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Superman Vs. The Elite...

Rating Superman Vs. The Elite

  • A) Excellent

    Votes: 9 40.9%
  • B) Good

    Votes: 9 40.9%
  • C) Fair

    Votes: 3 13.6%
  • D) Poor

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • F) Bad

    Votes: 1 4.5%

  • Total voters
    22
As I've mentioned in another thread, there's actually a good self-serving legal argument for superheroes not to use lethal force if they can possibly avoid it, even aside from what should be the obvious moral reasons.

In reality the costumed hero Phoenix Jones has encountered legal problems just from using pepper spray. If he started slashing throats and breaking necks they'd lock him up and throw away the key.
 
Man, what a good story... that was almost ruined by some distractingly bad character design. This really called for the kind of sophisticated design we saw in Batman Year One, not the simplistic, cartoony stuff we got here.

The style and design is based on the art from the comic book the story was from.
 
Man, what a good story... that was almost ruined by some distractingly bad character design. This really called for the kind of sophisticated design we saw in Batman Year One, not the simplistic, cartoony stuff we got here.

Cartoony doesn't mean unsophisticated. Look at how cartoony Bruce Timm's Batman: The Animated Series designs were compared to standard animation design styles from previous decades. But it was also the most sophisticated artwork on TV at the time.

That said, although I haven't seen the film yet, the execution (not the design) of the animation does seem simpler and more rushed, more on a par with TV animation than the feature-quality stuff they usually do. It does seem this movie was rushed compared to the others.
 
As I've mentioned in another thread, there's actually a good self-serving legal argument for superheroes not to use lethal force if they can possibly avoid it, even aside from what should be the obvious moral reasons.

In reality the costumed hero Phoenix Jones has encountered legal problems just from using pepper spray. If he started slashing throats and breaking necks they'd lock him up and throw away the key.

In reality, Phoenix Jones doesn't fight walking atomic bombs that casually level skyscrapers and can murder thousands with a twitch of his finger.

In a realistic scenario the police would have been begging Superman to kill Atomic Skull for them because they can't, they're not powerful enough, and they can't contain him, either. When Superman takes Atomic Skull to the Metropolis city jail to wait for his arraignment, it's a foregone conclusion that every law enforcement officer in that jail will die as soon as Atomic Skull recovers from the beating that Superman gave him. There is just no possible way that they can survive against him for even a second, much less keep him imprisoned. The law would give way to the reality of the situation.

There's also the fact that Superman would also be legally responsible for collateral damage caused in his fights, of which there is a great deal.
 
As I've mentioned in another thread, there's actually a good self-serving legal argument for superheroes not to use lethal force if they can possibly avoid it, even aside from what should be the obvious moral reasons.

In reality the costumed hero Phoenix Jones has encountered legal problems just from using pepper spray. If he started slashing throats and breaking necks they'd lock him up and throw away the key.

In reality, Phoenix Jones doesn't fight walking atomic bombs that casually level skyscrapers and can murder thousands with a twitch of his finger.

That would make him ever cooler. :D
 
There's also the fact that Superman would also be legally responsible for collateral damage caused in his fights, of which there is a great deal.

Superman should just let the villains do whatever they want!

I remember hearing that Superman was made an honorary deputy of the Metropolis Police Department in the comics. Did that really happen?
 
But that would make the city liable for all the stuff he busts up.

Precrisis Superman was so ridiculously powerful, I remember after some dinky alien invasion, he's doing the rounds and thinks to himself "I've already wasted a full 30 seconds cleaning up metropolis, at this rate I won't be able to fix up the rest of the world before dinner."
 
We actually saw this in classic Spider-Man comics. He was initially tolerated by the police, and even when they were nominally after him due to Jameson stirring up the city against him, a lot of rank-and-file cops respected what he did and didn't try very hard to arrest him. But once he was suspected of killing Gwen Stacy, it became a much more active manhunt and it got harder for him to function as a superhero until he was cleared. And that was when he didn't actually kill anybody.

Except Gwen Stacy wasn't a supervillian, so of course the police are going to chase after him if they think he killed an innocent bystander seeing as it makes him look like the bad guy.

As such it doesn't really tell us how the police would react if they think Spider-Man offed the Green Goblin especially in a case where it is obviously self-defense and especially if Osborn had just killed a bunch of people just prior to that after escaping from prison for the millionth time that week.
 
Except Gwen Stacy wasn't a supervillian...

That doesn't matter where the law is concerned. Legally, private citizens do not have the right to employ deadly force, and will get prosecuted for it if they do. And as I explained in the A-Team thread, self-defense only applies if you had no other choice, no avenue of retreat. If you're a vigilante who actively sought out a confrontation and killed someone during it -- or if you had the opportunity to escape but chose to engage in a fight and killed someone -- then you can't claim self-defense. (Not unless someone else's life was in immediate danger and would've been lost if you retreated, which admittedly is fairly likely to be the case if you're a superhero.)

Laws have to be designed to cover every situation, not just be narrowly focused on one specific instance. Sure, there may be the occasional situation where the only way to prevent a lethal supervillain from killing a bunch of people is for a superhero to kill them. But that's one situation, not a universal rule. If the law says it's justified for vigilantes to kill, then that sets a precedent that's going to cause a lot of avoidable and unnecessary death, including the death of innocents, because not all vigilantes are going to be as responsible, careful, ethical, or unprejudiced as a Superman, and because sometimes innocent people get accused of crimes. So the law has to come down hard on lethal force for everyone's protection. Exceptions exist, but they must be narrow. And it's not up to the police to say "Aww, we'll look the other way this time." They don't get to decide which situations warrant exceptions to the law and which don't. That's for the judicial system to decide, and the superhero would still need to be investigated and questioned in order for the DA to decide whether criminal charges were warranted, and possibly arrested and put on trial for a jury to decide guilt or innocence. And even if the superhero were cleared, their secret identity might still be exposed and their effectiveness as a superhero undermined. So again, it's in a superhero's best interest to avoid lethal force if at all possible, from a pragmatic perspective as well as a moral one.
 
i love it! i could see both sides! But in the end Superman was Right "we are not above the law!" And that the way it should be super man should not deside who lives and who dies! that up to the courts! well i hope next every 1 enjoy this superman Movie because with the next 2 movie will be batman films! there will be no new superman movie till next summer 2013 ! what should the next superman movie be about? i say "birthright" good night !:)
 
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You do understand that by the end Superman assumed that he was above the law?

Superrobots be damned, that Blazing saddles fauxgotha he fabricated would have required a metric tonne of permits from City Hall like any other pageant or parade going up and down Main Street... Hells bells, even when modern day Nazis have a pride march, their lawyers make sure that everything is tickity boo ahead of time to stop the police turning up with fire hoses.

A flashmob with real explosives?

That's thousands of briefs for attempted murder for the purpose of theatre and seriously, if he only had his daily planet cheque to draw from, the littering citations they could mark Kal up on for knocking over buildings would see his children birthed and buried in the poorhouse.
 
This was really good. Love the morale issues raised about Super Heroes and their role in society and how they handle Justice. The speech by Superman at the end was one of the best.
Was it me or did the Fortress of solitude look a lot like the one in Superman the movie. In fact I could see the Chris Reeves Superman movies doing a story like this.
 
The speech where he talks about how good it is to cut lose, how it feels excellent and will accomplish everything so expediently?

What he was announcing was nothing different from an admonishment you might hear everyday in a church basement from a narcotics anonymous meeting or an overeaters anonymous meeting.

Superman wants to be a villain.

He is jealous and angry that Manchester black can cut loose and be an asshole when he can't because he's a decent "human being". He's insensately annoyed by the limitations placed on him by the civil contract he never signed to be part of this culture to say please and thank you, or take shit from assholes with a smile when they deserve an unproportionate retaliation.

In the Justice League Cartoon 10 years back, on a Mirror Earth, the first step Superman took towards becoming the emperor of the planet was the lobotomisation of Lex Luthor with his heatray vision. The first evil that saw the construction of a thrown where Earth was ruled by an alien hand that knew better from on high.

What he said in this new movie was awful, but still deeperly out of context with what he did. He said that he wished he wasn't a good man, as he cut into an idiots brain with the power of the sun proving that he didn't know that he was already a worse man than he yearned to be.
 
In the Justice League Cartoon 10 years back, on a Mirror Earth, the first step Superman took towards becoming the emperor of the planet was the lobotomisation of Lex Luthor with his heatray vision.

Slight correction he killed Lex Luthor with his heat vision, he didn't lobotomize him. He did lobotomize regular DCAU Earth Doomsday though.
 
Details Hartziilla. ;)

In the comic book Kal faked the lobotomy.

He was playing for the cameras.

Superman was never talking to Manchester Black, he was educating the public about the use of power by making them wet their pants from giving them exactly what they wanted.

In the movie, Superman did lobotomise Manchester Black and then castrated the rest of the Elite.

Actions speak louder than words.

And as far as the REwriters of this movie script go, who pissed on the original story matter at the 11th hour by inverting the punchline/moneyshot, I can only imagine that they changed the ending of the story because they thought that Superman was fundamentally a pussy who needed to sack up for the new generation.

It's hypocrisy to have it both ways, not that there's anything wrong with that, if you're a hypocrite.
 
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Which laws is Superman talking about here anyway? Certainly not the ones about needing visas to travel. Though with the backing of a Superman, I guess the UN would become a lot more proactive organization.

It's a new age, the president can put out execution orders on dangerous American citizens. I think in a world with supervillainy, that law would definitely apply. The government might even sanction superpowered individuals to do the deed for them, what with presumably lacking the technology to accomplish it themselves. But let's get even more cynical, the only reason to keep villains alive is to form some sort of "SS" to get sent on jobs the moral heroes are too pussy to undertake. Or you could lock them up somewhere in the middle of the city (saves on cable), and then wait for them to escape and cause some more carnage. Cause all the free electricity sure is worth it. Whatever the outcome, Supes is complicit. Tony Stark and Superman's dad had the right idea with prison dimensions.
 
Prison dimensions? What do you think Cuba is? A prison so removed from the ethics of America that the Supreme Court stated that they were unqualified to decided right from wrong therein.

So the Yanks are already all over that.

"Sigh"

So, who's ordering death squads to whack unpopular Americans from the White House?

Obama or George?
 
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