!!Killing Doomsday and how to do it
* Why doesn't Superman just throw Doomsday into the sun, or drop him off on the moon? He didn't have to do the stratospheric bodyslam sacrifice, just relocate Doomsday somewhere where he wouldn't be a problem.
** Because it takes a ''long'' damn time to reach either the sun or the moon, and apparently this Superman ''can't'' [[BatmanCanBreatheInSpace Breathe In Space]]. He might lose control of the fight in the interim.
*** The Sun and Moon might be a long ways away, but once they left Earth's gravity all it would take is a little shove to send Doomsday hurtling off in whatever direction Superman wished. Newton's first law, baby.
*** Tends to stay in motion until acted upon. So, a million years from now, Doomsday hits a distant, potentially inhabited, planet with the force of atmospheric reentry, gets up, and promptly starts killing everything he can find. Again. And he's harder to kill than ever. Still sound like a course of action that Superman would choose?
*** Considering it seemed implied he knew he might die with that final attack it's better for Doomsday to be drifting for an untold amount of time and if need be Superman can deal with it again in the future. In Justice League he doesn't seem concerned at all with the fact that sending him to the Phantom Zone won't kill him and while we don't know much about the majority of criminals in the Phantom Zone it's safe to say few if any of them have done anything to warrant being locked in with Doomsday.
*** It would probably take a computer to be able to make that throw. You've got to take into account travel time and gravitational influence of other planets, etc. Probably something Superman felt he couldn't do on the fly. Definitely a good idea, though. He'd just need to practice.
** For that matter, why doesn't Superman relocate the fight far away from Metropolis? Any one of the times he threw Doomsday through a building, he could have thrown him to the middle of a desert where no civilians would be threatened.
*** Doomsday is WINNING. Superman can't wade into combat and wait for the chance to toss him a few dozen miles, he can barely stand toe to toe.
*** If you read the actual comics that this is based on, you'll see why...
*** In the middle of the fight, it would be difficult to relocate; he'd have to fight Doomsday over it, and he's ALREADY fighting Doomsday as it is. Now, why he opted on the way down from the orbital suplex to land right in the middle of the city, probably killing hundreds if not thousands of people with the shock of the impact and leveling several city blocks when he could have angled his descent to land in, say, some patch of farmland outside the city limits is beyond me.
*** In his defense, with this last one it was probably quicker to go straight up and straight down rather than going at an angle, which would get him out of the city but also give Doomsday more opportunity to recover and fight back or somehow prevent him from making the killing blow.
*** Coming down from orbit it would only be the tiniest deviation in the flight trajectory it would take mere seconds longer.
*** Doomsday's still winning the fight. He might only ''need'' 'mere seconds' to gain the upper hand.
*** The way it's shot though, Superman had the upper hand throughout the entire decent.
*** Only because he's got the edge of surprise at suddenly changing the situation (flying him up and down; disorientating him, in other words) and keeps pounding away at him while doing so. It's not like he's effortlessly overpowering Doomsday; he's still got his hands full and lessening the speed of his attack and barrage of punches in order to calculate a new trajectory would potentially risk Doomsday recovering from his surprise and regrouping. Essentially, straight up-straight down and non-stop hitting is the quickest way to deal with Doomsday while keeping him where Superman wants him.
** Doomsday's been pounding the crap out of Superman for the last few minutes / hours / however long, to the point where he's been vomiting blood. Since it's likely that Superman's thought processes at that particular moment aren't really that clear or coherent, could be he just doesn't have the focus or clarity to make those kinds of calculations or judgements discussed above and isn't really able to formulate a coherent plan outside of "up then down make Doomsday go splat". Simply put, I'd like to see some of the tropers criticising Superman above try the same or similar things after they've just been in a no-holds-barred beatdown.
*** The reality is that they wanted the iconic death scene and for Lois to be there when it happened. In reality there are so many factors that go into where you land on the Earth that without consciously doing it he'd most likely miss the state and certainly wouldn't land within the immediate area he had just been fighting in.
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* Additionally, why would taking a few punches in the gut and falling from orbit kill Superman anyway? I guess they needed a plot.
** The massive beating he took at the hands of Doomsday severely weakened him. The fall just finished what he started.
*** Doomsday is just that awesome. The modern version of Superman is not implicitly invulnerable, it's just that there isn't much in the universe capable of doing grievous harm to him. In raw physical power, Doomsday is (slightly) superior to Superman. However, Doomsday has a healing factor... [[spoiler: and technically, Superman does too, so long as he's exposed to the radiation of a yellow sun.]]
** [[spoiler: it didn't kill him. His body just put itself into a healing coma. Presumably internal bleeding+organ damage+Crashing into the ground as hard as possible is enough to take Superman out. ]]
!!Being Atmosphere-proof
* Shouldn't Superman be, I dunno, RED HOT after re-entry? Lois wouldn't be able to hug him without searing off a lot of flesh.
** Superman's pretty altruistic. He probably just gave the heat to Doomsday.
*** Basically, he did. Superman would be red hot if the heat of re-entry came from friction, which, contrary to popular belief, it does not. For friction to be a major factor, the air must flow around the object. At re-entry speeds, the object moves so fast most of the air is compressed in front of it; generating tremendous heat in the process. Very little flows around it; precisely how much air flows around it depends on the shape of the exposed surface (the less aerodynamic, the better); this is one of the reasons the shielded surface of most re-entry vehicles is fairly flat. This way, the heat is concentrated in one, relatively small area which is more easily shielded than the entire vehicle. Essentially, Superman [[GoodIsNotNice used Doomsday as his heat shield]].
*** Superman was trying to KILL Doomsday, so using Doomsday as a heat shield is just killing two birds in one stone.
!!Alas, poor Clone
* The story treats the cloned Superman pretty brutally. Sure, he ends up JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope, but he's certainly capable of being rehabilitated. Nevertheless, Superman didn't express even a little remorse after he was forced to kill the clone.
** Superman seemed a little sad when the clone died. And he was a pretty big threat.
** Clone Superman showed no remorse with any of his reprehensible actions, and multiple humans tried to reason with him. Become AGodAmI is kind of the reason Superman had to cut his healing short.
!!PG-13?
* Why was Superman: Doomsday rated PG-13? No details were provided.
** Violence. Implied sexual content.
*** Implied? They make it pretty obvious Lois and Superman are sleeping together.
*** ...that's what implied ''means''. It's as opposed to explicit sexual content, which would, you know, show them actually having sex on-screen.
*** There was also the heavily implied sexual tension between Lex and the Superman clones he kept dominating.
*** And the paedophilic implications for Toyman probably didn't help either.
** That, and the film didn't have strong swears, otherwise it'd have been R-Rated
!!Tranquing Lex and a weapons check
* When Lois tranqs Lex, she didn't bother to check him for weapons? Kinda shooting yourself in the foot there.
** No, remember, she had tunnel vision on what was going on, she didn't think of anything but Superman.
!!Bringing a Gun to Fight Doomsday
* Anyone notice that US Armed Personnel were using AK Assault Rifle expys during the fight against Doomsday
** The DC universe isn't exactly the same as the world we live in, it's basically a ParallelUniverse. It's possible that in this universe the US military was the one that developed the equivalent to the AK-47 Assault Rifle rather than the Soviet Union.
** In reality, the animators were probably not well-versed in military or weapons history and the process simply went something like this: "Draw these soldiers with machine guns!" "Okay, here's a visual reference of some soldiers with machine guns." "The soldiers now have machine guns! Perfect! Shoot it!"
!!Inconsistent strength
* OK, so Super-clone brushes off a missile strike like it's nothing, but he's capable of being bound in chains?
** Bound in chains by Lex Luthor, the man who designed and created him. Those chains are almost certainly made of a material strong enough to hold a Superman-like being.
!!Clone could have just not have done it but okay
* If the cloned Superman was so annoyed about wasting time with trivialities, why didn't he just ignore the woman with the cat?
** Bad writing.
** He might not have a real choice. A lot of his behavior was clearly programmed in by Lex and while Lex's programming apparently had loops you could drive a bus through he may very well have felt compelled to do those things.
** There are two possible reasons:
*** First, as noted above, Clone!Superman was created by [[EvilCannotComprehendGood Lex Luthor]], who views Superman as both LawfulStupid and StupidGood. So, it makes sense that Clone!Superman would take the time to help out with even the most inane tasks.
*** Second, Clone!Superman may not have any personal codes against killing, but he's still trying to be good. And part of being good means helping out people when possible. I think that if a fire broke out, Clone!Superman would go help out with that. He'd help out in the most creepy way possible, but his help would be genuine. He's not putting an act or hiding any secret agendas.
** The [=SuperClone=] seems to have rather conflicting impulses bouncing around in his skull. On one hand, he wants to be and is trying to be a nice guy superhero who flies around helping people and saving the day, like the original Superman would. On the other, these desires are clashing with what are clearly some rather violent, angry, destructive god-complex impulses like Lex Luthor has. Nice guy superheroes like Superman typically do things like flying around helping people when they're in a jam, such as trying to get a beloved pet down from a tree. On the other hand, angry narcissists suffering from god-complexes like Lex Luthor view themselves as being completely above the petty concerns of mere mortals and resent having to descend to their level in order to bestow some pathetic charity, such as having to recover some worthless feline too foolish to get itself out of a tree for some simpering fool. So, the [=SuperClone=] saves the cat, but makes it uncomfortably clear to the owner that he's above this sort of thing, didn't enjoy doing it, doesn't want to have to do it again, and might not be so nice about it if he ever catches the same cat in a tree again. In other words the [=SuperClone=], well, doesn't exactly have all of his marbles in the same bag if you catch my drift.
*** Essentially, the [=SuperClone=] is kind of what would happen if you jammed both Superman and Lex Luthor's mindsets together into the same brain and asked the result to be a superhero.
!!The clone burning the bomb out of his head with heat vision reflected off a mirror
* Wouldn't the mirror just melt? Glass liquefies at 1400 - 1600C, and Superman can handle temperatures much greater than that.
** Superman (and, by extension, a near 1:1 clone of Superman) can presumably moderate the temperature that his heat vision comes out at, to avoid situations where he is unnecessarily melting the glass (and, for that matter, unnecessarily risking harming the nearby humans, who would not cope incredibly well with being in an environment suddenly heated up to 1400 - 1600 degrees C either, for what it's worth) in a way that would be unhelpful to him accomplishing his goal. Considering how many times he's heated up a gun to get someone to drop it without the gunman spontaneously combusting as a result of suddenly coming into direct exposure with 1600C heat, this is a fairly reasonable inference to make.