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Here the film makes an interesting choice. The stakes are being upped here as we see Metropolis laid low, and we even have some characters we ‘know’ trapped in the rubble. That’s awful, but he’s the bad guy, and so killing innocents is his bag. There General Zod begins straight up massacring people his World Engine destroys what seems to be square miles of prime business real estate in the middle of the work week. Instead, Clark Kent’s hometown is essentially wiped off the map. A true Superman story would see our hero attempting to keep the incoming bombs away from Smallville while also fending off his foes. When the military sends in the jets to attack it doesn’t feel like a holy shit moment, it feels like a reaction in kind.
MAN OF STEEL SUPERMAN MOVIE
The Smallville fight is where you sense things are going a little off the rails in the movie because a small town in farm country is actually the easiest place to reduce collateral damage - Superman and the Kryptonians are never more than a few hundred feet from open farmland. He then proceeds to help destroy all the buildings in which those people were hiding, but at least he gave their well-being some casual thought. So where is that aspect once the punches get thrown? The only time Superman seems to show interest in the well-being of civilians is during the beginning of the Smallville fight, when he tells people to get indoors. It’s not as gripping as having him save a crashing space shuttle (as John Byrne did in his Man of Steel reboot miniseries back in the 80s) but it encapsulates who he is. He is laying himself down for Zod so that no humans are hurt. I wasn’t fully sold on Superman’s first costumed appearance being a scene where he is surrendering to the authorities, but in many ways that’s a great way to show him as protector. To Man of Steel’s credit the movie gets that aspect of him right a lot. And one of those things - maybe the ultimate central thing that makes Superman who he is - is his status as a protector. But there are some things about Superman that are so vital, so central to the what sets him apart from other superheroes, that to change them is to alter utterly the character, rendering him Superman no more.
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I understand that it’s 2013 and there are elements of the Superman mythos that need to be updated and brought into the modern world, that some characters reflect outdated, almost century old mores and gender norms.
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In our modern era of reboots and remakes and hip new reimaginings I’ve thought a lot about what makes a character the same character, about how many ways you can change Captain James T Kirk until he’s no longer the same character. That’s an important thing to keep in mind when we’re talking about the havoc wreaked during the course of Man of Steel. Yeah, he sometimes butts up against the criminals in Intergang and he sometimes has to take down archfoe Lex Luthor or stop an invasion by Brainiac, but left to his own devices Superman is first and foremost a protector. To some extent all superheroes do that sort of stuff but for Superman that’s the whole job. He’s the guy who plugs up exploding volcanoes, who rescues crashing jets, who plucks kittens from trees.