Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

All of Clark's interactions with his mom are adorable.

The conversation between Clark and the hologram of Jor-El is pretty sweet. "Kal-El? That's my name?"

I love the last couple minutes.

So kiss my ass with your joylessness.

I feel like people think it's "joyless" because every character wasn't a smartass making quips every 5 minutes and the villain was actually played completely straight.

Pretty much the same as people calling every emotion a character has but happiness "emo".

I wouldn't say it was joyless, but it was somewhat less joyful than a Superman movie should be.

Then again, I don't think Superman Returns was that joyful either. Cut Lex Luthor out and that movie loses like 75% of its humor, and I personally think the Clark who leaves Earth on its own and doesn't bother to check if the woman he banged was pregnant, only to later stalk her like a hawk, is more reprehensible than the newbie Clark, still struggling with his role in life, who has problems stopping superpowered army men and women from destroying parts of the city, but at least is fucking there for humankind despite them treating him much more suspiciously than that of the Donner-Singerverse.

Exactly. It's worth noting that most of the people who rip on MOS seem to believe that the Marvel films are God's gift to movie making.

I'm just gonna wait for a proper trailer, one with all the characters on stage (so to speak), to reserve judgement.

Indeed. The Superman Returns Supes failed his "guardian angel" responsibilities. Why do the Superman movies love using Christ imagery? Why not just compare Supes to a guardian angel?

Jason Momoa teases Aquaman for Justice League at Calgary Expo.

edited 23rd Apr '15 6:28:30 AM by Halberdier17

Nice to see everyone just having a good time with themselves.

I wouldn't call Man of Steel joyless either, there were several things that were exciting or enjoyable to watch.

I would totally call it joyless. There were plenty of things that were suspenseful, but there was very little mirth to be had. When it wasn't basking in doom and annihilation, it was drifting in solemn contemplation.

The action scenes were intense and satisfactory, the characters were well-written, but between Nolan Dialogue^LISTEN Wherein characters speak entirely in literary analysis of the movie's core themes and the general atmosphere of hopelessness, misery, and despair that pervades every second of the movie's runtime, it's not unreasonable to call the film joyless.

edited 23rd Apr '15 8:59:05 AM by TobiasDrake

"Hopelessness, misery, and despair?" Okay, I think you're exaggerating a bit...

This is a movie where the hero saves one species from complete annihilation by condemning another species to complete annihilation; the core conflict is Superman making a choice of which species is more deserving of genocide. There's enough death and destruction to qualify this film as a Roland Emmerich disaster flick. Whether or not this is an entertaining film is up to the individual filmgoer, but this is not a happy movie, is what I'm trying to say.

Just because something isn't happy, it doesn't have to be joyless, though. For something to be joyless there has to be absolutely no hint of joy and hope anywhere, but Glass Half Empty doesn't automatically equal Empty Glass.

A truly hopeless movie would have ended with most or all of mankind being annihilated by the Kryptonians before the Kryptonians themselves are brought down.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:04:13 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

I don't think destroying a Kryptonian sperm bank counts as "genocide." If anything, the fact that Krypton clones babies Brave New World-style is depicted as a bad thing - hence why the writers go out of their way to specify that Kal-El is a natural birth. Heck, the fact that Krypton clones babies with specific programming and such is what caused Zod to turn into a genocidal maniac in the first place.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:04:13 AM by spashthebandragon

I would definitely not call the characters well-written. General Zod, for all the attempts at making him into some sort of quasi-sympathetic, tragic villain, ultimately just boiled down to a screaming crazy person, and he wasn't particularly threatening because he kept going down like a chump. The other characters were just as thin.

Christopher Nolan's films might have a bit of the problem of having the characters expound upon the film's themes, but at least the characters are there and those themes are explored. In Man of Steel you have characters talking about how great Superman is going to be, but what does Superman really do, character-wise? The trailer sold this as the triumphant, uplifting return of Superman to cinema, but when Superman wins in the end it's tragic, rather than triumphant. The movie didn't really know what it was doing. Compare to, say, Dredd, which was also dark 'n' gritty, but kept its tone consistent and knew what it was doing. And was a better movie.

Earlier on this page someone made a crack about the Marvel fanboys, but here's the thing: despite their seemingly rigid adherence to checklist-following mediocrity, the Marvel Studios movies usually tend to be competent films. Man of Steel was not a competent movie.

Yeah, Superman is a shallow, two-dimensional hero. They should've given him some real depth by having him constantly crack jokes. Then the movie would be well-written like the Marvel movies!

They should have given Superman any characterization at all.

Here's the thing: if I were to rewatch Iron Man again for the first time since the thing came out in theaters, I could probably come back tell you a fair bit about Tony Stark's personality, the way he interacts with people, his likes and dislikes, his relationships with the people around him, and his character arc.

Can you do that with Clark Kent in Man of Steel?

Nice strawman, tho.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:11:25 AM by Pannic

Yes, I can do that with Clark in Man of Steel. He has a personality, especially in scenes like the one where he surrendered himself to the military. Maybe he's a bit of a traditional hero, but that's how Superman's always been in the comics, so the writers were just being faithful to the character.

In fact, if we're going to compare Superman to the MCU heroes, I'd say he's got just as much character depth as Captain America and WAY more depth than Star-Lord or Bruce Banner or Hawkeye or Black Widow (but, again, people forgive those movies because they crack jokes).

So good job providing zero evidence for your claim and taking it for granted that we'd just assume you were right by default.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:18:27 AM by spashthebandragon

It basically did. Not on a global scale, but as far as saving lives goes, Superman fails miserably at protecting people. We've all talked at length in the various threads about how Superman's complete and total inability to stop Zod from demolishing half of Metropolis with his terraforming device and the other half in his fistfight with Supes demonstrates how threatening and powerful Zod is, how inexperienced Superman is, etc. All good points.

But the fact remains that this is a movie where Superman fails miserably at protecting the cities these battles take place in, more or less levelling Smallville and Metropolis and causing untold fatalities - and building up to a climax where Superman, a character iconically known for his reluctance to kill^HEY albeit not to the extent many fans take it; he killed Zod in the other movie too, and let's not forget Doomsday is forced to acquiesce to Zod's Suicide by Cop.

The final blow of the conflict is the heartbroken villain attempting suicide in the ruins of a city now populated by millions of corpses, and the broken, morally-shattered hero complying. That's where it ends. Superman never rises above this moment. He breaks military property for lulz and then leaves the film with everything he ever stood shredded into pieces around the graveyard that was once the city he's iconically meant to protect.

Yes. It's okay that the Kryptonians were completely wiped out because their species sucked and they deserved to die. That's the message. "Krypton had their chance."

They did! Through a malformed romantic subplot with Lois Lane. They bonded over heartwarming moments like when the Fortress of Solitude attempted to murder her, or when Zod abducted and mind-raped her for no good reason. It built up to a culminating moment, the romantic climax of the film,

"They say it's all downhill after the first kiss."

in which Lois assures the audience that the relationship is doomed to failure.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:21:30 AM by TobiasDrake

Not on a global scale, but as far as saving lives goes, Superman fails miserably at protecting people.

So he succeeded at saving the lives of everyone in the planet, but failed miserably at saving people. Okay then.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:25:40 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

One of the prerequisites for building New Krypton was terraforming the Earth and wiping out humanity. Just because a race is destroyed by a natural catastrophe coupled with their own folly doesn't give them the right to wipe out a whole other race to rebuild themselves. (Although I'm not totally clear on why Zod couldn't have just terraformed Mars, but that might've just not occurred to him since he was crazy.)

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:22:59 AM by spashthebandragon

Yep. His actions resulted in the continued existence of countless offscreen people in parts of the planet you never see, while everything he physically touches gets destroyed.

Right. Only one species can exist, and Superman must choose which lives and which is condemned to extinction. They can't terraform Mars because there can be no third option in a joyless film; one species MUST be annihilated forever.

This is the conflict Superman was given for Man of Steel.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:24:29 AM by TobiasDrake

It's not that Superman doesn't rescue people, it's that those moments feel like token afterthoughts that the filmmakers put in.

Like, you know how in The Amazing Spider-Man there was a lot of buzz about how "Peter Parker makes wisecracks in this one like he does in the comics and like how the Sam Raimi movies didn't!" and then in the actual movie it amounted to a total of two scenes? That's how it felt to me.

Compare Superman's rescue of Lois Lane from the helicopter in Superman: The Movie to any of his rescues in Man of Steel. In Superman: The Movie the rescue is the complete focus of the scene. The whole scene is about how the helicopter is going to fall, and Lois is dangling from the helicopter, and Clark has to go to change into his Superman costume... There's buildup to the triumphant moment where he catches Lois and then gets the helicopter with his free hand. In Man of Steel, all the scenes where he rescues Lois (two of which are from situations where she really has no reason to be there) get drowned out by all the other things going on. The scene at the scout ship is surrounded by exposition, the rescue from Zod's ship still has the threat looming over them, combined with clunky exposition that forces us to re-arrange the events of what happened previously because we receive new information about things that happened off-screen...

Saying he saved the planet by punching out a giant space laser robot is all fine and dandy, but when it comes to making a movie where we feel something for the character, we need the personal touch we get when he stops a giant piece of rubble from falling on someone.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:26:31 AM by Pannic

But they could have survived on Earth with some compromise... Zod's a fantastic racist nutjob.

Superman never rises above this moment. He breaks military property for lulz and then leaves the film with everything he ever stood for utterly in tatters around the graveyard that was once a city.

Well, given this movie is apparently about people (the masses, Batman, even Luthor in his own even if misguided way) out to call him out on this, odds are it's because this is just one part of his character arc. It's like complaining about the state of Frodo's character at the end of Fellowship of the Ring; one can say that's a bad call or not, having the first movie not to be more self-contained in that regard, but I never got the impression we were supposed to take its resolution as more than the first step of the road for Clark.

Which doesn't matter when deliberating the tone and atmosphere of Man of Steel, specifically. Because future movies are not Man of Steel.

Sure, the Jedi came back and kicked the Empire's teeth in during Return of the Jedi, but that doesn't make Empire Strike Back any less of a dark and utterly crushing film, wherein the heroes more or less get the shit beat out of them for two hours and barely scrape by with their lives.