Man of Steel

am I the only one who took away that zod wanted to die (he failed his "genetic goals") and goaded superman into killing him? i thought that was pretty obvious

saw this and pacific rim this weekend, liked em both although weirdly enough I expected pacific rim to be more awesome than it was (yeah monsters and robots were awesome, story and actors were all awful) and superman was better than my expectations. I thought it was gonna be another shitfest like the last superman reboot, but I enjoyed all the scifi stuff and the fight sequences were amazing. Whoever said the first half of the movie was a random set of vignettes had it spot on though, and Louis Lane as a redhead... ugh

chaos_sl said:

not ok for Superman to kill him when he had the upper hand AND Zod was in the process of murdering people AND he was monologuing about how he will never stop and he will just kill everyone forever.

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It's not just a silver age thing. Superman doesn't kill people. It's an incredibly important part of the character, and I really dislike the gritty, modern necessity that he kill because he lacked any other option. Killing Zod should have been his Kobayashi Meru, and he fucking failed.

Think about what this does to the character. Superman can ALWAYS kill you. It doesn't matter what villain it is, there is no terrestrial threat and only a very few cosmic ones that Superman cannot just outright kill. Any number of them will be equally lethal to Zod, and Superman will have to make that choice again: either kill this guy, or he's going to take out countless innocent human beings. That's the plot of 99% of the stories. What does he do next time?

If you say "he takes that threat out", then you've just destroyed the character. There's always going to be something for Superman to save us from, and eventually it's just ourselves. What if it's Lex Luthor instead of Zod, with some scheme that involves starting a war for profit, something like that? At what point does he simply eliminate that threat? Pull the trigger once and it's so much easier the second time.

You cannot allow Superman to become a wrathful god. If you do, it fundamentally alters the core of the character. Even beyond that, I hated how the movie felt it necessary to portray a fatherless Superman to update it for a modern audience.

I watched this again, and other than the Super Violence, it was the total lack of a personality by the lead (and others) that brought this movie down. Superman looked like he was Super Constipated all of the time. Him and Lois had zero chemistry and you wondered why they were still talking to each other. And what does it say that there was more humor in any of Nolan's Batman movies than in Superman?

Next movie, give him a personality and don't have lots of disjointed flashbacks.

Heylel_sl said:

It's not just a silver age thing. Superman doesn't kill people. It's an incredibly important part of the character, and I really dislike the gritty, modern necessity that he kill because he lacked any other option. Killing Zod should have been his Kobayashi Meru, and he fucking failed.

Think about what this does to the character. Superman can ALWAYS kill you. It doesn't matter what villain it is, there is no terrestrial threat and only a very few cosmic ones that Superman cannot just outright kill. Any number of them will be equally lethal to Zod, and Superman will have to make that choice again: either kill this guy, or he's going to take out countless innocent human beings. That's the plot of 99% of the stories. What does he do next time?

If you say "he takes that threat out", then you've just destroyed the character. There's always going to be something for Superman to save us from, and eventually it's just ourselves. What if it's Lex Luthor instead of Zod, with some scheme that involves starting a war for profit, something like that? At what point does he simply eliminate that threat? Pull the trigger once and it's so much easier the second time.

You cannot allow Superman to become a wrathful god. If you do, it fundamentally alters the core of the character. Even beyond that, I hated how the movie felt it necessary to portray a fatherless Superman to update it for a modern audience.

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I never read a lot of Superman, but the immediate example that jumps out at me is Doomsday. Totally similar scale and impact, dude was wrecking several major states with his damage and would never, ever stop. What is the solution that doesn't involve that being, either Doomsday or Zod or whoever, having to die? And why does it matter that there is a distinction? Seriously, look at the scale of what happened to Metropolis in this movie. Zod makes Hitler look like fucking amateur hour. I don't understand how Superman is a better person if he allows more people to suffer and die.

In this story ark, Zod had to die. Yes Superman had to kill him in this version of the story. Of course Zod had to be killed, he was equally as powerful as Superman....

Wait, that was another problem I had with the movie. Superman was "raised" in the environment of the yellow sun. He grew up and thus changed(Aging does that) within the environment of the Yellow Sun. So his cells were altered thus causing many of the side effects associated with the change.

How did Zod or for that matter every other Kryptonian have all the same abilities and strength as Superman without actually having been exposed to the Yellow Sun like Superman?

If you want to nit pick a story, start with how ZoD had any of the capabilities of Superman. Yes he would have been stronger than a human being, but only because of the gravity difference. The X-ray vision, highly attuned senses, laser eyes and flying would not have been at his disposal for years, if ever. That would be an advantage Superman would have over any remaining Krytonian. He would have been "Raised" with the Yellow Sun. The story might have been better if Zod's military equipment and intellect had been his power instead of being Superman 2.0.

Ok, back to why Zod had to die in this story. Zod has all the powers of Superman and the training of a military leader which I assume included combat. Superman was trained by his mommy and thus really had no training. I agree that when Zod realized that he no longer served the purpose that he was bred for, he chose to allow Superman to kill him. In truth, if it were possible to kill a being like Superman, Zod would have kicked his ass. This is why Superman killed Zod. Zod let him and thus it was more of an act of assisted suicide rather than outright murder. Yes it is a grey line, but there it is.

Mahes_sl said:

Wait, that was another problem I had with the movie. Superman was "raised" in the environment of the yellow sun. He grew up and thus changed(Aging does that) within the environment of the Yellow Sun. So his cells were altered thus causing many of the side effects associated with the change.

How did Zod or for that matter every other Kryptonian have all the same abilities and strength as Superman without actually having been exposed to the Yellow Sun like Superman?

If you want to nit pick a story, start with how ZoD had any of the capabilities of Superman. Yes he would have been stronger than a human being, but only because of the gravity difference. The X-ray vision, highly attuned senses, laser eyes and flying would not have been at his disposal for years, if ever. That would be an advantage Superman would have over any remaining Krytonian. He would have been "Raised" with the Yellow Sun. The story might have been better if Zod's military equipment and intellect had been his power instead of being Superman 2.0.

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Ozone layer!

I watched this for the first time this weekend, aside from the random shaky cam scenes I enjoyed the movie, it just didn't seem like a Superman movie. When the best character in your Superman movie isn't Superman at all but is instead his dad, you probably have some issues. Jor El was written better, kicked more ass, had more and better lines, was more heroic, smarter, everything.

Also criminal waste of Kevin Costner and Pa Kent in general. A fully grown Superman can't or won't save his own dad from a tornado, give me a break. He could have run over there faster than The Flash and hauled him out of there and nobody would have known what happened. I liked it better when Pa Kent dies of the heart attack and it is clearly outside of young Clark's power to help him. When he dies here and it is fully within Clark's power to save him and he just doesn't...not cool.

Not much in the movie felt like he was Superman. I didn't like the Superman Returns movie very much but that scene in it where he saves the airplane and sets it down over the baseball game and the whole crowd cheers, that one scene feels more like "Superman" than anything in this movie.

Araysar_sl said:

The reason why superheroes never kill anyone is because it would be a pain in the ass to come up with all these one-time use villains. Once you realize that the superhero moral code stems simply from writing necessity rather than some high minded concept about an individual's morality, you realize that it doesnt really matter.

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It's really not, though. Superman is not a deconstructed hero. That moral code really does matter, because it's absence is so important. See the Red Son arc, for instance.

It's a bit like a character such as Gandalf, which today feels very simple and almost cliche. In fact, it's the constant reinvention and deconstruction of that character that makes him feel trite. Superman is a very unique comic book character *because* his motivations and convictions are played straight. He didn't need a tragic death in the family or a period of "finding himself". That's just modern day emo bullshit they tacked on so an audience with a 50% divorce rate can identify with him.

Yeah I still don't see how that is the superior moral choice, to let god knows how many people die just to maintain a principle that he just made up.

Araysar_sl said:

I dont think its emo bullshit at all. I think family tragedy is used to bolster character motivation exceptionally well whether its Batman or Spiderman. It also serves as a useful backdrop for a variety of storylines.

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You're totally right, but Superman isn't Batman or Spiderman. He's unique *because* he comes from a healthy, stable, unbroken home. He can go back to Kansas and have a beer with Jonathan Kent, or eat dinner with his family. It grounds him in humanity in a way that is necessary precisely because he isn't human. We didn't need another orphan in a cape.

Superman is not a character who is painted in shades of grey. It isn't juvenile, he's just very earnest and direct in his moral code. If he slips even once, how quickly does he become a danger instead of a savior? He knows he can't save the entire world (one of the reasons I cut the destruction at the end a little slack), but the important thing for the character is that the ends NEVER justify the means. That's very different from say, Batman.

The best Superman stories are the ones where you get to see what the world would be like if Superman was compromised, such as the Justice Lords arc from the DC animated show. Superman can so casually enslave the entire world that where he draws the line is vital.

chaos_sl said:

Yeah I still don't see how that is the superior moral choice, to let god knows how many people die just to maintain a principle that he just made up.

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It isn't the superior choice, but it's the choice he's made and needs to stick to. Superior doesn't enter into it. The character has been shown to believe, time and time again, that for him to blur that line sets him onto a path where he's no longer a net positive. It doesn't mean there aren't consequences of his inability to use lethal force.

Not arguing that Superman "should" find alternative solutions that continue to promote his idealistic view on morality. What most of us are saying is that in the context of the movie, the option he chose was literally the -only- option available to Superman who has been Superman for... less than a week. What, two days? Even Silver Age superman would have done something drastic (or absolutely retarded, given the times) given that same situation within the origin time-frame. What humanizes a character more than coming face to face with a failing? In the years to come, Man of Steel's Superman will look back at Zod's death as a black stain that he will forever try to rectify by -not- taking that path again. But in the context of the movie? 100% complete sense.

If anything, this makes him a more easily related to superhero, yet still maintains the concept that he is the best of us. Because you have to have a little bit of "us" in the alien to make him a figurehead. And "us" contains the occasional regret. Zod? Is perfect Superman's regret, in the context of this movie.

If that's how they go with it, then it will somewhat redeem that scene. However, the movie did have a denouement after Zod's death where Superman made no mention whatsoever of regret over killing Zod, and in fact was just his chipper self while blowing drones out of the sky. I'll believe it when I see it.

I adored certain scenes of the movie, and it was beautifully shot. There were a couple of scenes that produced genuine chills for me, but it all felt very disjointed. It wasn't just them missing the whole point of the character, but it was also just a poorly constructed movie.

Heylel_sl said:

If that's how they go with it, then it will somewhat redeem that scene. However, the movie did have a denouement after Zod's death where Superman made no mention whatsoever of regret over killing Zod, and in fact was just his chipper self while blowing drones out of the sky. I'll believe it when I see it.

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Superman's only answer to anything in this movie was to blow moar shit up. They managed to have more explosions than in all of Michael Bay's movies combined. They should have named this movie "Xtreme Superman."

To all of you bitches who are going to neg me over this post, this is preemptive "Eat a Dick" message. You probably fap to posters of Fabio Superman that hang over your bed. Admit it, the pic below causes your nethers to be aroused. When a comic book character gives you wood, you've taken fanboyism too far.

The difference being that Superman had no options. He wasn't a partially aware weapon with multiple modes of dealing with issues/people. Superman had his knowledge of what would transpire if he let Zod go. And that was death for 1+ people. People that Superman identified with, whereas Zod did not.

This isn't rocket-science. It is pretty much right and wrong, and superman was right in his dispensation of justice. Even if it is Wrong for the character (given the silver age) it was right for the character in the movie. No matter how much it would have made sense in future issues after the fact, what Superman did in the movie makes 100% complete internal sense. With zero issues. Is it silver age Superman? No. But then, that shit hasn't been relevant since the 60s anyway.