But then I started to hear it more. It comes up in every Badass Digest post about super heroes (especially in the comments), it came up in GODZILLA reviews, it comes up in the comments here, one of my buddies even said it to me in person when I started to tell him about what I was working on here. So this is like the end of the book I Am Legend. (spoiler for the end of the book I Am Legend.) It turns out I was the Superweirdo the whole time.
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But it bears repeating that Man of Steel saves the entire human race before he even gets to the final battle in his movie. 1978 Superman saves the west coast of California, which is only 1 (one) smidgen of the human race.
Which, if you think about it, is a more efficient use of the available resources than having the one guy who can destroy the World Engine before it changes the shape of the earth and kills everyone on it flying around individually carrying each person out. In my opinion. I think they got a good system figured out here.
Oh yeah, they did do that. He spends his young life rescuing people and now has fulfilled his destiny, foreseen by both of his father figures, to rise up against a deadly force and save everybody on earth. But other than that he has a total disregard for humanity, because he throws an alien through a train and breaks a bunch of walls.
Vern argues that Metropolis might not have piles of dead under the rubble, but Snyder very clearly used images resembling real life destruction. There is no other reason to use those images other than implying that type of impact. (on top of him saying later on he did mean to imply there was a lot of collateral damage).
Or to put it another way: imagine if JURASSIC PARK had opened with a twenty minute sequence where John Hammond escapes from a fiery, self-destructing InGen facility by jumping onto the backs of various stampeding dinosaurs. It would have been rousing, exhilarating spectacle, to be sure, but it also would have ruined the movie. When our hero Dr. Grant sees a dinosaur for the first time, he is struck dumb. He stares. His legs go out from under him. His ordinary world has been turned upside down because he is witnessing something extraordinary. And the moment would have been meaningless if we had witnessed anything like it (let alone bigger than it) at any point before.
Ask Bruce Banner why, if he can control his anger and control when he becomes Hulk and understands human emotions even when in HulkSmash Mode, he jumped up on all those buildings in Manhattan and shattered all those windows and risked the structural integrity of all those buildings that OH MY GOD MIGHT HAVE CONTAINED INNOCENT CIVILIANS WHO PROBABLY DIED (offscreen) JUST LIKE THE CITY DESTROYED IN MAN OF STEEL WHICH MADE ME ANGRY UNLIKE THE AVENGERS BECAUSE WHEDON IS GOOD AND SNYDER IS BAD even if at the same time Hulk punched a bunch of Chitauri.
Gawd, this audience reaction/commentary is doing a lot to enforce the basic escapist/meta-escapist message of SUCKER PUNCH. Dudes paying for entertainment and watching from the dark shadows, titillated by what they [expect to] see yet disgusted by the notion that they are titillated by what they see and what it represents. No wonder the after-effects and nerd-reactions are so violently, irrationally out of whack. Blinded by nerdery.
Zod and his crew did not represent anything positive once they started to terraform Earth, they wanted to make it into Krypton, which Man Of Steel paints as a terrible future for our own civilization.
Yes, Superman technically gives a shit. The movie tells us this several times through forced and awkward expository dialogue. The technical, logical, fact is that the fim technically does communicate that he gives a shit.
Mouth, Independence Day is: (a) a stupid movie, (b) not a superhero movie but more of a disaster movie, and (c) somehow manages to be less depressing than Man of Steel even though it has a higher body count.
I look forward to your explication that one of the most successful, most cable-tv-replayed films of all time that happens to deal in aliens that reap worldwide murderous havoc is somehow less reprehensible, more artistically valid than MoS.
So yes, asking the Man of Steel to take a break in the middle of an epic superhero/supervillain beat down, the scale and impact of which has rarely (if ever) been visualized on screen before, to save a cat or an infant or whatever is not going to happen (not in the climax, anyway). Not in grim spectacle.
Also, the screenplay is kinda clunky. But not any worse than similar superficial blockbusters. Yes, I like the marvel movies as much as the next fella, but does anybody actually invest in their stories or characters? I dont. That Doesnt prevent Captain America and The Winter Soldier from being an awesome kickass action movie, though.
I am puzzled by all the hatred towards Man of Steel. There must be some deeper reason that people dislike Snyders take on Superman so much (much like the criminally underrated Sucker Punch). Im not sure if Snyder is underrated or overrated, if his subversive twist in Sucker Punch was weak storytelling or some clever Verhoeven shit, but something in this filmmakers personality definitely pisses people of. And I love that.
Blitzkrieg made a very solid point about audiences identifying (recognising themselves) in the protagonist. It might be flaws, it might be a fantasy about who we wants to be. In finer storytelling, we often end up identifying with deeply flawed, often almost despicable human beings by the director giving us great insight into their situation. Hell, in Screenwriting for dummies, the first thing you learn is that a character has a want and a need in order to make the audience identify with him. But thats not always necessary for an action hero. Yes, Macclane wants to save his wife and kill europiens. His surroundings needs to acknowledge that he is fucking badass. Thats a typical male-fantasy, something we can all identify with. Batman wants to confront his childhood-traumas by beating up criminals like the murderers of his parents. He need to chill the fuck out and understand the certain humans become criminals out of necessity, an underlying theme present in the best batman-stories, villains and bat-babes.
Ive had a problem with Superman since early childhood. He was just to clean-cut, to nice and correct for me to identify with. He was boring and unrelatable. But I have kinda fallen in love with the Donners Superman over the last few years. Being raised in foster care, traveling to the big city, being a nerd with superpowers, falling in love with mentally unstable women like Margot Kidder etc. Shit, thats my life right there. I identify.
I am also fascinated by Superman as the american jesus. He is an emigrant who grows up to be the american we all aspires to be; the strong and morally superior man, who uses his powers for good. Thats what we wanna be like. Thats why I like Superman. He is something worth striving to be.
The (awesome) teaser might be a big part of the reason that this movie pisses people off. Superman is presented as a human child / young man, living among us, with great potential. We are almost promised a story about an man, like you and me, who realises his potential and stuff. Its a recognisable romantic fantasy, a standard methaphor on growing up and realising your potential, but NOT what the movie is.
Anyhow, Superman kills and becomes one of us; The American Jesus. Now the army wanna play with him and the girls thinks he is hot. Yeah, he cries and stuff when he has to compromise everything he believes in, but at least he is no longer a foreign peace loving pacifistic alien, but a real american; one of us.
He is not who we want to be, but who we need to be (because of terrorists and stuff). Somebody who uses his superpowers to terminate a threat to the free world. A world, who turned his back on him because hes a weird freak.
Again; Im still not sure if Snyder is an idiot child or a genius who makes subversive movies, designed to piss of his audience. Maybe he is both. But there is definitely something going on beneath the spectacle, and that enhances my enjoyment of his action spectacles a lot.
In conclusion; yes, I love Donners Superman, and thats who I wanna be. But Snyders killer-alien is a more interesting character, highlighting some personal issues I have with alienation, disgust with the human race, and the eternal dilemma of wanting to fit in or not giving a fuck. MOS is a reflection on being a part of our fucked up society, not merely a fantasy bout saving it, and I suspect thats the real reason so many fans are pissing and moaning about Superman being an american killer as opposed to being a clean-cut american saviour.
When the twin towers fell all those years ago, it was the real life manifestation of our fascination with fictional disaster porn. The real life super-villains behind such an obscenity served up Hollywood images to us outside of the cinema and it was no longer entertaining. The cultural shock wave not only influenced the material world but also spilled back over into the fictional world. When our four color heroes arrived afterwards in all their digital, photo-realistic glory they were projected onto a backdrop of urban shock and awe.
It is a fruitless exercise to document the body count or displays of compassion displayed by the members of the Avengers in one of their celluloid outings. Their entertaining adventures cannot be compared to Man of Steel because it is simply not a comparison of kind. We are royally pissed at Kal-El because he did not prevent the fictional chaos bleeding over into our real world. As the ultimate superhero we project our anger on to him, an absent father who was not there to save us. Iron Man, Captain America and Thor have the advantage of not being saddled with such weighty expectations.
Superman is also The Man of Tomorrow, the ultimate template for what our species should have striven for in the post-world war environment. We are quietly devastated that the celluloid incarnation that met us in 2013 was actually a reflection of us. Not an omnipotent solar being but an amazingly talented person trying to hold things together as the world crumbles around him and many people lose their lives.
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