I made a post on the travel back in time thing Superman did some time ago. I did notice that in the Donner cut of S2 that he did it again to basically erase all that had happened after the arrival of Zod. Felt like a bit of a cheat if you ask me if Superman could reverse time everytime something majorly bad happened.
I see it as less of a cheat than a writer painting themselves into a corner. If you accept that Superman can reverse the spin of the Earth to erase what happened, why wouldn't he do it every time something happened? Why shouldn't he do it to reverse the damage Zod caused?
The thing is: Superman, The Movie and Superman II were originally supposed to be one long film. The ending of the first was always intended to wipe away the effects of Zod's conquest of Earth. However, behind the scenes conflicts arose between Donner and the Salkinds. Production was taking too long, and the Salkind's wanted to get a finished cut out to the theatres when Donner had most of what would be the first and about half of the second film shot. Donner made some changes to the first, like the death of Lois, to explain away the need to do time travel to erase it dramatically (hence why the crevice that ate Lois' car in the "first" timeline never showed up in the "second" and after Jimmy showed up). Tensions continued to rise, and shortly thereafter the Salkind's fired Donner and brought in Lester to finish the project of Superman II.
This is why the time travel scene is used again at the end of Donner's cut of Superman II. Because if he was allowed to finish the project as he had first envisioned it, that was how it was supposed to end.
I was watching it the other day for the first time in years and I never really caught onto it but in the scene where Zod and co arrive at the Moon the three of them begin walking on it as if there's an atmosphere equal to Earths, also Zod and Ursa speak to the astronauts and they speak back indicating they could hear them.
Is this another case of Kryptonian powers or is it considered a major goof?
What I believe is that the Kryptonian/Yellow sun powerset is vastly different from how they are actually portrayed. So that, while yes, some of their abilities are physical in nature, most of them can be explained away by the enhanced mental powers of telepathy and telekinesis. Such things as flight and super strength can be an obvious extension of telekinesis, but so can heat vision. Heat is produced by the agitation of molecules, so molecular level telekinesis would do the trick. This also explains Zod's levitating of the man with the shotgun in East Houston, Id.
Things like speaking in space, or even switching back and forth from English and Russian even though they'd never encountered those languages before, is obviously telepathy. Likewise "the kiss" at the end of Lester's Superman II, a telepathic mindwipe of Lois. But even his role as Clark Kent is a form of telepathic invisibility. He is really saying "don't notice I'm Superman" when he's wearing the glasses, so no one mentally puts two and two together. No one except for Lois, who I suppose he really wanted her to know on some level.
Now the S-shield "net"? Or the multiple images of Superman that crumble to ice? I am at a loss to explain those away as part of the powerset. I can only assume they were defensive gimmicks of the Fortress itself. Stuff that Superman set up, in addition to altering the molecule chamber, while he waited for Zod, Ursa and Non to arrive.
