Same difference in sci-fi
Spoilers Superman (2025) Grade and Discussion
- Thread starter Nerys Myk
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Same difference in sci-fi
Maybe. For me, it all felt like being ok with killing.
So the same person who was just bemoaning people getting into conflicts over these movies … immediately turns around and tries to stoke another one.
And your post started off so well. I’m glad you enjoyed Gunn’s movie.
Good for you to misread my post. But you are a much smarter and better man than I am. I said I love both movies, and that BOTH MOVIES have something some people fight over.
Don’t kid a kidder. Bringing up the neck-snap at all in that context was unnecessary. As you well know, it’s been a geek flashpoint for over a decade, and going, “Nyah, nyah, Gunn did it too,” was pure bait.
The defensiveness of your reply is also telling.
But as I said, I’m sincerely glad you liked Gunn’s movie. I, too, thought it was awesome. I just wish you had ended your post with the first paragraph.
Hey dude, if that helps you sleep, fine by me. You do you. I know what I said.
Gunn went out of his way to show the guys in the Raptor suits are still moving when they hit the ground. The clone going into the black hole is the equivalent of everyone BUT Zod going into the Phantom Zone. Every reason to think he will be back. Considering Gunn is following up the Raptor suits with Lex in full body armor in the sequel. I would not be surprised to see the clone return looking more Bizarro. He setup a lot of threads and now he gets chance to pay those off. The great thing about Clone/Bizarro it’s David Cornswet his lead. He already has him. Even if it’s a small part, the actor is part of the cast already.
Having the clone return would be so... Bizzaro.So the clone is definitely not coming back?
As noted, the split won't happen until next year. In addition, Zaslav will be in control of Warner Bros (The TV and Movie studios, DC Studios, the streaming service, the gaming studio, and the library) and the CFO Gunnar Wiedenfeld will get Discovery Global, which is basically all the TV channels (including CNN, TNT, TBS, etc).
Exactly. From the announcement of the Gunn film's production, the usual, emotionally rattled suspects could not stop their incessant whining about Snyder and his movie, when any rational adult has the ability (or one would assume) to ignore the older film in favor of one they often claimed they were ever-so-happy to see on its way to theatres. Nope. their obsessive hatred of an interpretation of a character fueled their daily ranting, wild, failed box office predictions (in this thread, for a start), and to this day, continued bitching about Snyder.Talk about someone living rent free in the minds of certain people!
Exactly. From the announcement of the Gunn film's production, the usual, emotionally rattled suspects could not stop their incessant whining about Snyder and his movie, when any rational adult has the ability (or one would assume) to ignore the older film in favor of one they often claimed they were ever-so-happy to see on its way to theatres. Nope. their obsessive hatred of an interpretation of a character fueled their daily ranting, wild, failed box office predictions (in this thread, for a start), and to this day, continued bitching about Snyder.Talk about someone living rent free in the minds of certain people!
I ment from both sides.
Has Jon Peters ever been asked about these things? It's such a legendary story among sci-fi nerds it would be entertaining to see his response.
Yes, he was interviewed by the late Jon Schnepp for his documentary The Death of Superman Lives.
I finally saw the movie now that it's on HBO Max. It's excellent, probably the most consistently good live-action Superman movie we've ever had. It strikes an effective balance, embracing all the lunacy of Silver Age comics but playing it straight with believable character nuance. It does a good job of feeling like a lived-in world right off the bat and bringing the audience up to speed on everything they need to know.
As a Cincinnati native who lives less than two miles from Union Terminal and once worked there briefly as a museum guide, as well as tagging along with my father when he did radio broadcasts from it in my childhood before it became a museum, I loved how well the Hall of Justice scene celebrated its magnificent architecture. When the Arrowverse used a photograph of the Terminal exterior to represent the Hall, it was digitally altered to look more like the Super Friends version that it inspired, and the interiors were shot in a Vancouver airport hangar. But Superman lets us see the Terminal as it really is, with no changes except the "Hall of Justice" sign out front and the digital alteration of the historic Winold Reiss murals to represent past superheroes instead of American cultural heritage and Cincinnati industry. They didn't even hide the Art Deco "To Trains" sign! (Which is still accurate, since the Museum Center is still the only passenger rail terminal in the city.) Even the garage door was the real thing! It was lovely seeing such a great showcase for my favorite building. Gunn's team found some other gorgeous locations in a similar architectural vein for the Daily Planet and the shopping center (?) where the flying kiss happened.
I do have a couple of plot quibbles. The way Jimmy Olsen led Eve on about their relationship felt mean-spirited and kind of misogynistic. And it bothered me that the Engineer's fate was left unresolved. They said she was still alive after the impact, but then just forgot about her, and there was no evidence that she'd been retrieved from the rift before it shut, so she probably died. I was expecting that Superman would save her and make her re-evaluate her hatred of him, but instead, she had no character arc and was just a physical threat. (And the Fortress scene where Lex and the Engineer monologued about their reasons for trying to destroy Superman was very clumsily expository.)
I've often said that I prefer giving new Superman composers a chance to create their own Superman marches rather than reusing the Williams theme (which was itself an homage to the Sammy Timberg and Leon Klatzkin Superman marches that preceded it). But unlike Superman Returns, where they basically just needle-dropped the unaltered Williams theme every time Superman went into action, this score makes use of it more transformatively and creatively, so I'm okay with it.
As a Cincinnati native who lives less than two miles from Union Terminal and once worked there briefly as a museum guide, as well as tagging along with my father when he did radio broadcasts from it in my childhood before it became a museum, I loved how well the Hall of Justice scene celebrated its magnificent architecture. When the Arrowverse used a photograph of the Terminal exterior to represent the Hall, it was digitally altered to look more like the Super Friends version that it inspired, and the interiors were shot in a Vancouver airport hangar. But Superman lets us see the Terminal as it really is, with no changes except the "Hall of Justice" sign out front and the digital alteration of the historic Winold Reiss murals to represent past superheroes instead of American cultural heritage and Cincinnati industry. They didn't even hide the Art Deco "To Trains" sign! (Which is still accurate, since the Museum Center is still the only passenger rail terminal in the city.) Even the garage door was the real thing! It was lovely seeing such a great showcase for my favorite building. Gunn's team found some other gorgeous locations in a similar architectural vein for the Daily Planet and the shopping center (?) where the flying kiss happened.
I do have a couple of plot quibbles. The way Jimmy Olsen led Eve on about their relationship felt mean-spirited and kind of misogynistic. And it bothered me that the Engineer's fate was left unresolved. They said she was still alive after the impact, but then just forgot about her, and there was no evidence that she'd been retrieved from the rift before it shut, so she probably died. I was expecting that Superman would save her and make her re-evaluate her hatred of him, but instead, she had no character arc and was just a physical threat. (And the Fortress scene where Lex and the Engineer monologued about their reasons for trying to destroy Superman was very clumsily expository.)
I've often said that I prefer giving new Superman composers a chance to create their own Superman marches rather than reusing the Williams theme (which was itself an homage to the Sammy Timberg and Leon Klatzkin Superman marches that preceded it). But unlike Superman Returns, where they basically just needle-dropped the unaltered Williams theme every time Superman went into action, this score makes use of it more transformatively and creatively, so I'm okay with it.
I dunno. It was a good movie of its type, one of the better ones… but I wonder if I’m finally just aging out of the type. Plenty of individually good scenes, and I like this iteration of Mr. Terrific, but at the end of the day it still feels like Just Another Superhero Movie.
And yes, I realize that’s like complaining about Just Another James Bond Movie.
I suppose my own cynicism plays into it too, with the final triumph in the plot being something that the last year has been demonstrating just doesn’t work that way.
For me, the first half of the 1978 film remains not only the best comic book movie ever made, but one of the very few “real” movies in the genre. (And only the first half; once he’s newly revealed and we switch to Metropolis, that movie is over.)
And yes, I realize that’s like complaining about Just Another James Bond Movie.
I suppose my own cynicism plays into it too, with the final triumph in the plot being something that the last year has been demonstrating just doesn’t work that way.
For me, the first half of the 1978 film remains not only the best comic book movie ever made, but one of the very few “real” movies in the genre. (And only the first half; once he’s newly revealed and we switch to Metropolis, that movie is over.)
Nice post. Thanks for the information about the Union Terminal. Gunn left a few unresolved plot lines. He's winked about it in interviews, implying that we'll get answers to those later on. I agree about the Engineer, and at the same time, I see how Gunn has hired actors with the idea they'll return later on. Perry, Steve, and Cat don't really get character arcs either. I felt similarly about Bizarro.
I'm curious what you thought about the characters in the film.
Pretty good interpretations overall. I have a hard time buying that Superman could be that unconcerned about the consequences of his actions; by the "World of Cardboard" principle, he'd have to be constantly thinking of consequences to others or he couldn't even open a door without damaging the building. But I guess physical consquences are one thing, abstract geopolitical consequences another. And it does work as a way of establishing that Superman is incomplete without Lois to keep him grounded. The interview scene was a very effective way of establishing their relationship in all its complexity. And I liked how they started with a fakeout scene in the Planet offices that created the illusion of a standard Lois-Clark rivalry before revealing that it was just a cover.
Hoult's Luthor is an excellent portrayal of the character, comparable to Jon Cryer's in capturing the essence of his personality, and better able to show the extent of the schemes he's capable of with his technology. It's the modern business-mogul version of Luthor, but fully embracing the reckless scientific genius of the pre-Crisis version, much like in All-Star Superman. It did feel contrived that every threat Superman faced in the movie was orchestrated by Luthor, but I guess that's because it's all one movie, so there's one consistent adversary.
Jimmy and Perry were okay, and it's nice to see a version of Jimmy that isn't defined as a photographer (an invention of the Donner films, when he was a cub reporter in radio and comics). I have to wonder why we even needed Cat Grant, Steve Lombard, and Ron Troupe except as continuity winks.
A fridge-logic consideration occured to me overnight. If this is the modern version of Supergirl who was already a teenager or adult when Krypton exploded, who has personal memories of her homeworld, then why didn't she tell Clark that they were really a race of conquerors? Maybe that was just Jor-El & Lara's secret scheme that she didn't know about, but still, the rest of the movie implied that Clark had no knowledge of his homeworld except through that message. Although the very existence of all the advanced, presumably Kryptonian technology in the Fortress also seems inconsistent with that. If that tech came with Kal-El in his space pod, wouldn't it have had records and data files to allow building all that stuff?
I also had my usual problem with the depiction of skyscrapers toppling over like dominoes. As we all saw on 9/11/2001, when a tall building begins to topple sideways, the vertical structural members aren't designed to handle lateral shear forces and break right away, and the building collapses mostly straight downward, not holding together long enough to tilt far sideways. In this case, though, I'm willing to be a little forgiving, since the buildings were toppling into each other and pushing each other sideways, which makes it a little more believable, though not much. Just in general, though, I'm sick of this need in feature films to depict mass urban destruction at all, even though they did say the city was evacuated first (though realistically it would take hours if not days to evacuate a city that size).
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