re: The OFFICIAL Man of Steel Discussion and ***SPOILERS*** Thread

..... (continued, since I am long-winded as frick )

Okay, so Zod has these terraforming machines. They seem to be pretty badass and are wreaking havoc on the world. Cool. They're strong enough to physically affect everything around them, like cars and buildings...they lift off the ground and SLAM back into the ground and frick things up. Cool. However, when Lawrence Fishburne and his crew are running around the city, they aren't affected by any of this? Same with people running around...at one point, cars were being lifted off the ground and slammed back down while people ran all around. Shouldn't the same thing have happened to all the people? That was kinda weird, and it reminds me of the bitching people did about Transformers 2 (I think) where that mega transformer was sucking everything into its core but people were standing around unaffected. I guess this one gets a pass since it's Superman and not Transformers.

Speaking to my last point, the whole Series of scenes with Fishburne and his crew seemed out of place and completely unnecessary. I guess they were just trying to create unnecessary drama or make me care about those people? (which I didn't at all)

The fight scenes. Okay, I'm torn on these. I do think they were cool and all, but come the frick on. The fight scenes between Superman and Zod and his crew did more damage than the damn terraforming machines. Building after building after train after car after building were destroyed. I agree with whoever it was that said it was almost as if some 13 year old directed this and was like "Okay, we're gonna have a building right here and Zod will PUNCH SUPERMAN THROUGH IT. And we'll have a train over there and have Superman PUNCH ZOD THROUGH IT...rinse, repeat." It got laughable eventually. Also, it really bothered me how in one instant, a single punch would send the opponent through 5 buildings, but in the next second the same punch would send them flying into a metal rail where they would stop. There was no consistency at all...why can one wall stop a punch when the last 3 punches sent the person flying through multiple highrise buildings, a train, and vehicles? Stupid. And it seemed like the fights had almost nothing at stake, since they seemed to be evenly matched, except for lots and lots of human deaths. Which brings me to my next gripe...

Why were the fights so evenly matched? We learn from Jor-El that Superman draws his strength from Earth's Sun. He even literally says the line at one point: "I can't believe how strong you've gotten." That lead me to believe that when Jor-El was activated (in the old ship), Kal was even more powerful than J-E could've ever imagined. So for me, that set up the whole "Superman is indestructible" thing. However, when Zod and company get to Earth, they are just as powerful, if not more, than Clark was. Why? Even if their powers were strengthened by our sun, they had been there a single day whereas Clark had been absorbing it for 33 years. There's no way in hell they should've been on the same level. Yet Superman gets his arse HANDED TO HIM by Zod's chick soldier. I mean, she kicked his fricking arse. Handily. I can almost see how SM and Zod could be fairly evenly matched (even though I don't think they should be based on the setup that SM has been building his powers from our sun for three and a half decades), but his henchman chick? No way.

Also, it bothered me that SM so easily snapped Zod's neck. If it was that easy to dispose of him, he could've saved millions of human lives. He also could've not destroyed the largest city in the world killing untold numbers of people.


I'm sure I am forgetting some of the things that I hated about this movie, but those are ones that kept jumping into my mind while I was writing this. And don't get me wrong, I wish I loved this movie, because that's exactly what I was hoping would happen when I saw it. And I even tried to sort of "blindly like it," but I just can't. It was that bad at times.

There were things I did like about the movie. when Michael Shannon wasn't completely overacting in a high school play kind of way, I didn't mind him as Zod. Some of the fight scenes were cool (even if frustrating with what I mentioned above) and there was plenty enough action to keep me satisfied. And like someone else said earlier, they did a good job with not just having SM lift heavy things the whole time. I thought Russell Crowe was great. Same with Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. I thought Henry Cavill completely looked like what SM is supposed to look like. I liked the flashbacks (despite the jumpy editing). I liked the personality of Clark, and the angle of him staying off the grid most of his life.

All in all, I didn't hate it as much as I just hated how disappointed it was. It is good enough to be a "mindless popcorn flick," but I was just hoping/expecting more from it, especially based on the names attached to it (like Snyder and Nolan).