What about Faora? Sure, she was one-dimensional, but she still kicked everybody's asses, including Superman's.

 

I believe the idea with Lara not following was that she and Jor-El felt that the Kryptonians had screwed up too badly for them to be saved; that's kinda why they had Kal, so that he could break away from the stagnation of Krypton and be something better. While having his mother around - a mother with all the powers of Superman, no less - might have been beneficial, they seemed to feel, or at least Jor-El seemed to feel, that it was better for Kal to be cut off from Krypton altogether, so he could create something better on Earth without being chained to Kryptonian society. As Supes puts it near the end, 'Krypton had its chance'.

From the point of view of the Council, its probably more a simple case of 'nah-nah-nah, this isn't happening, we're totally right in everything we've been doing'. Which isn't that ridiculous, when you think about it; given the strong Roman vibe Krypton gives off, it's kinda the equivilent of Nero fiddling while the city burns, I guess.

With regard to the Colonies, I don't think that was tied to Krypton dying. From what I recall, they'd gone off and colonised earlier in their history, but then returned to Krypton and stayed there. Which leads me to the scout ship, which I'll spoiler tag because of non-film although apparently canon material from the prequel comic (which I haven't read)

Spoiler

The scout ship was actually piloted by Supergirl, who in this continuity is apparently a distant ancestor of Kal, rather than his cousin. The crew winds up dead - there's a villainous stowaway or something - and the ship gets buried in the ice. The Superman suit is there because it's an El family ship, and it's presumably part of the fashion/part of the explorer uniform. Doesn't seem that practical to me, but /shrug.

I think I kinda feel this way about Lois, as well. She wasn't exactly a thoroughly fleshed out character, but when she was on screen she was mostly being kinda awesome. Telling the military how it was going to work at the dig, then proceeding to casually stroll into the scout ship. Piecing together Clark's story. Nearly getting away from the FBI. Breaking out of the Kryptonian ship like a boss. Helping the military deliver the bomb. Yes, it's one note, but at least she actually got to do something. And yes, Faora was badass. I've seen someone suggest her as a potential actress for Wonder Woman if they ever get round to that; I'd be well on board for that.

More broadly - since I haven't commented on the film as a whole - I enjoyed it, rather a lot. The action was incredible, Cavill was excellent, the story...was kinda meh, but servicable. Some of the finer details don't necessarily make sense, but it's not so bad that it spoilt the film for me. As for getting Superman right, I'm not quite sure yet - I'll probably be going to see it again at some point, so I might be more sure then. I did think they captured the idealism of the character, but at an early, not quite fully formed stage.

That said, while I get that the main symbolism of the character is that he's Space Jesus, the Messianic imagery was brutally unsubtle here.

 

For a few, yes I believe so.

Because she and Jor-El agreed that Krypton society had degraded and needed to be restarted. They were part of the failed system and needed to die with it. Escaping themselves was never their goal.

The ship was sent by the House of El, which is why the costume was there. The costume in this continuity is the suit worn under the battle armor, and the symbol is that of the House of El. Zod's wearing the same thing after he strips off his armor at the end, but a military variant with a different symbol. There were no embryos in the birthing chamber, just the pods for where embryos would go if they got the data in the Codex put in.

Zod's goal is to make a new Krypton exactly the same way as the old one was. He's literally unable to accept any deviation in that goal or compromise to it, because he's molded from the ground up to think and act in a certain way. Natural births are heresy, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that the powers they get are too. They don't fit in with how his Krypton should be. Also, while he and his soldiers could adapt, newborns would have a much harder time adapting to Earth's atmosphere. Martha Kent says that Clark nearly died as an infant adapting to it.

They used Earth and not some other planet because they were already there, that's where the Codex was, and Earth already had the capacity for life and just needed some tweaking from the World Engine to make it more like Krypton, whereas Mars or Venus or whatever didn't have those helpful building blocks. Zod also viewed humans as inferior in every way to Kryptonians and unworthy of life, which is why he didn't even try to spare them.

 

Its based around the kind of sunlight Kryptonians get. Under a yellow sun they get super powers and on Krypton the sun was a red giant which while it didnt necessarily hurt them they got zero powers from. The reasoning behind it varies a shit load though from science to the sun is their god Rao and its sentient.

As for the Kryptonians not believing the planet was going to go boom or why Clark was the only one that got launched off the reasons varied wildly. With Krypton they bounced between the planet was just really old and the council was lazy, Kryptonian society got too decadent and the council too corrupt so they kept their mouths shut and tried to handle it on their own trying to avoid shaking peoples faith in them to they'd given over too much control to robots and AIs and when Jor-El explained things the AI that ran things made it look like Jor-El was making it all up so it could preserve itself. As for why it was just Clark that bounced from, the tiny ship with him was all that could be made and launched in time to psychotic superweapon altered Kryptonian DNA to make them die if they left the planet and they could only shield something as small as a baby to according to their religion Kryptonians couldn't leave the planet without Raos direct approval.

Consistancy was......really not their strong suit.

 

If that was actually the case, you wouldn't have been swinging your opinion around like it was a club, and getting pissed at people for not agreeing with you.

And no. I didn't read your fan dissertation on the essence of Superman. Nor will I. I shouldn't have to read a giant wall of text just to be able to converse with someone about something, nor should anyone else.

No one kills the Joker because he's too good of a character to kill off in any main contenuity. He's died plenty of times in various one-offs and What-Ifs.

I'm also convinced this is part of the reason why they keep rebooting the Batman franchise and spinning new things off. Part of it is for profit, sure, but I'm pretty sure some of it is because after awhile, the cost of keeping Joker alive to try and save him starts to seriously outweigh the moral and ethical ramifications of just giving him the death penalty.

Which, by the way, is perfectly valid, provided you subscribe to the theory that Gotham is a Chicago expy, as opposed to a New York one. People who murder children and bomb city centers get the needle in Illinois.

Honestly, if I was in charge, I'd make Joker a legacy character before I did it to Batman. Who Joker is doesn't matter, and never has. It's the idea behind the Joker that makes him who and what he is. People rejected Batman being made a legacy character because people liked Bruce Wayne too much to see anyone else wearing the cowl, but we've never known who the Joker was, nor has "who is the Joker" ever been a question that actually mattered.

I'd be perfectly willing to have the Joker take it too far, and for Batman to finally kill him (or allow him to die by refusing to save him), but then another Joker shows up, different from the first but still definately the Joker.

I'd pay money to see a scene of Batman watching the Joker die, and the Joker is just laughing and tells Bruce that it was never about him, and that the Joker is an idea, and you can't kill an idea.

And then Batman looks him straight in the eye, says "No. But I can try."

 

I liked the movie, although I thought it had some issues. However, I'm a bit annoyed about the Christian imagery. Warner Bros was trying to act as though this was all about jesus, but that's just post-production pandering. Zak Snyder was trolling, folks. That's what he always does. Superman isn't Jesus, he's the anti-anti-immigrant ideal (considering the history and creators).

 

They showed a preacher once, and suddenly the plot is all about Christian imagery?

Aren't you hypersensitive and missing the point.

He's unstoppable, indestructable, and can perform miracles. The worst he's ever been is 'not right,' and his typical mode of operation is that he isn't wrong, so he's the next best thing to infalliable in terms of morality and ethics. He looks exactly like a human, and loves humans, and wants to protect and guide them to a better future, but he isn't one himself, and came from somewhere in the heavens as a child. He was found by farmers (poor lower class folk), in most classic tellings his pod literally landed in the barn (stable), the couple decided to raise him as his son even though he wasn't, and he was sent away from his original decadent home by his birth mother in a vessel that was cast adrift (reed basket origin, Egyptian Nile).

Superman is Moses plus Jesus divided by spandex. The original creators were both Jewish, and pretty much said as much themselves. It's not really up for debate. He's blatantly a messiah figure, and it's equally blatant where they got their imagery and symbolism from, even if you ignore the fact that the original creators basically Word of God'ed it themselves.

I'm sorry if it gets your panties in a wedge because you think a one minute long scene with a Catholic priest giving someone advice is "too much Christian overtone," but that's the truth. Trying to ignore it just puts on you on the same tier as all those annoying Tumblr twats that never read the books and only saw the movies and drone on and on about how it's such a goddamn crime that the Narnia movies were "taken over by the religious movement."

NO YOU GUYS. ASLAN ISN'T JESUS. HE'S A FAIRY AND A PAGAN SYMBOL OF THE EARTH. C.S. WHO NOW? NEVER HEARD OF HIM

 

I'm getting pissed at people for not agreeing with me? Where exactly?

But I will give you that you managed to piss me off a little with this:

Moving on.

And I wasn't aware that I must repeat my arguments every time I post something because someone is too lazy to read what I already told about it before starting a discussion with me. But if you really don't want I will just quote the important part at the beginning of it:

And something I missed from a previous post.

That's your opinion. To me he wasn't boring at all.

 

Actually what I was saying is that I didn't think the movie really had much in the way of Christian imagery, and I was annoyed by people reading too much into it. As for CS Lewis, you know it's funny, but maybe it's due to my lack of learning of the New Testament as a kid, but I never saw Aslan as the obvious Jesus analogue until I was in high school and wrote a paper about it (and the rest of it). Really, CS Lewis gets a bit obvious about it in the last book in the series, which mainly confused me as a kid.

Also, Shuster and Siegel never said that Superman was Jesus, that sort of interpretation came later with other writers. If you have a source to contradict that, I'd be happy to read it. That being said, I think it's reasonable to see a lot of "mythic hero" in Superman as well as being a "savior" in general, so the parallels are reasonable, if not explicit or intentional.

 

Not going to even try to add to the ongoing debate, as I don't know nearly enough about Superman to have an opinion.

Saw it today. Thought the romance was contrived, and that they could have done better with the flashbacks to really establish Clark's character. Another scene with Jonathan would've done wonders I think. The final fights, though epic, seemed a bit over the top and long. I felt the whole conflict was drawn out beyond what it needed to be.

Zod was good IMO, with motivations that made sense in-universe. His character became much more tragic at the end with his reveal at being bred to be a soldier. Felt like I could actually sympathize with him a bit once the rest of the Kryptonians were gone which isn't something I can usually do with movie villains.

Lois was well done, minus her shitty romance with Clark. I thought they could've gone a bit more in depth to some of her actual searching for him over the months/years, which would've added both to her character and to the overall story. Amy Adams did a good job.

I liked Clark personally. Thought his struggle made for a pretty good story, though some expansion on his childhood and/or some more looks at his travels would have done wonders to really solidify him as a character. Some real struggle for an identity, not really knowing where he belongs, combined with a bit more wonderment or eagerness about find out about Krypton also would've been great. The final death of Zod could have had a lot more impact if it had been shown more clearly that Clark wanted to have a peace with him and rebuild Krypton, rather than just protecting Earth because Zod wanted to kill all the humans.

I certainly enjoyed the overall experience and give it a 7/10, though they botched the ending by trivializing Superman's kill.

Interested in what they may do with a sequel, especially if they want to use Luthor as the main antagonist. There's a lot of room for development with Clark at the Planet, especially if he's digging into Luthor personally. I feel like a second (if they do it) could be great given all the character development possible as well as a good Luthor.

 

I think Johnathan Kent was just extremely frightened for his son. The acting came across as he didn't want to let people die but didn't want his son to be persecuted for being different. It was more "between a rock and a hard place" than "Watch your back, trust no one" situation for me.

 

Good film- Easiest ways it could have been improved.

- Fighting scenes (scale that shit back a bit) Chronicle seemed to get it about right for me. mass damage but not so much that you loose sense that this is a person.

- A little more focus on the day to day realities of growing up as such an outsider.
No "real" friends that you can actually open up to.
No touching or hugging for your entire life- for fear of revealing your difference.

- The love aspect should have been handled way better. In many ways it could have been really integral to the story.

 

How Man Of Steel Should Have Ended.

 

Wow, that was the dumbest thing I've seen all day.

HISHE is just horrible anyway. Shit animation, shit music, shit jokes.

 

Why dumbest? It's pretty much exactly as the movie ended only they skipped all battles by making Superman more genre savvy.

 

You just answered your own question. It's not even really "how it should have ended," working with the narrative that was given, it's just a bunch of chucklefucks trying to be clever by making some stupid random change somewhere in the movie. Just like with another notable one, the Deathly Hallows movie, where it's just "hurr snape alive durr time turner." It's a shitty joke. Which is symptomatic of the whole HISHE series.

Maybe I'm also extremely, extremely sick of this movie getting undeservedly shit on. I can't even find actual discussion anymore, it's just "lol this movie sucked so much and if you like it you're autistic, amirite?"

 

I didn't think it was a particularly good Superman movie, but damned if I didn't enjoy it.

 

Although I often find those guys amusing, I can acknowledge that within the context of the film's narrative, sometimes those "how it should've" don't make sense. The Iron Man 3 ending one though I actually thought made a lot of sense, and they should consider that angle in the next ones. As for Superman, there a few decent discussions online, even if I disagree with them.

If you want some, try:
http://badassdigest.com/2013/07/03/film-crit-hulk-man-of-steel/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgEv22m2gnA

 

Wow, ALL CAPS with a stupid gimmick and a whole lot of technical horseshit. It's basically a thesis statement about how he's so enlightened and knowledgeable and that anyone who liked the movie is just a shallow stupid pleb. That's exactly what I'm fucking tired of seeing.

This was better -- at least it didn't talk down to you and try push some "you are objectively wrong" shit. Though I think the negative side of the argument didn't get a fair shot with that neckbeard as their spokesman. I thought he was going to have a stroke.

 

Totally agree.