You Want Superman Revamp? [Also the Man of Steel (2013) thread]

wtf production values aside this movie was worse than green lantern

GL was worse

worse than ghost rider?

this wasn't anywhere near green lantern

xp seriously though, i'm not sure. maybe ridley scott. i'm thinking a sort of batman dkr thing, starring an aged, cynical batman late in his career, who has built up resentment against superman over the course of decades.

I dunno it looked good but the best part was 5yo Clark running with his red cape.

i liked the art direction/photography in this film. the color scheme and lighting reminded me of alex ross's artwork.

[hugely important part of filmmaking] aside this was way worse than Green Lantern

the best part of this movie is that jonathan kent died in vain, a martyr to a cause that didn't pan out. i thought this was an interesting take: his death was heroic and principled, yet totally pointless. the only thing i really didn't like about this was amy adams' demure, helpless lois lane.

also i thought it was interesting/kinda funny that superman is the indirect cause of seemingly 100s of thousands of deaths. his existence in this film was a net negative for the world bc he is the only reason zod bothered to fuck with earth.

tbf I'm out on a limb here having only seen about 15 minutes of GL on cable but this entire thread was unable to prepare me for the horror so.

not worse than TDKR tho

the movie undermines itself in certain ways. maybe it is a polemic against utilitarian ethics: positing a vision of heroism that is admirable even when it hurts people. in this sense, it is more extreme than nolan's dark knight series, with its exploration of "blowback" in the second film. in that series, batman is ultimately found to be a net positive... his imposition of order onto gotham does, in the end, prove (i think) to have been the right course of action. if batman never existed, bane would have succeeded in destroying gotham i think?

iirc if batman never existed, talia wouldnt have wanted to destroy gotham

hm, i thought that might have been the case but i forget for certain. was ra's al ghul's beef with gotham completely bruce wayne related? or did he hate its "decadence" or something? ftr, i never really grasped ra's al ghul's ideology.

iirc he has a very particular set of skills. skills acquired over a long career.

if batman didn't exist ra's would have poisoned gotham and every other major city on the planet

yeah you are right. i am reading batman wiki and it seems that ra's al ghul is an eco-terrorist, essentially, who wants there to be a radically lower human population. and yet, he has a daughter.

supervillains are such hypocrites

an illegitimate daughter tbf

Such a terribly ugly looking film. Oppressive teal upon teal upon yet more teal upon smudged grey and deathly skin tones all round. I'll be so glad when this fad for desaturating films of their colour finally fades itself; I just want to see blue skies in one modern movie again before I die.

On Nolan and the ending:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/man-of-steel-ending_n_3461332.html

This idea of being uncomfortable with Supes killing Zod, but being totally fine with the total destruction of Metropolis, is so fucking insane to me.

He was his last link to Krypton.

doesn't he have all of krypton in his cell structure or something?

Yeah. But he doesn't know how to extract those lil kryptonians.

I came up with this idea of the heat vision and these people about to die. I wrote the scene and I gave it to Chris and he said, "OK, you convinced me. I buy it."

smh so hard at this... that family cowering in teh corner as the heat vision swept towards them was so lame, it looked like they could have easily just ran in the other direction

yeah, was anyone not thinking that? also, and i am not a superman scholar, but i feel like in most iterations he could've easily found a way to stop zod without doing what he did. he's supposed to thwart bad guys in creative ways! not just pummel them to death

yeah I was like why are they just cowering there? literally nothing to stop them running off

you'd think they'd never been close to a heat ray before

http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/06/how-to-outrun-a-crashing-alien-spaceship/

"This article is part of our occasional “just because” or “fun” series."

it's a goofy looking shot and bogus motivation for super-necksnap but i think a bunch of people shitting their pants a foot away from a death beam is more plausible than Kevin Costner doing a Sam The Eagle impression inside of a tornado

everytime i hear about the tornado sequence, i wonder why they didn't have red tornado show up in this film
and then i remember this film is not for me

i think i would go into shock if i was standing next to that heat vision beam, and might even neglect to get out of the way. who knows?!?!?

people often go into shock when they see a gun partially due to "wtf, it's a gun", and also the knowledge that any sudden movement could trigger a shot from the person holding it. When you see the trail of lolazers coming towards you, slowly and deliberately, I think most of us could manage the fortitude to stop messing our pants for three seconds and move ever so slightly out of the way.

perhaps they didn't want to live in a world where they relied on the protection of one of the Tudors

yes they should have outrun the eye-lasers that's what was wrong with this movie

because that's clearly what I said

Yeah. But he doesn't know how to extract those lil kryptonians.

― Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the (Treeship), Sunday, June 30, 2013 10:33 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i807.photobucket.com/albums/yy352/PLQMZY/dirties.gif

i didn't think cavill was bad at all, but the role was kind of incoherent as written

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Thursday, June 27, 2013 7:32 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

he played superman as a being of immense vapidity... the way he tells his mom "i've found my real parents" in the most vacant sounding way, like he's going to append it with "...and i stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night!" or when hes meant to be giving these looks of deep reflection and inner struggle and he just looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/KCZEOEy.gif

at best he made some really poorly judged choices for the character. christian bale's bruce wayne comes off like a harry lime style dynamo in comparison

my friend made some good points to me about this - like that if nolan/snyder/goyer are honest with themselves they'll do what the dark knight movies didnt have the guts to do and make luther the protagonist of the next one. based on this movie he'd be 100% in the right to mount an anti-superman campaign!

superman's autistic childhood gives way to a repressed rage-filled adulthood... the structure of the movie forces you to anticipate seeing him finally cut loose & deliver a country beatdown to zod. clark saves a bunch of people, but the movie treats it elliptically, the implicit message is that helping people is a sideshow to your own repressed brooding. instead of finding a moral compass and learning to become a force for good, he learns to brood until triggered into action by some kind of trauma.

when he and zod level metropolis, there's never a point where the character could credibly step back and say "no, this isn't what i'm about!" - because he's living his fuckin dream, he finally gets to beat the shit out of the bullies. jor-el had a value system that he could articulate when he wanted to stop zod; when zod pleads with supes not to fuck up his plan and doom the kryptonian race, superman answers with a dirty harry one liner and his angry eye lasers; it doesn't even occur to him to try and talk zod down, to reason with or console him

once he becomes superman nearly everything he says conveys his superiority, even the quip after he kisses lois. after clark saves pete ross, pete never says another word in the movie - hes awed into silence. why couldnt they be friends? when superman crashes into the IHOP and pete sees him, they act like two coworkers who just ran into each other at a porno shop and dont want to make eye contact. clark doesnt have friends, and he doesnt seem to want them either. who is he, The Man With No Name??? the movie reiterates over and over, You're Gonna Change The World, Choose The Man You Will Be... this superman is a terrifying demigod who can do anything he wants, and the 'choice' the movie shows him making is to be a smugly indifferent asshole who's getting back at everyone after his lonely childhood. this is a supervillain's origin story!

if future movies follow the nolan batman model, they'll foreground these qualities while having characters in the movie repeatedly let him off the hook and treat him like he's an amazing hero who's doing good. Perry white will have a speech where he goes This isnt just a man... hes a man made of things... strong things... like steel... and he does things to get us through this dark long night, at the end ogf which is an extremely bright dawn, and then a priest puts his hand on clarks shoulder and goes You're not just a man... your a super man [hans zimmer score goes crazy]

if i'm lucky i think i'm never ever ever gonna watch this

booming post h4a.

that post almost makes it worth having seen this thing

great post H4A. you articulate nicely what is "off" about this superman, his origin and motivations, and how he feels different from previous incarnations of the character. he really did seem much too shallow and one-dimensional to trust with all of that power.

i'd love it if they had luthor as an all's-fair-in-finance-and-war libertarian who rightfully sees superman as a pathetic fascist who's arbitrarily pro-America because he's "from Kansas," fighting Supes through channels he can't just punch through (which would force the action sequences to be more about disaster prevention and puppy saving). But really I don't have a lot of faith in the creative team to pull that off and not just have Brainiac or somebody blow up the city again.

Snyder's Metropolis =

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/3209334/no-no-no-no-o.gif

H4A otm x 10000000000000

the more i think about that nolan quote the more ridiculous it is... "i could never accept the idea that superman would kill anyone... until a writer took the unprecedented step of creating a scene in which a bad guy threatens some innocents."

i didn't realize the significance of that moment in the theater. i was more mystified as to why superman was conflicted about killing zod at that point.