(Warning, some spoilers)
Yeah, it takes me forever to get around to seeing movies. Finally saw it earlier today.
I'm a big Superman fan. As such I kind of avoided seeing this because I think Zack Snyder is a clown. When it comes to Superman I'm very picky. I understand why a lot of people say they find Superman boring, because he's very easy to write badly. This movie has a lot of the pitfalls that make Superman bad. There's a ton of stuff about Krypton, which I can't stand almost ever. The Kents are fairly marginalized, which I think misses a lot of the point of the character. There's a lot of Superman punching dudes and dudes punching Superman, which is pretty much the most boring thing ever because he's fucking Superman and he's definitely going to win. Despite all of that a lot of it kind of worked. The prologue on Krypton was basically gibberish and could have been completely cut and the movie would have been better (in fact, doing that would have eliminated a few big plot holes), but Zod more or less worked as a villain. Johnathan Kent was handled in a way that I'm not really okay with, but in a lot of ways Superman still behaves like Superman anyway.
There are parts of it that made me really uncomfortable and that I'm still processing. The action was very difficult to watch. The collateral damage is absolutely gratuitous, which is borderline unacceptable in a Superman story. Like to the point that I almost walked out a couple of times. And then there's the part where at the end Superman kills a guy. I had this spoiled for me well in advance and was actually surprised by how well done it was. He seems to literally not have a choice, which is narratively interesting. After that though I don't think there can be another Superman movie, or if there is it has to be way different. If you're going to write Superman into a corner where he has to kill, there have to be heavy consequences and there don't seem to be any at all. Although I don't know how big a deal that gets to be when Superman is indirectly but closely responsible for what seems to have been tens of thousands of deaths over the course of the big fight sequences. Superman loses in this movie. He does not win the fight because he failed to protect a mind-blowing number of people. I don't know how I feel about that. The Christ imagery also kind of creeped me out. I recognize it as being a component of the character as written by many people, but I don't like it.
Ultimately I think the biggest problem I had with the narrative was basically the same one that I had with Amazing Spiderman (aside from, you know, the fact that Amazing Spiderman was boring and stupid and had horrendous effects). One of the ultimate points of the movie seems to be that Clark Kent is exceptional because of his biological father. The Kents are such a small part of the movie that Jor-El is presented as being a majority of the reason Clark is Superman. We do see him save people before he learns about Krypton, but he seemingly does so against Johnathan Kent's wishes. Pa Kent dies apparently still believing that Clark is doing the wrong thing by using his power for good. This seems to imply that Clark is Superman because he's genetically predisposed to do good despite his foster parents actively holding him back, just like Peter Parker in Amazing Spiderman being genetically brilliant and succeeding apparently largely because of his exceptional father. The Superman I love is 90% human and just happens to be an alien, not 90% alien who just happens to have been raised by humans. Frankly that character is kind of terrifying, not inspiring. Maybe I'm just projecting because this wasn't handled the way I like to see it done, but I kept waiting for another flashback to the Kents encouraging Clark to do some good, and it never came.
So anyway, I went in with zero expectations and liked it more than I expected, but I still don't know if I feel positively about it. Anybody else got thoughts?
