WHAT I LIKED:
Henry Cavill – I buy this guy as Superman, whereas Christopher Reeve, Dean Cain, and Brandon Routh were more like “it’s impossible to cast Superman perfectly, but these guys are tall and seem earnest.” Cavill can be nice without seeming unaggressive, as in his “I’m not asking to help you, I’m telling you” tone towards General Swanwick. This is a Superman that isn’t removed from danger because he’s immune to it; he’s just pretty confident he can handle any shit that comes his way.
Krypton – Man of Steel presents a much more interesting Krypton than any of the movies so far–not as interesting as the comics, but the comics have had 900 months to explore the concept. I definitely got a John Byrne vibe from it, which surprised me because that was like three or four reboots ago, but it fit with the premise. Byrne’s Krypton is not just a doomed world, but a civilization in decline. Granted, a fantastic Curt Swan kind of Krypton would be even more enjoyable, but after decades of glaciers and crystals I’ll take what I can get on the big screen.
Kevin Costner – I’ve never sat down and compared all the different versions of Jonathan Kent, so I can’t say for sure that Costner is the best one. But I am certain that this is the first time I bought Pa as a midwestern farmer, and not the idea of a midwestern farmer as conceived by some big city writer or movie director. In playing the role Costner comes across like some guy my dad would know, at an age where he’s not ready to admit he’s no longer the alpha male in his family. The father-son quarrel especially rang true.
Urban Legend Superman – I’m a sucker for the period after Clark is grown up and leaves home but before he decides to act publicly as Superman. It’s a fertile ground for doing stories you can’t do after Superman’s debut, and this movie takes advantage. It’s a blast watching that mysterious unkempt stranger showing up in random places helping people and sneaking in his powers. And it provided a novel way to introduce Lois Lane to the story, by acknowledging that sooner or later an investigative journalist would notice Clark’s trail and trace it back to the Kents’ farm.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:
The plot – Basically Krypton is dying, so Jor-El’s solution is to start fresh by sending his son to Earth, and General Zod’s solution is to turn Earth into a new Krypton and make all the same mistakes again. This conflict reminds me of nothing so much as the “World of New Krypton” storyline a few years back that sucked so hard that I dropped the Superman comics and DC rebooted them. You can’t get into “Earth vs. Krypton” because Krypton is dead–that’s the one thing everybody knows about it–so you can’t shake the feeling that you’re watching the last desperate twitches of a spent force. Superman II avoided this dilemma by depicting Zod as a self-interested (not nationalist) megalomaniac who is freed by (rather than in denial of) Krypton’s demise. In contrast, Man of Steel feels like a pointless (albeit well choreographed) brawl over a moot point.
The pacing – It felt like every time the movie started to build momentum, we had to grind things to a halt to show another flashback to Superman’s childhood or a Jor-El speech. It sucks to have to say that, because this movie deserves points for letting Superman be active and alive rather than floating around being thoughtful. But somewhere along the line someone still thinks that pensive reflection is what makes it a Superman movie, which is especially frustrating in light of the Nolan Batman movies and the Avengers franchise raising the bar for superhero blockbusters.
Superman didn’t save many people – OK, you know that scene in the 1978 movie, where Superman saves Lois in the falling helicopter? Of course you do. What makes it so iconic is that it’s the perfect example of what makes Superman such an appealing fantasy–Lois’s danger becomes increasingly apparent, and as tension mounts all you can do is wish that some guy with all the power to fix it would swoop in and fix it. (Similarly satisfying: Captain America saving that old man in Avengers; any time Batman says “I’m Batman.”) Trouble is, Man of Steel has several scenes like that in which Superman frankly can’t fix it, either because he’s fixing something else or Zod’s thugs are all as powerful as he is. I don’t want to be too hard on the big guy, because he did save the world and that’s where I keep all my stuff. But throughout the third act there are places where I wished someone would magically prop up the falling buildings or rescue the frightened minor characters. And when Superman is literally in your movie, it’s kind of frustrating when he can’t be there every time it looks like a job for Superman.
Jor-El – Let’s be clear: the whole point of Jor-El is that he’s gone. He cannot raise his son, he cannot know what will happen to his son, and he cannot help his son. That’s what he has to come to grips with when they launch the rocket, and that’s why he doesn’t need to be all over the movie after that. As soon as any Superman story has to rely on a premise of “Luckily, Jor-El thought of that so he packed this into the rocket with Kal,” it’s time for a rewrite. Man of Steel has Jor-El pack a handy fully interactive Jor-El hologram that can literally do everything for Clark except punch General Zod. Imagine if Batman’s dad built the Batcave and left him extensive notes on how to be Batman, as well as a prerecorded plea for the villain to abandon his mad scheme so innocent lives are not lost. It’s kind of like that.
Again with the Jesus references – Look, I get it, Superman came from the heavens to save the earth in his early 30s, but regular people sometimes regard him with suspicion. But that’s also right where the similarities with Jesus end, so can we get over this already? You’d think somewhere around the part where Clark is flying around the Indian Ocean trying to zap a giant world engine with his heat vision, the writers would start to notice that this isn’t very much like the New Testament after all.
The Daily Planet is almost irrelevant – It’s not that I object to a Superman story that doesn’t involve the Daily Planet and its staff. It’s that time is wasted on these characters when they are irrelevant to the plot. I strongly suspect that the folks who made this movie would have preferred to dispense with the journalism stuff altogether, but they didn’t think they could get away with reinventing Lois Lane as one of the military guys. As it is, the scene where Perry White and Steve Lombard have to save that girl loses its impact, because the only reason we have to care about them is that they’re going to be Superman’s coworkers in the future.
Racebending missing the point – If the goal is to increase visibility of non-white performers in predominantly white movies, I would have rather seen Christopher Meloni play Perry White’s irrelevant part, and Lawrence Fishburne play the badass colonel guy that is in all the important scenes and helps Superman save the world. I’m just sayin’.
That other thing that’s a SPOILER – It will probably be the most controversial thing in the movie, and I could probably do a whole post on it. So let’s just pretend I’m talking about Batman filming a porno with a goat. Basically, if you’re going to have Batman fuck a goat, and you want to make it clear Batman absolutely doesn’t want to fuck a goat, it might be a good idea to establish beforehand Batman’s strong feelings about goat-fucking, and not have Batman appear to be totally fine in the scene immediately following the goat-fucking. I think I’ve made myself clear.
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Not to defend goat-fucking but there was that cry of anguish after the deed was done. Also, he was begging Zod not to do what Zod was trying to do which I took as begging Zod not to make him fuck that fucking goat. So, his anti-goat-fucking bone fides were not explicitly established, but were kinda there in the subtext. Still wish he hadn’t have fucked that goat though. Blame John Byrne for paving the way to that particular barnyard.
Yeah, that cry of anguish after the deed was done, and then after the cry of anguish was done, nothing.
Yeah. After the cry of anguish there was nothing ’cause around that time was when the movie ended. Well, ended after setting up his new status quo with the military and the Planet. Also, upon reflection, he was crying into Lois’s womb-area, kinda symbolic of his having taken a life. Yeah, I’m stretching. Everything means something or other if you look at it long enough. Plus, really not defending goat-fucking. Just love to be involved in an interesting argument. Also, sorry for that.
It’s not that he ended up having to fuck a goat- that was a well done scene, with Superman having to decide whether to fuck a goat or watch innocents die. The problem with that scene is that it comes after Superman was willingly fighting Kryptonians in the middle of populated areas- punching them through buildings, even! That sheer disregard for bystanders was completely un-Superman.
Incidentally, the first episode of Black Mirror was about the Prime Minister having to fuck a pig on live TV, and it was quite good, just in case anyone is wondering if actual drama could come from this plot.
One might also say that, if you’re planning to introduce Batman to a whole new generation, you may not want to feature goat-fucking in your opening story.
I think both “Lucius Fox builds everything Batman needs” and “Jor-El provides a deux-ex-machine” may both be metaphors for “I’m working for a major motion picture studio, and have access to all the resources I could ever need”.
Or it could just be lazy writing.
In fairness, it’s easy — too damned easy — to read the climax of Superman II as also fucking that particular goat — at least in the theatrical release, as I understand it (there’s a deleted scene, it seems, that changes the obvious interpretation of that scene’s action). And as a scene unto itself, it’s handled much better here than in that movie.
The issue that I agree with others on is that it’s not a scene unto itself, and that’s jarring in this film for a number of reasons.
And I think that’s a short-term win for a long term loss. Having a brother play White is somewhat like Jackson as Fury, in terms of role growth potential.
After all, it’s unlikely he’ll get fewer scenes in a sequel, and his scenes were about the only “man on the street” human interest in the story. Given that we African-Americans tend really often to be cast as the “utter basass” type when people are trying to put us in a good light in a fictional context, having us sit in the place of an iconic character like Perry, and being the “quiet hero”, actually is a worthy point in my eyes. Fishburne has the right role.
Also — since the African-American General and the Jimmy Olsen expy survived as well, there’s some play there for an even more diverse cast, going forward.
What were your thoughts on Lois Lane?
Couldn’t he have used his super-ventriloquism to shout to the family, “Yo, move like ten feet to your left and his eye-beams can’t hit you anymore,” and then not have had to struggle with the question of whether or not to kill Zod?
Yeah, my biggest problem with the fuck the goat moment was that it was:
a) entirely avoidable,
b) after a giant mess of a fight far too over the top for your first film in a franchise (seriously, how are you gonna top that on your future JLA movie? the Avengers didn’t wreck a city until it was time to wreck a city, on THE AVENGERS, not before) on which a million civilians were killed and that Superman did nothing to prevent from happening the way it did and
c) it was on a film that introduced Superman to a new audience WHILE there’s that stupid game out where Superman is a dictator because he can’t help but murder people.
It seems like the message DC is giving everyone is that modern Superman is always just a villain away from throwing all of his beliefs under the bus.
Also, the Jor-El thing. I agree wholeheartedly with the Jor-El thing.
Imagine the google searches that will now lead to this page.
Clicking on that link and seeing that panel made me somehow choke on my tongue. I always thought that was an urban legend.
Also since I haven’t seen the movie I think I’ll just assume Superman really fucks a goat. It would probably be more in character than letting millions of people die anyway.
…aaaand now I have ‘superman goat fucking’ in my Google search history. So thanks for that.
(I haven’t seen the movie yet, nor have I been spoiled, why do you ask?)
Bluepard- Superman can’t save everyone. In fact until he time travelled in the original he failed to stop a massive nuclear missile from exploding
Jason: you may recall in said film Superman spent an awful lot of time saving people, before and during those events, with one notable casualty. Thanks for playing though!
The goat fucking criticism is so stupid it hurts. Yes, still stupid when it comes from Mark Waid. Because it sticks Superman in a ridiculous concept of “guy who’d spend years looking for a way out of tucking a goat, even if fucking a goat stopped innocent people from being fucked by a goat.”
Zod wanted to have the entire Earth fucked by a goat… but yeah, Superman was clearly wrong for stopping tha.
There are a number of characters who would fuck goats, if it came to it. Golden Age Superman was one, but Superman as a whole hasn’t been that guy for a very long time now. For the majority of his history, he has possessed both the power and the brains to make goatfucking unnecessary. He saves people from goatfucking, even his enemies. The problem is not that he was wrong to stop Zod from goatfucking, but that he had to fuck a goat himself to do it. That by itself could be forgiven, except for the wanton acts of goatfucking that make up the entire third act of the film, and (as MGK said, and as others have said elsewhere), the fact that he appears completely fine the next time we see him.
Will we see a goatfucking post, MGK? There’s clearly a conversation to be had, and the use of goatfucking as a codeword is rather… unusual.
The thing is, it totally would have been a believable character moment for Zod to have fucked his own goat.
Yes, but until he fucks that goat, he’ll never truly understand the pain and agony that goat-fuckery can cause. Superman shouldn’t want to fuck goats because it would be too easy and horrible for him to do, same as Batman, but making it that he will never do it neuters him (granted, same as Batman) It humanizes him. Though I agree the scenes afterwards were a bit of a weird counterpoint.
Also, saving people wasn’t practical here: A) he can’t do it on a large scale till he’s Superman or gummit shows up and B) While Zod and the Cockroach Soldiers (and who is Krypton fighting or afraid of, anyway, that they need a military) are around saving people seems counterproductive. If I put out a fire in the middle of an air strike, I am not accomplishing anything helpful. Deal with the bigger problem first.
[…] already covered a lot of ground yesterday, a lot of which I concurred with and sort of pre-empted chunks of my post, but I’ve got a few […]
I think the scene also does damage in that it severs one of the few commonalities between Superman and Batman: neither of them would fuck a goat. Now Supes has gone ahead and done it their first time out. Maybe that’s good for “dramatic tension,” but I tend to think a good S/B friendship goes a long way toward humanizing the rest of the Justice League.
ETA: Also, I just wanted to write that neither Superman nor Batman would fuck a goat. For posterity’s sake.
For many people, watching Superman make the choice to fuck the goat humanizes him, makes him relatable, makes him interesting. And that’s fine. There are a lot of iterations of Superman and there’s probably room for a goat-fucking one.
For me, that moment in the movie was the point in which he should have become Superman. Up to then he was Clark in a suit, but flying around and punching things real hard do not a Superman make. What elevates Superman over the other superheroes is that even in the most dire of circumstances, he simply would not make the choice to fuck a goat, no matter how expedient. It’s bone-deep, not a learned thing, not part of his “arc.” If he had taken that moment and triumphed anyway, that’s when he truly would have become Superman, symbol of hope for humanity.
Except he didn’t, of course, so we now have a series of movies about a flying strong guy who will always have goat-fucking as his last-ditch go-to move. Where, exactly, is the hope there? We hope he won’t snap and start eying all the other goats?
@aboynameddart
Batman has trained extensively for every eventuality.
EVERY eventuality…
Edit, just so everyone knows, this entry now shows up at #3 if you google search “superman goatfucking”
It’s only # 3 because internet.
I don’t think it makes him relatable, I think it makes him fucking heroic. Someone who will do anything not to fuck a goat, but if he has to to save a life, if he has to because there’s no alternative, and if he absolutely has to, he will.
Same as with Batman in Final Crisis – when the world is threatened, when there’s no way out, and when you’re backed into the corner… You get over your Daddy issues and your self-righteous morality, and do what has to be done.
In an ideal world, he wouldn’t have to fuck a goat. But saying he never would is as stupid as saying he always should.
I agree with all of your post. Particularly, “it’s time for a rewrite”.
But there were alternatives. The creators of the movie made it look as if he had to fuck the goat or all was lost, but I could name four or five ways out of that situation without trying very hard and I’m not Superman. There was even a long-term way out, since we’d seen the Goat Homeworld Ship had stasis chambers…
My beef is not that Superman made the choice to fuck the goat, not really. I’m annoyed at the creators who decided early on that Superman in their movie absolutely had to be a goat-fucker, and they wrote the movie to lead to that apparently inevitable and desirable end.
Same as with Batman in Final Crisis – when the world is threatened, when there’s no way out, and when you’re backed into the corner… You get over your Daddy issues and your self-righteous morality, and do what has to be done.
I think there’s the same problem creeping up there: There was no indication that Batman had to deal with making a “one-time exception” that went against a lifetime of training himself not to fuck any goats — which was one of the defining traits of the character for decades. The Omega Sanction doesn’t quite count, in my estimation, because it’s not Bruce coming to terms with him choosing to fuck the goat; it’s him getting himself out of another fine mess.
ETA: I may be wrong on this, but I got the sense that DC wiped away a chance to address this post-Flashpoint, when we saw that Damian picked up the keys to the goat-fucking business, as well.
First off, I have to disagree with the claim that Henry Cavill was a great Superman. His performance struck me as Someone Performing Superman according to Someone Who Hates Superman.
Now, When I ask Someone Who Hates Superman why they hate Superman, I generally get things like “He’s a goody-two shoes; always polite, always friendly, firm, but in a boringly stoic way, and when it comes to blows he’ll never throw out a snarky quip or anything like that.”
It’s right around here that I point to Christopher Reeve’s performance in rebuttal. Reeve played Superman with a wink and a smile, ironically playing up Superman’s Boy Scout stereotype and All-American wholesomeness. When Reeve’s Superman says he stands for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”, you get the sense that he understands the preconceptions around him. He’s in on the joke and he doesn’t care, in fact he relishes playing into it.
And that’s just the start of the many, many hidden depths you can take Superman’s character. Yes, in many ways Superman is a boy scout, but that doesn’t mean he can’t also be lighthearted and quippy, or solemn and self-reflective.
Henry Cavill’s Superman…well let me put this way: it’s definitely Superman. It checks off all the correct boxes. Henry Cavill sounds and acts like you’d expect Superman to sound and act. My problem is that there isn’t much else. He isn’t tortured enough, he isn’t intimidating enough, he isn’t funny enough, he isn’t confident enough, he isn’t anything enough for him to stand out in my mind. To put it another way, he’s par for the course when other Supermen have really gone out there to do different or interesting things.
And that’s fine, I guess. Vanilla Superman is a perfectly valid flavor for people, and it certainly isn’t as bad as haters claim. But compared to other movie Superheros? Compared to Iron Man’s ego, Thor’s Brashness, Captain America’s scrappy earnestness, Batman’s brooding, or even Reeve’s unironic self-satire? It just doesn’t do it for me.
Apparently you and I saw a different movie – Costner as dumb-ass, amoral Jonathan Kent was awful
Awful beyond belief
Superman is god made man. His humble beginnings and strong moral character is what defines him. This Jonathan says “let your friends and me die, cuz someone might not like you”
Jonathan should tell Clark “when you are ready, be the man – don’t abuse power but use it for the greater good”
Jonathan in MoS is what you get when a Hollywood writer writes a midwesterner – a rube, stupid and a bit of a yutz
And why was Pete’s mother sounding so accusing when she said what Clark did? What is wrong with the people of Smallville – your son saved our kids – how dare he!
That sheer disregard for bystanders was completely un-Superman
Yeah.
On the one hand, I get that Clark may not yet have fully formed his Superman Code of Ethics. I mean, sure, he goes around helping people a lot, but it was clear during the (much better) first half of the movie that he’s still working out how he fits in and what he is to do. SO faced with a much more extensive threat than he’s ever faced before, I can see where he’d not yet worked out that priority 1 is getting Zod et al away from a population center.
But, yeah. Much as I liked finally seeing a “true” depiction of what a fight between superhumans would really be like, mostly I couldn’t stop thinking about the thousands of folks dead when you’ve got that level of destruction going on.
At least SOMEthing from Superman to suggest he was aware of the consequences for regular folks happening all around him would have been nice. I get he may not have been able to stop it, but he should have at least been seen to want to.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with most of your criticism. The main failure of the movie was in establishing Superman as a protector of lives, and he didn’t even seem as if he was particularly disturbed by all the carnage around him. There is a distinctively schizophrenic tone in the two halves of the movie; in the first half, you did have Supes helping out wher he could, but as soon as big fights get going, that gets pretty well dropped in short order. I believe he saves the one pilot, but… who else? A little more effort on his part- perhaps an attempt to talk Zod down, try to understand things from his perspective, get him away from crowded areas during the fight instead of escalating things- would have gone a long way to justify the… er, goat-fucking, but even then, as others have said, the situation was still avoidable. In the end, the only reason this goat got fucked is because Snyder/Goyer’s vision required Superman to fuck that goat, damn the circumstances or even narriative sense, and THAT, I find, is what the problem is with that scene.
(This is the oddest post I’ve ever made on the Internet.)
But another part that really killed the movie for me is that Superman never… you know, has fun. What JCHandsom says rings true: there’s never really any personality quirk that this superman has to make him stand out from all the other superheroes making it big today. And that’s a shame because the character of Superman gives an opportunity a lot of superheroes don’t: that is, the genuine chance to have a good, normal life, and how having that life informs ones ethics. In the comics, Ma and Pa Kent take great pains to raise Clark as normally as possible, so he had holidays, pets, friends at school, and a fairly well adjusted personality. That didn’t take away from his various struggles, it added to them, as clark constantly called into question the right thing to do. That’d be somewhat inspirational, and would add lots of meaning to the latter part of the film, especially the goat-fucking and how Clark deals with it before and after. But no, it’s the samer old Troubled Childhood ™: uncontrollable powers, ostracism at school, a lot of speeches regarding destiny and choice, hard decisions, somebody dying and being an inspiration, blah blah snore… and consequently, this superman is yet another angsty hero who treats the saving of lives as a tedious, oppressive duty, rather than the right thing to do. Some inspiration.
All right, here’s a question-if you DON’T fuck the goat, what then? What do you do with Zod? Where do you imprison him? Zod’s a bigger threat than, say, the Joker. He is a madman with nothing to lose, better fighting skills and Superman’s powers. There really wasn’t a choice. And it’s not like he LIKED the bastard. He’d only known his true self for maybe a few days?
We’d already been shown the stasis pods in the Goat Homeworld Ship. had the writers/director had the slightest interest in a less-goatfuckery Superman, they could easily have utilized one of those with no more plot-devicing than anything else that happens.
All right, here’s a question-if you DON’T fuck the goat, what then? What do you do with Zod?
I thought about that, and here’s a shot: Zod zips away, having managed to figure out that whole super-speed thing, and hides out in, let’s say, a South American country, amassing a new batch of soldiers/followers. There’s a lot you can do with the idea of Zod as this counter-culture take on Superman who’s playing the locals while pretending to stand up for “the common man,” as opposed to Kal-El’s maintaining the status quo. It’s a bit Bane-ish, yeah, but with an expanded range.
@aboynamedart: The problem is that Zod wants to kill as many humans as possible as quickly as possible, because he’s doing it out of spite. I read that scene going exactly as Zod ultimately wanted it to.
@MonkeywWIthTypewriter: All right, here’s a question-if you DON’T fuck the goat, what then? What do you do with Zod? Where do you imprison him? Zod’s a bigger threat than, say, the Joker. He is a madman with nothing to lose, better fighting skills and Superman’s powers. There really wasn’t a choice. And it’s not like he LIKED the bastard. He’d only known his true self for maybe a few days?
So it’s okay if Superman kills anyone he just doesn’t like?
See, here (as many have already pointed out) is the thing with Superman: He’s supposed to be better than that. He’s supposed to find a way. Not shrug and say “Well, whatta ya gonna do?” and then chose kill.
Even early in his career as he’s figuring out where he fits in, even if everyone on Earth does fear him as an unknown they can’t control, the character of Superman is still supposed to do what’s right because it’s the right thing to do.
And that means being aware of the massive devastation happening and not adding to it with utter disregard for the people around him. And it means finding another option other than killing Zod.
Again, did youv ignore Superman’s primal “I killed? Fuck. Never again” scream?
“You’d think somewhere around the part where Clark is flying around the Indian Ocean trying to zap a giant world engine with his heat vision”
Ahem.
“I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” – Luke 12:49, KJV
Again, did youv ignore Superman’s primal “I killed? Fuck. Never again” scream?
Again, did you ignore Superman’s complete “I killed? Where? When I crashed Zod thru the gas station in Smallville? Or when I ignored the people getting squashed by the buildings I knocked down in Metropolis? Fuck. Don’t care” attitude?
Show me these people being squashed and blown up,
Oh, right, you can”t. Because you’re assuming they died, rather than it actually happening. It’s a Hollywood film – if something happened, they make it explicit.
I think it’s funny that approximately 4 comments after I figured out what goatfucking was a stand-in for people started outright mentioning it.
“So it’s okay if Superman kills anyone he just doesn’t like?”
Can’t you construct a slightly more convincing strawperson from the text you quoted?
@Ian Austin: Show me these people being squashed and blown up,
You got me. I can’t. Oh, wait, that was something I already noted.
It’s a Hollywood film – if something happened, they make it explicit.
Really? So all those discussions I’ve seen from who heard Citizen Kane’s last words to how can it be daylight at both ends of Zod’s terraform engine were stupid because movies always explicitly show everything that happens?
@highlyverbal: Can’t you construct a slightly more convincing strawperson from the text you quoted?
When the text I’m quoting specifically gives “And it’s not like he LIKED the bastard.” as justification for Superman killing
then asking an on-point “So it’s okay if Superman kills anyone he just doesn’t like?” is fair.
If you see a strawman, take it up with the one who brought it to the table.
[…] Man of Steel, Movie of Tedium […]
He seems a lot more broke up about it than all the times Batman has fucked goats in the movies despite his arguably stronger stance against goat fucking. Hell, Superman has actually fucked this exact same goat in the comics, so all the butthurt “they don’t understand Superman, he doesn’t fuck goats” crowds are the same ones that complain about stuff like Dick Grayson being Batman despite not reading the books with Dick OR Bruce under the cowl or complain about Spider-Man being black but not understanding the idea of the Ultimate universe, that it’s a new person, etc.
@Sean D. Martin: Nope, the strawperson started with YOU and YOU alone, when you chose to leave out the other, more important criteria that MonkeyWithTypewriter presented. Need a hint as to what those were? Or is your reading comprehension finally up to the challenge? You do notice that the sentence you are quoting most recently starts with the word “And”, right? Follow that clue, bro!
Embarrassing that you would double down on this.
Superman has actually fucked this exact same goat in the comics, so all the butthurt “they don’t understand Superman, he doesn’t fuck goats” crowds…
True. But if someone’s going to play the “but it happened in the comics, so STFU” card then they really shouldn’t take just that bit out of context. Superman executing the Kryptonians in the comics wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, and had MASSIVE ramifications.
Also, a LOT of things happen in the comics that, if used as arguments for Superman’s behavior, would contradict much of what Superman did in Man of Steel. If nothing else, there are lots of places one could point to in the comics where Superman specifically says he doesn’t kill.
So, yeah, “this one time in the comics he executed Zod”. But also, here’s dozens of times in the comics he’s made it clear that he won’t kill.
I think people might find Superman, umm…goat-fucking far worse than how Batman has fucked goats in every single movie appearance since the Jack Nicholson Joker movie because Batman doing it is just a guy, a really awesome guy, but just a guy.
When you have Superman doing it, there’s a strong undercurrent of “If this guy ever has a bad day in his entire life he could fuck every goat on the planet in the time it takes to read this sentence.”
I’m actually surprised that folks seem to have a far harder time picturing Batman killing than Superman.
Batman is already dark and threatening. He hides in shadows and his whole persona is to scare the shit out of people (“a cowardly lot”). And he’s not really shown any aversion to killing in recent movies.
Superman is bright primary colors and something folks look up to (“up, in the sky”). And he’s never killed in any movie I’ve ever seen.
Yet, several have commented on how Batman has a greater aversion to killing than Superman. I find that quite surprising.
Sean, I think its because the prevention of Death is at the crux of what makes Batman-Batman and not just some bored rich guy playing with his awesome toys. Bruce Wayne is a man shaped by utter tragedy, who out of that tragedy, sacrificed essentially every other future (when you become the richest man in the world at what 8 and then discover that you’re also movie star handsome and an Olympic level athlete- lets just say the opportunities in life are pretty open) in order to prevent the recurrence of that tragedy in what is ultimately a quixotic crusade against an abstract entity (“crime”)–you’re central principles become key stones of your ethos- you don’t kill, I mean saving lives is at the very core of what Batman is– hell the end of the first one was wrong but arguably within the mythos and was rectified in the second when he saved the Joker and tried to save Dent (and sacrificed himself to atone for the failure in the latter case).
Superman on the other hand shouldn’t kill because he has other options– I mean Doomsday is the one really tolerable “Superman Kills” story, its not as deeply tied to his overall mythos as it is for Batman.
Let me throw in one I don’t think anyone’s touched–given that the military already know he’s Clark Kent, posing as Clark Kent is well, not going to work. At all.
I don’t think the military ever knew his human name. I doubt he provided it, and I don’t think Lois would either. If they did know his name, wouldn’t they be spying on his mother instead of trying to follow him home with spy drones?
Yes, the military doesn’t have it spelled out who he is, but they probably should’ve shown a second of him carrying the rocket or it would be really obvious to them if they pick it up at the Kent farm. It’s bad enough that they give Lois a ride there (if I recall correctly).
the military should be able to connect the dots, being that Superman told them he was from Kansas and that they arrived at the Kent farm to pick up the baby rocket, in Kansas.