and probably saved Jonathan unnoticed. A better movie could've spun that into some productive pathos, but this wasn't that movie so the scene just fell flat and felt off. I'm not arguing that. I'm just arguing that, from a perspective of what his character knows in the scene, Jonathan's actions are generally sensible and, at the very least, justifiable. The scene, however, is neither of those things.

No, i dont buy into this analysis. To start with i think the tornado scene makes it pretty clear Jonathan were worried about Clark getting discovered when he told him not to try and do anything.
Because at the same time this Superman is one of the more highly powered ones we have seen on movies, and at the time of the tornado scene he should already be more than powerful enough to rescue his father without any problems whatsoever.
Something that Jonathan Kent should have been aware off, his son worships the ground he walks on, to a degree where he obeyes an instruction to let his own father die rather than risk getting exposed. I find it really unlikely Jonathan had not been told the majority of what Clark were able to do.

So to sum it up, the movie tried to set the tornado scene up as something heroic, but it failed horribly at doing so.

[Kyberwulf]

See, people will hate this movie just to hate on it.

It wasn't suppose to be heroic. It was suppose to be tragic. It fell forced though.

[Anteros]

See, people will hate this movie just to hate on it.

It wasn't suppose to be heroic. It was suppose to be tragic. It fell forced though.

It was incredibly forced and stupid. I don't see how pointing that out is hating on the movie just to hate on it.

You'll notice I was one of the people arguing on the movie's behalf concerning the Metropolis fight earlier in the thread.

[Bobb]

He's telling his son not to save him because there is a chance me might be discovered or killed by the giant tornado. Without knowing the exact extents of his strength and durability, running straight for a huge tornado is pretty risky business. If there were scenes of little Clarky playing in tornadoes the way other kids play in rain puddles, Jonathan's worries would be silly. Since there weren't, though, his worry (that no-matter how strong his son seems, a huge tornado might be stronger) is actually pretty well-founded, especially from a perspective of parental protective impulses.

Except the writers of the movie explicitly tell us, through Clark, that Jonathan Kent died to keep his sons powers a secret. That is the stated reason given by the person who should know Pa Kent best, his son.




I didn't write it, but someone who is a person and put time and effort into their work did write it. I feel that it's basic decency to offer thoughtful, considered criticism (however harsh or even flippantly phrased it may be) rather than shallow, petty jeering propped up by outright fabrications about the text.

So all the posts about MoS you're criticizing are petty jeering, fabricated out of our imaginations?

[Zrak]

Lindelof frankensteined together a few other scripts that existed for the film and it was supposedly terrible. The final writing team that tried to fix that was discussed earlier. They wrote it for money, someone paid them that money and while it's not great for LA money, it's more than lots of cancer researchers see. I think they can stand some vitriol.
To be clear, I think vitriol is fine; it's just that unwarranted, inaccurate vitriol is always undeserved and pretty much never productive.


I'd really like to see someone try and defend the editing of MoS, that'll take some heroic measures.
I was going to ask if you meant the editing of the screenplay or the editing of the actual film, but then I realized it'd take some serious heroics in either case.


Except the writers of the movie explicitly tell us, through Clark, that Jonathan Kent died to keep his sons powers a secret. That is the stated reason given by the person who should know Pa Kent best, his son.
Well, sort of. He states that as the reason in the context of why he doesn't want to reveal his identity, although I'll grant that I think it probably is what he believes, generally. That said, I think it's a little hasty to consider Clark such a reliable source, given that the central character arc of the film, such as it is, hinges on Clark erroneously collapsing his father's entire legacy and memory into basically one issue and having to learn to get over that.
That said, the quote does pose problems for my reading, and I can accept that someone might be unwilling to buy into the existence of subtext in this movie, given the number of times various characters just flatly state their motivations. So, let's approach this from a different angle; accepting for the sake of argument that Pa Kent is also worried for Clark's safety (whether you believe this is the case or not) or imagining a hypothetical scene in which that were the case, would that really meaningfully improve the scene? I don't really think so; while the central dramatic conflict would be somewhat more reasonable, its drama is going to fall just as flat and the sacrifice is going to feel just as wasteful. Hence my contention that the real, primary problem(s) with the scene is its pretty grievous mismanagement of dramatic irony and/or mishandling of narrative causation.


So all the posts about MoS you're criticizing are petty jeering, fabricated out of our imaginations?
That's how I would characterize the general tone of criticism to which I object. Some of the posts here I have criticized not because of their tone, factuality, or the inherent triviality of their concerns, but because I believe they're nonetheless faulty or ill-considered readings.

[Reddish Mage]

So I decided to take a look at what the professional critics had to say.

Looks like the main criticisms surround not developing the world enough, lack of cheer, or underdeveloped characters. Roger Ebert oddly only has a big problem, with how the movie handles women and Clark/Lois. Superman has no sexuality or chemistry and Amy Adams no personality. Still Ebert penalized the movie for repeating the Nolan path rather than trying something different.

[Zrak]

I don't think it's fair to say Lois has no personality, since she's, uh, spunky or something. She quips, you know? In a movie where there are dudes who do nothing but flatly spout exposition, that's gotta count for something. :smallwink:

I think, really, a ton of the movie's problems could've been fixed if the screen time inexplicably devoted to Krypton Plots were instead devoted to developing massively important yet totally underdeveloped characters, like Lois and the Kents.

[MLai]

That's how I would characterize the general tone of criticism to which I object. Some of the posts here I have criticized not because of their tone, factuality, or the inherent triviality of their concerns, but because I believe they're nonetheless faulty or ill-considered readings.
I think what you've been doing is elaborating, analyzing, and clarifying on the underlying movie faults which produced the foam of general vague antipathy against the movie. This does not mean that the movie was in fact decent, nor does it mean that all the viewers who hated the movie without writing an analysis were wrong.

[Reddish Mage]

The question is, how does all this impact what Synder likes to call "Man of Steel 2."

How is this new Superman movie with the old Superman going to get beyond all the flaws of the previous movie. Or will it?

Can Batman v Superman be dark and scary and somber and series, and still awesome?

There ain't gonna be a Krypton or a Pa Kent in this one, just some time starting with Clark's life in Metropolis and Superman's life as a divisive god or demon or fascist dictator-like figure (I think we'll be getting all three) before moving to Gotham to take on Batffleck.

After that its anyone's guess where the movie's gonna go, I'm guessing **** interrupts them and they make a truce and take on Lex Luthor or something and form the Justice League.

[Zrak]

It has a lot of faults, but I'd still say it's a decent movie, overall. Certainly no worse than a lot of considerably better-liked films (oh, lord, Avatar), and definitely not beyond saving. Relative to the original topic, a sequel which considered and addressed its actual faults could easily be really good. However, "general vague antipathy" doesn't identify those faults, and the specific points to which that antipathy has most often been honed are either trivial enough, misguided enough, or simply false to the point that even when that foam of antipathy solidifies into a point, it's usually the wrong point and addressing that point wouldn't fix the movie.

So, at the very least, a significant number the people who hate the movie are very often wrong about why they hate it, and that does (or at least can) matter.

[Legato Endless]

It has a lot of faults, but I'd still say it's a decent movie, overall. Certainly no worse than a lot of considerably better-liked films (oh, lord, Avatar)...

Hey now.

Avatar is extremely pretty. While not revolutionary like Birth of a Nation, it remains one of the most refreshingly shameless propaganda films I've ever seen. The film's ability to compensate for it's abyssal lack of sophistication in terms of theme, characters, plotting, symbolism and dialogue with a zealous commitment to visual manipulation of extreme technical craftsmanship is remarkable. A film that elicits cheers in certain sectors and a brief spiral into depression for some few vulnerable thousands certainly did...something. I mean, if you ignore the extreme stigmata it places on the disabled, the brutishly straightforward white power motifs, the 18th century conception of indigenous peoples, the dark grasping nature of the sympathy advisors who tweaked the Navi's faces to maximally impact evolutionary sympathy clues, the truncated love letter to-but I digress. Pandora is really quite lovely if you block out the hum of the narrative.

[Misery Esquire]

Hey now.

Avatar is extremely pretty. While not revolutionary like Birth of a Nation, it remains one of the most refreshingly shameless propaganda films I've ever seen. The film's ability to compensate for it's abyssal lack of sophistication in terms of theme, characters, plotting, symbolism and dialogue with a zealous commitment to visual manipulation of extreme technical craftsmanship is remarkable. A film that elicits cheers in certain sectors and a brief spiral into depression for some few vulnerable thousands certainly did...something. I mean, if you ignore the extreme stigmata it places on the disabled, the brutishly straightforward white power motifs, the 18th century conception of indigenous peoples, the dark grasping nature of the sympathy advisors who tweaked the Navi's faces to maximally impact evolutionary sympathy clues, the truncated love letter to-but I digress. Pandora is really quite lovely if you block out the hum of the narrative.

And forgive the rather direct Pocahontas (Story, character, plot, theme, setting*...) port, or, even closer to the grain ;

Avatar - Did You Watch Fern Gully?

*In the matching of The New World with a new world, not the fantastical creatures and plants.

[Bobb]

Avatar is a bad film. Such movie producing talent wasted.

I'm not supposed to be rooting for the humans that want to nuke everything!

[MLai]

Avatar was a great film. Now, thematically it was treading tired ground. When James Cameron said he wrote the script 20 years ago and was just waiting for SFX technology to catch up, that just made perfect sense. But technically, in the writing department, it did everything it set out to do. I don't care whether you actually agree with the underlying sentiments (white man's burden, happy noble savages, etc), but the writers and director aimed at a target and they hit exactly the bulls-eye they wanted to hit. That's how you make a blockbuster.

[Chen]

Avatar was a great film. Now, thematically it was treading tired ground. When James Cameron said he wrote the script 20 years ago and was just waiting for SFX technology to catch up, that just made perfect sense. But technically, in the writing department, it did everything it set out to do. I don't care whether you actually agree with the underlying sentiments (white man's burden, happy noble savages, etc), but the writers and director aimed at a target and they hit exactly the bulls-eye they wanted to hit. That's how you make a blockbuster.

While Avatar is certainly at the top of the list of money making movies, it takes far less to be considered a blockbuster. Hell Man of Steel made a pretty tidy sum of money, just like pretty much every other super hero movie has, regardless of quality (with some exceptions in the past like that awful first Hulk movie and the new Fantastic Four one). I mean even the previous two Fantastic Four movies made a fair bit of money (~50 million opening weekends) and those were complete garbage.

[lord_khaine]

I mean even the previous two Fantastic Four movies made a fair bit of money (~50 million opening weekends) and those were complete garbage.

Strongly disagree, the first one were really good. i watched it twice at the cinema.

[Chen]

Well personal taste aside, the first Fantastic Four film with Jessica Alba in it (there was one before that apparently as well) has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes (average rating 4.5/10). It's safe to generalize and say most people disliked that movie.

[Reddish Mage]

I found it odd that a discussion of Avatar haven't referenced the previous Oscar winner Avatar was said to copy but instead a lot of lesser known works (you know that Noble Savage theme goes way back right?).

In critical circles Avatar was known as "Dances with Smurfs."

[Zrak]

Hey now.

Avatar is extremely pretty. While not revolutionary like Birth of a Nation, it remains one of the most refreshingly shameless propaganda films I've ever seen. The film's ability to compensate for it's abyssal lack of sophistication in terms of theme, characters, plotting, symbolism and dialogue with a zealous commitment to visual manipulation of extreme technical craftsmanship is remarkable. A film that elicits cheers in certain sectors and a brief spiral into depression for some few vulnerable thousands certainly did...something. I mean, if you ignore the extreme stigmata it places on the disabled, the brutishly straightforward white power motifs, the 18th century conception of indigenous peoples, the dark grasping nature of the sympathy advisors who tweaked the Navi's faces to maximally impact evolutionary sympathy clues, the truncated love letter to-but I digress. Pandora is really quite lovely if you block out the hum of the narrative.

I think part of the reason my opinion of the film is so overwhelmingly negative is that I wasn't particularly impressed with its visuals as anything beyond a technical achievement. That's not to say there's anything wrong with its lush, maximalist style of prettiness, just that because my tastes tend to lean more towards the stark sublime (my "prettiest movie" is probably Herzog's Heart of Glass), I was never really able to be distracted from its flaws by its prettiness. In any case, I think the main distinction is that, in Avatar, one has to essentially block out the entirety of the narrative's grating hum, while in Man of Steel one only has to politely ignore the scenes and characters in which that hum goes wildly off-key; Man of Steel is a movie with a number of serious narrative flaws, Avatar basically is serious narrative flaws. It's not the worst movie ever made, or really even one of the worst movies ever made, but I think it's certainly worse than Man of Steel, or at the very least as bad as it.


Avatar was a great film. Now, thematically it was treading tired ground. When James Cameron said he wrote the script 20 years ago and was just waiting for SFX technology to catch up, that just made perfect sense. But technically, in the writing department, it did everything it set out to do. I don't care whether you actually agree with the underlying sentiments (white man's burden, happy noble savages, etc), but the writers and director aimed at a target and they hit exactly the bulls-eye they wanted to hit. That's how you make a blockbuster.

It conveyed its messages, distasteful though those messages may have been, but I don't think you can just offhandedly say that means it hit its targets. If this is the case, every ransom note ever sent by video would be a cinematic masterpiece. I mean, they convey their message. They do everything they set out to do. The reason they aren't is because conveying a message isn't enough; a film that conveys its message may do everything it set out to do, all that means is that the problems were with goals instead of execution.

Also, impressive special effects and blatant, pandering appeals to mainstream hurray-for-the-home-team sensibilities are how you make a blockbuster.

[Reddish Mage]

In any case, I think the main distinction is that, in Avatar, one has to essentially block out the entirety of the narrative's grating hum, while in Man of Steel one only has to politely ignore the scenes and characters in which that hum goes wildly off-key; Man of Steel is a movie with a number of serious narrative flaws, Avatar basically is serious narrative flaws.



It conveyed its messages, distasteful though those messages may have been, but I don't think you can just offhandedly say that means it hit its targets. If this is the case, every ransom note ever sent by video would be a cinematic masterpiece. I mean, they convey their message. They do everything they set out to do. The reason they aren't is because conveying a message isn't enough; a film that conveys its message may do everything it set out to do, all that means is that the problems were with goals instead of execution.

See I think your wrong in disqualifying Avatar simply for its distasteful message. A movie can be a great movie regardless of what you think of its morality. What makes Avatar a blockbuster less a cinematic masterpiece is that it's messages are all cliche's

[Zrak]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply I was disqualifying Avatar because a number of its messages were either intentionally or accidentally distasteful; like you say, a lot of good movies say some pretty awful things. I wouldn't even just disqualify it because those messages were mostly repetitions of trite tropes, though that's certainly true as well. I think the real problem is that there was really nothing there aside from the trite message it ham-fistedly shoved down our throats; every other aspect of the writing, from the characters to the plot to the dialogue, is basically just an empty functionary of those messages. Even if the messages were more original, or less distasteful, they couldn't save a film as ultimately shallow and hollow as Avatar.

tl;dr: Hackneyed, one-dimensional "Message Pictures" are bad basically regardless of their message.

[BannedInSchool]

For Avatar I was briefly excited when I thought the elves might actually lose the big battle, but then they won and I was disappointed. :smallfrown: Maybe being a nine-hour trilogy could have given it sufficient depth. :smallbiggrin: But anyway...

It's interesting that Man of Steel was originally cobbled together from different scripts because that's how the movie felt to me. I don't mean the flashback editing itself but that different elements just seemed smushed together and didn't feel like a whole. Kal-El is free from predestination on Krypton to become whomever he wants on Earth, the planet of opportunity...as long as he doesn't let anybody find out because his human parents say that'd be bad. :smallconfused: