‘Superman & Batman’ movie will follow ‘Man of Steel’

[Christopher]

For me, it was not necessarily the level of destruction. This is the type of thing we see in the comics. It was meant to be horrifying and it was. What was missing though was some attempt on the part of Superman to prevent the destruction. So, when he saves the one family at the end, we are left thinking why is he saving them and not the thousands of people he just let die.

For me it was both. Mainly it was the callousness of having all this destruction without Superman doing a thing about it, but it was also the duration of it. When the city-smashing had finally died down and we had a lull and then Superman and Zod started going one-on-one and buildings started collapsing again, I was yelling "Seriously?" at the screen and very, very sorely tempted to storm out of the theater. It was just too much. Action films today are too driven to excess.

But also it was the sheer superficiality of it. You could remove all that devastation without it affecting the plot, characters, or dialogue in any way. It had no impact on the story whatsoever. If you read a dialogue-only transcript of the film, you probably wouldn't even know that most of Metropolis had been destroyed. It wasn't even part of the story. It was completely gratuitous, tacked-on spectacle.

Not to mention that it was stupid. Skyscrapers don't collapse like houses of cards the moment something slams into them. They're designed not to fall down. If Zod tossed Superman through a building with superstrength, sure, he'd punch a man-sized hole through the building, but the building would probably survive.

So on multiple levels, from plot to character to story logic to basic physics and engineering, that destruction simply should not have happened. And yet it dominated the film for a huge amount of time.

 

[Aldo]

I'm not sure it's fair to put all that blame on Snyder though. You gotta think that a lot of the action was written into the script with Snyder just following that. Now this is merely an assumption on my part, it could very well be Snyder's doing...

On the subject of the destruction though, the part I and my friend both chuckled at was the part where Superman is thrown through the gas station in Smallville then the damn thing explodes(!) We both looked at each other and said "Yep, there goes a whole bunch of people."

 

[Dr.H]

Not to mention Zack Snyder's signature imprints are splattered all over the film's second and third act.

I actually think Snyder's direction was pretty far removed from his usual style. A signature Snyder action sequence would have loads of slow motion. If you want an example of a signature Zach Snyder sequence I would say look no further than 'Sucker Punch' that film is unabashedly Snyder.

It's dialed down, but there's still those seething remnants of it that are bottled within the film that come popping out in full force in the final act, free from the shackles of constraint. The final act(sans the slo-mo') is vintage Snyder.

 

[DWF]

For me, it was not necessarily the level of destruction. This is the type of thing we see in the comics. It was meant to be horrifying and it was. What was missing though was some attempt on the part of Superman to prevent the destruction. So, when he saves the one family at the end, we are left thinking why is he saving them and not the thousands of people he just let die.

For me it was both. Mainly it was the callousness of having all this destruction without Superman doing a thing about it, but it was also the duration of it. When the city-smashing had finally died down and we had a lull and then Superman and Zod started going one-on-one and buildings started collapsing again, I was yelling "Seriously?" at the screen and very, very sorely tempted to storm out of the theater. It was just too much. Action films today are too driven to excess.

But also it was the sheer superficiality of it. You could remove all that devastation without it affecting the plot, characters, or dialogue in any way. It had no impact on the story whatsoever. If you read a dialogue-only transcript of the film, you probably wouldn't even know that most of Metropolis had been destroyed. It wasn't even part of the story. It was completely gratuitous, tacked-on spectacle.

Not to mention that it was stupid. Skyscrapers don't collapse like houses of cards the moment something slams into them. They're designed not to fall down. If Zod tossed Superman through a building with superstrength, sure, he'd punch a man-sized hole through the building, but the building would probably survive.

So on multiple levels, from plot to character to story logic to basic physics and engineering, that destruction simply should not have happened. And yet it dominated the film for a huge amount of time.

Only two buildings were destroyed during the fight between zod and Superman, one by Zod's heat vision and the other came down after Zod threw a tanker truck into it. Any building that was destroyed before that was the result of being hit a Krytonian gravity beam and the missiles fired by the Raptors.

 

[Aldo]

Not to mention Zack Snyder's signature imprints are splattered all over the film's second and third act.

I actually think Snyder's direction was pretty far removed from his usual style. A signature Snyder action sequence would have loads of slow motion. If you want an example of a signature Zach Snyder sequence I would say look no further than 'Sucker Punch' that film is unabashedly Snyder.

It's dialed down, but there's still those seething remnants of it that are bottled within the film that come popping out in full force in the final act, free from the shackles of constraint. The final act(sans the slo-mo') is vintage Snyder.

I actually wished Snyder had employed slo-mo during the final action sequence. Sure it would still have been mindless action, but at least it would have been stylistically mindless action.

 

[Dr.H]

I'm not sure it's fair to put all that blame on Snyder though. You gotta think that a lot of the action was written into the script with Snyder just following that. Now this is merely an assumption on my part, it could very well be Snyder's doing...

You're right, it was in the script. Goyer confirmed it in this interview he did right here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOoSSrYt-Sk

Look at the 5:24 mark.
But Snyder certainly played a part in the depiction of it, listen to Snyder's hilarious justification of the massive death toll.

I wanted the movie to have a mythological feeling. In ancient mythology, mass deaths are used to symbolize disasters. In other countries like Greece and Japan, myths were recounted through the generations, partly to answer unanswerable questions about death and violence. In America, we don’t have that legacy of ancient mythology. Superman (who first appeared in ‘Action Comics’ in 1938) is probably the closest we get. It’s a way of recounting the myth.”

http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/zach-snyder-on-man-of-steels-mass-destruction.html

 

[Aldo]

As much as I'll defend Snyder, that seems to be missing the point of Superman. Oh well, what's done is done. I do long for a day when Superman can be the overgrown boyscout again, and his weakness is that he tries to save everyone all the time.

 

[JacksonArcher]

Snyder was probably my biggest problem with Man of Steel and the biggest element I'm worried about with this Batman/Superman film.

Sure, Goyer isn't the best writer either, but when he's paired with a talented director (Christopher Nolan, Guillermo del Toro) he can usually deliver solid results. That's why I'm hoping Affleck will have some influence on the story or direction - Affleck is a much stronger writer/director than Snyder and Goyer combined.

I'm also hoping another writer gets brought on-board to strengthen the script (a la Jonathan Nolan), but I'm not holding my breath. What's worse is that Christopher Nolan is playing a much more backseat role this time around, so it is possible Snyder will be even less restrained with this one.

 

[Christopher]

I'm not sure it's fair to put all that blame on Snyder though. You gotta think that a lot of the action was written into the script with Snyder just following that. Now this is merely an assumption on my part, it could very well be Snyder's doing...

You're right, it was in the script. Goyer confirmed it in this interview he did right here.

Makes little difference. In Hollywood feature films, screenwriters have no power; they're seen as hired contractors whose job is to write what the director and producer tell them to write. The specific words and connective tissue come from the writers, but the decisions about the key story points, about what goes in the film and what doesn't, come from the director and producer.

That's why Goyer's record as a screenwriter is so inconsistent, why -- as JacksonArcher said -- the quality of his work depends on the quality of the director overseeing it. It's because the director is the one making the real decisions.

 

[Dr.H]

Man...would I love for Affleck to direct this film. It would totally be the most awesome cinematic justice ever if it was announced Snyder is leaving the director's chair with Affleck taking his place. He originally was approached by Nolan to direct Man of Steel to which he declined due to his inexperience in special effects. I really wonder how Steel would have turned out if he had accepted the gig.

 

[Chuck Finley]

To those opposed to Affleck, I too am skeptical of his acting ability, but after finally seeing Argo, I'm more convince. Though Argo is not the be all, end all, it is mor inspiring than his previous work. For what it's worth, I think he definitely looks the part.

 

[davejames]

But also it was the sheer superficiality of it. You could remove all that devastation without it affecting the plot, characters, or dialogue in any way. It had no impact on the story whatsoever. If you read a dialogue-only transcript of the film, you probably wouldn't even know that most of Metropolis had been destroyed. It wasn't even part of the story. It was completely gratuitous, tacked-on spectacle.

I won't deny the level of destruction was a bit much, but I wouldn't say the battle was completely superficial and unnecessary either. These are two ultra-powerful, godlike superbeings fighting each other-- of course it's going to cause a ton of damage and take quite a while to play out.

To have the whole thing neatly wrapped up in 15 minutes, with hardly any damage inflicted on the city, would have been unrealistic as hell.

 

[Christopher]

^The point isn't whether there would've been damage or not. The point is about whether the story even acknowledges the damage. We see Metropolis subjected to Hiroshima-level devastation, then two scenes later we see the staff at the Daily Planet (whose building was clearly part of the devastated area) chatting and laughing in their offices with no acknowledgment that they're recovering from a horrific tragedy.

Even worse is Jenny's line "He saved us" when Superman shows up. It just doesn't fit in the story as shown. She's totally unaware of what Superman was doing on the opposite side of the planet. All she knows is that he was nowhere to be seen while the city was collapsing around her, that the US military then flew in and destroyed the machine that was wrecking the city, and that Lois Lane fell out of a plane and the guy in the cape flew in to save her. So all she knows is that Superman saved Lois, and had no impact at all on any other aspect of events that she was aware of. So putting the words "He saved us" into her mouth was grossly dishonest and invalid. It didn't fit the character and it didn't fit the situation.

So lack of realism is exactly my complaint. The characters do not react to the devastation in a remotely realistic way. It has no impact on them or on the story, so it's as if it didn't even happen. The movie was horrendously unrealistic, hypocritical, superficial, and incompetent in the way it tacked this massive destruction into the film without justifying or anchoring it in the story in any way whatsoever.

 

[davejames]

Well they definitely seemed pretty horrified and shell-shocked while the battle was going on, so I wouldn't say the destruction had no effect (although I agree the movie shrugged off the destruction afterward a little too easily).

And I think Superman stopping Zod from going on a rampage to destroy every last human being on Earth would definitely qualify as "saving us." Without Supes doing what he did, poor little Jenny and everyone she knows would have been toast.

 

[Christopher]

Well they definitely seemed pretty horrified and shell-shocked while the battle was going on, so I wouldn't say the destruction had no effect (although I agree the movie shrugged off the destruction afterward a little too easily).

But what I'm talking about is the lack of consequences. Yes, you see them reacting in the moment, but the moment itself is quickly forgotten and has no impact on what follows. So the appearance of having an effect, either on the characters, the city, or the world, is superficial. You could remove most of the destruction from the story and it would not alter the story's plot points in any material way.

And I think Superman stopping Zod from going on a rampage to destroy every last human being on Earth would definitely qualify as "saving us."

But the point is that Jenny herself had no way of knowing that at that moment. She was a character in the story, not a member of the audience, so she didn't have an omniscient viewpoint. At that particular point, she had no knowledge of what Superman had done on the other side of the world. The only thing she'd personally seen Superman doing prior to that moment was saving Lois Lane after she fell out of a plane. It is fundamentally bad writing to have a character display knowledge that it is impossible for the character to have -- and in this case it's particularly egregious because it's so completely opposite to how a character in her situation would be more likely to react (e.g. "Oh, you save the hot reporter, but where the hell were you ten minutes ago when hundreds of thousands of people were dying all around me?")

 

[JarodRussell]

Interestingly enough, today is September 11 and around here nobody seems to have noticed.

The time frame might be too tight in Man of Steel, but eventually, everyone forgets caring about events. If you looked for 5 minutes at the people in 2001, and then looked for 5 minutes at the people in 2013, you would get the impression that we are a bunch of heartless monsters when actually we simply moved on.

 

[Scout101]

12 years later? Likely a different feeling if you're talking about New Yorkers vice another crowd. And DEFINITELY different if you're observing them a few months later vice more than a decade...

Also, like 100 times the devestation. How many buildings did they drop in this one, all smashing into each other? What's the body count if you essentially turn half of New York into a parking lot?

 

[Greg Cox]

Well they definitely seemed pretty horrified and shell-shocked while the battle was going on, so I wouldn't say the destruction had no effect (although I agree the movie shrugged off the destruction afterward a little too easily).

But what I'm talking about is the lack of consequences. Yes, you see them reacting in the moment, but the moment itself is quickly forgotten and has no impact on what follows. So the appearance of having an effect, either on the characters, the city, or the world, is superficial. You could remove most of the destruction from the story and it would not alter the story's plot points in any material way.

To be fair, nobody seems too broken up over the total destruction of Alderaan in STAR WARS either. Leia reacts in the moment, but then we're back to swashbuckling adventure and quips. And everybody is grinning and upbeat at the big feel-good awards ceremony at the end . . . despite the fact that an entire planet has been destroyed, on a scale that makes Zod's attack on Metropolis seem like a fender-bender!

Which just goes to demonstrate how tricky it can be to balance larger-than-life, comic-book-sized cataclysms with telling a rousing pulp adventure story. I mean, does anybody think that STAR WARS (or MAN OF STEEL) would have been better if it had ended with a somber memorial ceremony . . . .

Just a thought.

 

[Christopher]

To be fair, nobody seems too broken up over the total destruction of Alderaan in STAR WARS either. Leia reacts in the moment, but then we're back to swashbuckling adventure and quips. And everybody is grinning and upbeat at the big feel-good awards ceremony at the end . . . despite the fact that an entire planet has been destroyed, on a scale that makes Zod's attack on Metropolis seem like a fender-bender!

Yes -- but the destruction of Alderaan was over in a matter of seconds (in fact it was ridiculously brief). The film didn't devote half a reel to it. It wasn't a huge part of the story because the story was a lighthearted adventure tale rather than a solemn examination of grief and tragedy. And so it didn't have any more time or attention devoted to it than the story required. That's not the case here. The destruction went on forever but had no story relevance at all.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ And the MOS makers were at great pains in advance to stress how 'grounded and realistic' it was, while Star Wars had a fun and fantasy tone.