Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Superman Related Post-Viewing Discussion: Man of Steel movie (SPOILERS)

In movie is there any reason given for Zod having his ship attack Metropolis? I know the non-movie reason is that we have already seen some people in Metropolis, so it makes sense to have Perry, Steve and Jenny being in a place to get caught by the devastation, but is there any reason given in the movie for Zod to attack Metropolis?

The one possibility is that he likes killing people and creating devestation, but I am not sure he really does, and even if he did, his plan will level everything, so it really does not matter where he starts.

Didn't he chose Metropolis due to Lois?

Sidebar question:

Can you tell me more about this and how it relates to the movie? I have never read the Book of Mormon.

Nephi kills Laban to get the brass plates, which is basically the Bible. In 600 B.C. books were very rare, and if you are building your society on a book you want a copy. The line to justify this is "It is better that one man should perish than an entire nation perish in unbelief".

I guess the Kal-el killing Zod issue involves more immediate issues. I think I mainly bring up Nephi and the plates because Nephi is one of the leading prophets in the Book of Mormon, and while this is not the only death recounted (the Book recounts wars at various times), this is one of the most personalized versions of death there.

It crossed my mind that we seem to know that people in Smallville who know can be trusted to keep Clark's secret. While Lois is the only person we see proactively not tell his secret, presumably Lana, Pete and a few others may have known enough that they could have turned Clark over to the military, and spared Lois being captured.

This makes sense, but does he ever actually say "I will punish Metropolis to get back at that Lois Lane, and make sure that we center the initial blast to destroy her mid-town apartment", or are we just thinking that is his motivation?

Per Virginia's suggestion (which I just saw), I'm moving my review to this thread.

My wife and I have seen them movie and we both liked it a lot.

I read the review Fred Bracklin wrote ( see it here ), and either the guy just doesn't get it or he loves the sound of his own snark. Either way, he's apparently not a Superman fan.

I liked putting the extended intro on Krypton. It gave the casual yeah-I-heard-of-Superman moviegoer enough background to understand why Clark/Kal-El was sent to Earth in the first place.

If he thinks the tornado part was stolen from Twister, he obviously knows nothing about Kansas being smack in the middle of Tornado Alley, where a spring month without rope funnels on the horizon leaves residents nervous and wondering what the problem is. Tornadoes are a fact of life in Kansas and Oklahoma and north Texas and Nebraska.

And as far as calling the director The Man Who Would Be Michael Bay, he apparently doesn't understand that bad people do bad things, and the more powerful they are, the more destructive the bad things they do end up being. When super-powered bad guys break things, they break big things and lots of them.

My likes? This is what stands out to me right now.

1) I liked the fact that Lois tracked down Clark and identified him as the secret super-do-gooder before Superman appeared on the scene. It shows that she's not only brilliant and determined, she's committed to a higher goal than just selling newspapers, because she never hints that she knows more about Superman than anyone else does. I also like it that Clark has an ally at the Planet who will help him retain his civilian identity.

2) The madness of Zod. Only a crazy person - or one who's been pushed over the edge of sanity - will fight for a destroyed and totally unobtainable goal. Zod's actions don't even rise to the level of honorable suicide (i.e., kamikaze), especially at the last fight between him and Kal-El. The movie portrayed an insane man who was lost in a reality inhabited by no one else but himself as he strove to recreate and reshape his home planet.

3) Zod's female adjutant Faora-Ul. She was almost as loony as Zod and just as fanatically committed to his goal. The actress playing her (Antje Traue, from Germany) captured just the right amount of snarls and deadpan stares.

4) Both of Clark's fathers (Jor-El and Jonathan Kent) played Robin Hood in previous movies. No wonder Clark was so into the truth and justice thing.

5) Lois greeting Clark at the very end when Perry introduces Clark as the new stringer: "Welcome to the Planet." Terrific double-entendre (they're not all dirty) to welcome Clark to the organization and Superman to the world at large.

6) Christopher Meloni (formerly of Law & Order: SVU) giving Faora-Ul's words about a good death back to her just as he dives the C-17 into the terraforming ship (although, shouldn't it be called a Krypto-forming ship?). Poetic justice and courage if I've ever seen it on the screen.

My nitpicks? Mostly minor.

1) Jonathan Kent would know that the absolute worst place to hide from a tornado is beneath an underpass. The wind currents get compressed and speed up, sending all the debris sailing at the people and objects in its path. They should have dived into the ditch on the other side of the bridge, or even climbed into the ends of the horizontal drainpipes. But you have to be careful there, too, because if a flash flood happens along - not rare with tornadoes - drowning is a real possibility.

2) At the end of the movie, downtown Metropolis gets rebuilt quicker than two shakes of a lamb's tail. If there had been something about Superman helping to rebuild, that would have made it a little more believable. After all, the replacement for the World Trade Center isn't finished yet, and how long has that been?

3) Superman kills Zod.

For some, this will be a HUGE turnoff, because the modern mythos is that Superman does not kill. But I saw the act as the only option Zod left for Clark. He didn't want to take a life. But Zod had promised to kill humans wherever he could, whenever he could, and was trying to fry some as Clark was trying to restrain him - including children. If I were faced with the decision to save the lives of many children by taking one life, I don't know what I'd decide to do. I do hope, though, that Lois has to help him deal with the emotional fallout in future movies.

4) Not a nitpick, really, but other reviewers have commented on how little screen time Perry and Jenny and Steve got. I would ask, where would you put such interactions? There was barely room in there for what's on the screen now.

Overall, I'd give the movie as many thumbs-up as I have thumbs. If you've not seen it, I recommend that you to go. I think you'll consider it worth the time and the dollars. And if the sequel is close to being this good, it will be worth it too.

He also doesn't know about the trade paperback Superman: For All Seasons. In that book, a tornado and a subsequent conversation with a clergyman both played formative roles in his life. (Incidentally, the scene of an ecstatic young Clark/Superman flying over a herd of zebras was taken directly from the trade paperback Birthright. The makes of the movie did do their Superman research.)

I agree that by human standards, he was mad. I'm not sure whether the Kryptonians would have agreed with that assessment, though. They might have considered him to be fulfilling his role as a soldier-born. I think that, at least in part, his "madness" had been bred into him.

Joy,
Lynn

I've seen the movie twice now, once regularly, and once in IMAX 3D. I really enjoyed it for the most part, though I had enough nits that went too far beyond simple suspension of disbelief requirements for me to label it as my favorite Superman movie.

This was my primary problem with the climax of the movie. I had no problem with him killing Zod in the end, because it was made clear that that Zod was a super-powered, fanatic nutball and that killing him was the only option. However, the movie didn't show one iota of Superman even attempting to get Zod and his cronies away from the population. Even if Superman had failed, I would have been appeased because they'd have shown him trying. It would have taken maybe an extra minute of screen time.

Worse still, like you, I felt like Superman was going out of his way to cause extra destruction by tossing Zod through buildings. Then he insensitively kissed Lois and made jokes in the middle of the killing field. Was he even affected by the death and destruction around him prior to his anguished "I killed Zod OMG!" scream? I didn't see any evidence of it.

I really liked this, particularly for the thought provoking aspect of what happens when your entire existence is engineered around something that is later taken away from you?


Bwahaha! I hadn't noticed that. That's funny!

I think that was my favorite line in the whole movie

Maybe he watched that news special in 1991 where the reporters in Kansas hid under that underpass and survived a tornado. That one news special is largely where the idea that overpasses were safe came from.

The only thing about the kiss that bothered me was the fact that it's their first kiss and it was witnessed by Perry, Jenny, and Steve, and Zod. It was more of a relief 'we've saved Metropolis from the World machine and survived' kiss. In that light, it wasn't very romantic. Neither of them has had time to processing the death and destruction around them, or even consider where they are. They are just happy to still be alive, and to have won that battle (since Zod is still alive at this point). In that regard, Lois is right. That isn't a good foundation for a relationship. They haven't yet had a chance to take a step back to view the destruction around them and go "whoa, you guys really destroyed Metropolis, Clark."

Technically, there isn't time for Clark to process and come to terms with everything that happened in this film before their tagged on 'everything will be okay' ending (unless a good year has passed by, but the filmmakers were obstinate when it came to NOT marking the passage of time well). If this is supposed to be the more emotional and "Dark Knight"-ish Superman, we need to see him introspectively process what happened during Zod's campaign of terror, and I hope he is at least still haunted by it in MoS-2.

I knew I heard that it was a good idea somewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I don't need an angst fest like Batman. It's not so much that they kissed, but the context in which they kissed that bothered me. If they'd shared a comforting embrace and kiss and hadn't joked and smiled and acted silly, then I would have bought it 100%. Instead of simple relief, the writers chose to use that moment as one of Man of Steel's few bouts of comic relief, which I thought was pretty inappropriate given the flaming ruins, likely full of bodies and trapped injured people, that surrounded them.

I don't need a hulking mountain of angst/guilt/remorse, but I will be happier if, in the sequel, Superman at least acknowledges that he could have handled things without so much reckless abandon.

Lois can probably get away from any residual problems with the kiss by saying "come on, he just saved my life, it was a spur of the moment kiss, it didn't mean anything", and since she and Clark clearly have a deeper connection and are good at saying one thing and meaning something else as we saw in the last scene, it will probably work.

I am thinking that they will deal with the aftermath of the destruction in the sequel. I know some people already thought the film was too long, and they really had to end with the very upbeat Clark shows up at the Daily Planet. Well, I guess they could have done another way, but I am glad they ended the way they did.

Before saying anything, I should admit that I'm not a Superman fan - this was the first time I've deliberately watched a Superman movie. The other times, the kids were watching on TV and I caught a few scenes here and there.

I've also never read a Superman comic. In fact, my entire knowledge of the Superman mythos comes from Lois and Clark.

And now, MoS.

I enjoyed it. A lot. Maybe being ignorant of how things have been portrayed in the past freed me to accept it at face value.

On the characters - Lois grew on me as the movie progressed. By the end, she seemed enough like Lois to be Lois. I'm not a huge Russell Crowe fan, but I liked him as Jor-El. I was disappointed when he died so suddenly and was glad when he returned to give direction to both Lois and Clark. I thought Jonathan was OK - different, but OK.

The one character I couldn't warm to was Martha. Not really sure why.

I would have cut out about half of the Zod/Superman fight. Having said that, my 19yo son thought the fighting didn't go long enough! I thought it was cool the first time the tar on the road crumbled as Clark slid along it. By the 10th time, I was over it.

The mass destruction of the buildings went on too long. I wasn't concerned about possible human deaths because I assumed they'd been evacuated. Did we see any actual bodies/deaths? I can't remember any. For me, Clark killed Zod because he was directly threatening the nearby family. That didn't really make a whole lot of sense if many thousands had already been killed off-camera.

I had no problems with Zod's death. He laid down the ground rules - that it would finish when someone died. Better him than Clark.

Regarding the slightly tangential discussion about whether Clark should spill the secret or propose first, I agree with Victoria. The secret, once told, can NEVER be reclaimed. Revealing the secret puts Clark in an incredibly vulnerable position for the rest of his life. And, I also believe it puts (in this case) Lois in a difficult position. That sort of knowledge is a burden that only a fiancée/wife should have to bear.

Corrina.

I think Corinna has a good point that the knowledge is a burden. In a lot of ways Clark binds Lois to him by telling her. Once he tells her he always has to worry about how she takes it.

I will say he should tell her before proposing, but he should not tell her until he is ready to propose.

I see that "Man of Steel" has evaporated from the theatres. In another internet post, the movie was called "uninspiring". Do you think so?

I know I had a chance to see it at a second run movie theatre last weekend and I decided against it. I was afraid seeing it a second time would make me like it less.

The only part I really found inspiring was when Martha helped young Clark calm down when he was experiencing sensory overload. And I suspect that the only reason I found that inspiring was because I've had to do similar things with my own son many a time, and it was nice to be on the viewing (rather than the experiencing) end of it for a change.

I had *really* wanted to like the movie, and I do like parts of the movie, but I have no intention of seeing the movie again. And if I ever did rewatch it, it would be with remote in hand to fast-forward through much of the needless violence.

I think that as I have had more time to reflect on the movie, I have actually come to like it less. There is still a lot of potential in the franchise, and I will (with some misgivings) see the Superman/Batman movie when it is released (either in the theatre or online/DVD/BluRay), assuming it isn't completely panned.

I will say that IMHO this movie was at least better than Superman Returns.

Joy,
Lynn

Supposedly the Regal Theaters are going to be showing the movie over the Labor Day weekend for those that might want to see it again. I'm tossing the idea around but it doubt I will in the end (between the pregnancy and a 19 1/2 month old.)

I have to say I liked "Man of Steel" more on my second viewing.