‘Superman & Batman’ movie will follow ‘Man of Steel’
- Thread starter JoeZhang
- Start date
Maybe it was mentioned before, but superman killed zod without remorse in superman 2, and he actually was happy afterwards
Superman could've easily have tossed Doomsday into space or even the sun itself. Adn ini the end Doomsday came back to life, but there were other solutions to the problem.
^^^
But that is exactly the point. Superman could have done any number of things if the script were written differently. People are treating these stories as if they were documentaries or something. Fiction is written by people who make choices as to where the story should go and how it should be resolved.
If the scriptwriter had wanted, Zod could have been depowered or sent to the phantom zone or even just realized he was defeated and surrendered. Similarly if the writer had wanted Doomsday disposed of differently then it would have been written that way.
A more effective and relevant discussion is WHY did Snyder choose to have Superman kill Zod. What was the intention? Shock value or something more? Did the extended battle serve any kind of narrative purpose.
And in response to "eyesresist", of course Superman is a fairy tale that is filled with magic. That's the fundamental core of the character and his world.
Also, we don't know that Superman killed Zod in the Donner movie. There are several versions to that ending, including one where the villains are taken into custody.
But that is exactly the point. Superman could have done any number of things if the script were written differently. People are treating these stories as if they were documentaries or something. Fiction is written by people who make choices as to where the story should go and how it should be resolved.
If the scriptwriter had wanted, Zod could have been depowered or sent to the phantom zone or even just realized he was defeated and surrendered. Similarly if the writer had wanted Doomsday disposed of differently then it would have been written that way.
A more effective and relevant discussion is WHY did Snyder choose to have Superman kill Zod. What was the intention? Shock value or something more? Did the extended battle serve any kind of narrative purpose.
And in response to "eyesresist", of course Superman is a fairy tale that is filled with magic. That's the fundamental core of the character and his world.
Also, we don't know that Superman killed Zod in the Donner movie. There are several versions to that ending, including one where the villains are taken into custody.
I'm fine with heros killing villains in general, with one major exception: heros who vastly outpower their villains shouldn't kill because it's unnecessary and kind of disturbing, for obvious reasons.
Superman shouldn't kill unless he's fighting someone equal or greater in strength. He killed Doomsday in the comics, for example. So killing Zod is fine by me.
Superman shouldn't kill unless he's fighting someone equal or greater in strength. He killed Doomsday in the comics, for example. So killing Zod is fine by me.
Better yet, don't send him to the other side of the world in the first place. That was a completely arbitrary choice to keep Superman away from Metropolis for most of the destruction, so that the filmmakers would be free to indulge in endless disaster porn. The even more arbitrary choice was having Zod land the device in Metropolis in the first place. Why? He could've landed the thing anywhere on the planet. And at that point in the film, Clark/Kal-El had never even been to Metropolis. It had no significance in the film except as Lois's hometown, and Zod didn't have sufficient interest in Lois to want to punish her by starting the destruction in her city. This was a decision that had zero in-story motivation. So it's absurd to say it was the only possible way the events could've happened. There was no reason in the film for it to happen at all. It was just something the filmmakers arbitrarily imposed on the story because they wanted an excuse for disaster porn. And they didn't want Superman to be able to stop the disaster -- even though that's Superman's whole deal -- so they arbitrarily decided that there would be two weapons and Superman, for some reason, had to go to the one that was literally on the opposite side of the planet from Metropolis. They intentionally contrived the situation so that Superman would be prevented from doing the one thing that defines him most as a character -- saving Metropolis. And that is a stupid way to structure a superhero movie. More than that, such arbitrary storytelling with no internal motivation is an incompetent way to structure any narrative.
As I've said before (probably in this very thread): If a whole city gets destroyed in a Godzilla movie, then the title character is doing his job. If a whole city gets destroyed in a Superman movie, then the title character is failing to do his job. And it's the filmmakers who contrived the situation in such a way that it guaranteed Superman's failure.
No, we're asking for a story that's appropriate to the character of Superman and what he represents. If you want to make a dark, gritty, cynical superhero story, then fine, go do Watchmen or Suicide Squad or Powers. There's plenty of room for stories like that. But Superman is the original, archetypal optimistic hero. A Superman story should be defined by hope, and by the idea that the hero, not the villain, is the one who has the power to define the outcome.
Superman originated in an era where there was plenty of darkness in the world -- the Depression, global war, entrenched corruption and organized crime, rampant social injustice and racial and religious bigotry -- and people didn't need to imagine more. He offered hope to a world that needed it, and Americans embraced the optimism he represented, the idea that power could be used for good and that it was possible to rise above the oppression and injustice. That wasn't a useless fairy tale, it was an inspiring dream. It was something America needed to help it through dark times. Something to think about as we look at the state of things today.
^Funny thing in this context is that there's an early Superman story, from his vigilante/social crusader days, in which he single-handedly tears down a slum neighborhood to force the landlords to rebuild. The residents were evacuated so nobody was hurt, but this only got him in deeper with the authorities. (It was actually referenced in subsequent stories.)
Yeah, but that's the thing. It wasn't about the buildings, it was about the people. That Superman tore down the buildings because he cared about the people. Zack Snyder didn't care about the people, and he didn't have Superman care about the people, so the trashing of the buildings was gratuitous and pointless. And I hated it because I was thinking about all the people who must certainly be dying, and Snyder had zero interest in that because he just wanted to play with smashing up CGI buildings.
I just watched the original Godzilla (Gojira) last night, and I thought about this conversation when I saw how much attention it gave to the victims of Godzilla's rampage, their panic and terror as they flee. The scene of the aftermath of the Tokyo rampage, the hospital scene with the focus on the dead and dying and the despair of the survivors, is incredibly powerful, and it lends weight and substance to the crude, primitive visual effects of the earlier rampage. It's the human dimension that makes it work, and that's what Snyder forgot. (And the fact that it seems to be a driving focus of BvS, however belatedly, is what makes me hope this will be a better movie than its predecessor and avoid the same mistakes.) Of course, later Godzilla/kaiju movies generally made a point of evacuating all the populated areas before the monsters arrived so that only empty buildings were being destroyed, which is why few of them have the power of the original. But at least they bothered to acknowledge that the people were safe.
Gosh, wouldn't it be great if filmmakers consulted fan fora before they made their multi-hundred million dollar blockbuster movies? No one would ever have any reason to complain!
I thought we were talking about the Death Of Superman at the hands of Doomsday not the movie. But really if there's no lives at risk there's nobody for Superman to save, nles like the first Donner movie he just goes back iin time and prevents any deaths.
Lots of multimillion-dollar blockbusters are bad. That's nothing new. There has always been bad entertainment, and it has always been okay for people to criticize it. That's an important part of the process. People make mistakes, and if they're mature enough to listen to critics -- and if their critics are mature enough to issue meaningful analyses rather than petty brickbats -- then they can learn from their mistakes and do better work in the future.
Indeed, that's what seems to have happened here. I think there's little doubt that BvS's clear focus on the aftermath of the destruction of Metropolis and the questions raised about Superman's legitimacy as a hero are in direct response to the widespread criticisms of MoS's gratuitously destructive and aftermath-free climax. It seems to me like a clear example of the filmmakers listening to feedback and addressing audience concerns. And that is often a good thing. Feedback often drives new creativity. Heck, Larry Niven was inspired to write The Ringworld Engineers when readers pointed out a plausibility hole in Ringworld -- the fact that the title megastructure would be dynamically unstable -- and the question of how it would counter that instability inspired a new story idea in him.
It seems like a case of preaching to the choir here.
You're a professional writer. Write the movies you want to see.
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Elongated Man! 
It seems like a case of preaching to the choir here.
You're a professional writer. Write the movies you want to see.
There is no inconsistency between writing your own stuff and criticizing other stuff. How do you think I became a professional writer in the first place? I did it by writing stuff that wasn't very good, getting criticized for it by editors, listening to the criticisms, learning from them, and thereby raising my game. If I hadn't been criticized, if I hadn't listened to criticism, then I never would've improved enough to become a professional -- and to continue refining my work afterward so I could stay a professional. And those editors were able to criticize me because of their own experience being writers and working with writers. It's all part of the life cycle.
I've seen wannabe writers whose response to having their ideas criticized was "No fair, my stuff is perfect and divinely inspired, you're just elitist snobs who are conspiring to keep me out of your clique, and I hate you all and you're terrible human beings, now please pretty please buy my next submission." And because they see criticism as an attack and a personal failing of their critics rather than a learning opportunity for themselves, they never recognize the limitations in their writing and never do the hard work to become better writers, and so they never have a chance of actually getting published.
Since all film/art is subjective this debate goes in circles. Some people liked/loved the movie, others didn't. Playing "what if" gets old after a while.
It seems like a case of preaching to the choir here.
You're a professional writer. Write the movies you want to see.
There is no inconsistency between writing your own stuff and criticizing other stuff. How do you think I became a professional writer in the first place? I did it by writing stuff that wasn't very good, getting criticized for it by editors, listening to the criticisms, learning from them, and thereby raising my game. If I hadn't been criticized, if I hadn't listened to criticism, then I never would've improved enough to become a professional -- and to continue refining my work afterward so I could stay a professional. And those editors were able to criticize me because of their own experience being writers and working with writers. It's all part of the life cycle.
I've seen wannabe writers whose response to having their ideas criticized was "No fair, my stuff is perfect and divinely inspired, you're just elitist snobs who are conspiring to keep me out of your clique, and I hate you all and you're terrible human beings, now please pretty please buy my next submission." And because they see criticism as an attack and a personal failing of their critics rather than a learning opportunity for themselves, they never recognize the limitations in their writing and never do the hard work to become better writers, and so they never have a chance of actually getting published.
So, yeah. If you don't like the movies as they're written, get hired and write them they way you want. Or write what you want to see and produce it yourself. You're one of the only people around here who is in a position to do anything approaching that.
I never said anything about most of what you wrote in your reply, so I'm giving that a shrug.
It's a bit much to say that he's not as entitled to watch and criticize something as the rest of us if he didn't write it himself.
Umm... what?
I get Superman Returns isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it always bothers me when people criticize this aspect of the movie. For one, Superman had no idea he was the father of a child when he left Earth to search for the remains of Krypton. Lois Lane didn't tell him until the very end of the movie.
And what happens when he finds out? He leaves the hospital, visits his son, imparts a meaningful message of hope and tells Lois he's going to be around for a very long time. The movie is called Superman Returns, suggesting he was back to embracing his savior role as Superman and was gonna stick around. If the movie ended with Lois telling Superman that he was a father and then he decided to skip town, then I would be in complete agreement. But that didn't happen.
So, no, he didn't fail to live up to his responsibilities as a father because the movie didn't get a chance to actually explore his responsibilities as a father. He had just found out he was a father at the very end. We can presume Singer and co. did this so that the sequel could deal with this dangling plot thread.
I would say Superman Returns handled Superman a lot more poetically and earnestly than Man of Steel did, for the reasons Christopher has described and then some. At least in Superman Returns, he is seen actually, y'know, saving people. Metropolis isn't Ground Zero at the end and he doesn't snap Lex Luthor's neck or succumb to his ideology. People can dislike Superman Returns all they want. I totally understand why people don't like that movie - it's far too uneven, even though I enjoy it for its characterization, story and heartfelt attempt to bring back the Silver Age/Christopher Reeve Superman. Man of Steel at least tried to do something new with the character, but they sort of fell flat on their face in doing so.
As Christopher said, I don't wanna see a Superman movie where he conforms to the ideology of the villain and ends up destroying more than half of Metropolis - but to each their own. To play devil's advocate, it does seem like Batman v Superman will be dealing with the consequences of these ideas, so hopefully that film might make me retroactively like Man of Steel a little bit more - however if that decision was wholly intentional and the plan all along or just a response to the criticism of Man of Steel remains to be seen. Given Zack Snyder's comments that Batman was never intended for the Superman sequel from the start, I'm guessing the latter.
