History Headscratchers / SupermanTheMovie

** Now if, as Luthor says, even Superman can't fly fast enough to stop both missiles, and if the film proves that he doesn't, how does it then make sense that he later flies fast enough to turn back time? Wouldn't time travel require flying faster than stopping a mere missile?

*** If I recall correctly, in the modern age, it took time for Superman to absorb enough yellow sun radiation to get powers, so you couldn't just turn on a device and get them instantly. In UsefulNotes/{{the Silver Age|OfComicBooks}} and UsefulNotes/{{the Bronze Age|OfComicBooks}}, it was instant--but ''everything'' was affected. You couldn't gain super-powers and smash a city because the city buildings would become super-tough just like Superman's costume did. (And Krypton had such high technology that you wouldn't need superpowers just to do things like fly.)

* Lois Lane interviews Superman where he tells her he's from another planet. Why didn't star reporter Lois not literally sh*t in her pants at what must be the single most important discovery in human history...that there's intelligent life on other planets!! Why did she concern herself on a front page story about Superman's daring-do when this news would have made her as historically famous as Leonardo Da Vinci?

* Lois Lane interviews Superman where he tells her he's from another planet. Why didn't star reporter Lois not literally sh*t in her pants at what must be the single most important discovery in human history...that there's intelligent life on other planets!! Putting her name on such a scoop would have guaranteed her name in history books and be found much more rewarding to the world than discussing Superman's heroic daring-do.

* Jor-El mentions to Clark/Superman that "many thousands of your years" will have passed by the time he turns 18. However, all evidence implies (and possibly even confirms) that Krypton exploded in 1948, and that it was a simple 3-year flight to Earth. Jor-El's education recordings make mention of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and later movies include quotes from poets from the 19th century (for the record, the round-trip flight to the ruins of Krypton in ''Film/SupermanReturns'' is only 5 years). This would make Jor-El's line a simple throw-away. Any ideas?

* Why does Lex Luthor plan to set off a ''300 megaton'' nuclear bomb right next to where his new premium ocean-front property will be? The fall-out of such a bomb would probably contanimate the entire continental US, and then some. Why was the military testing such a weapon anyway? The most powerful thermonuclear device ever test-detonated by the US in real life was Castle Bravo at 15 megaton (and any tests done inside the continental US never even got into the megaton range). The most powerful device ever detonated, period, was the Russian Tsar Bomba at 57 megaton. A 300 megaton warhead detonated in California would probably break windows in New York! And Jimmy Olsen sees this thing go off at a distance where he should've been hit by the blast (even if it was a more reasonable size, like maybe 20 kiloton, which is what the mushroom cloud size he sees suggests), but he isn't even phased! In fact, the nukes appear to have ''no consequences whatsoever'' besides breaking the fault line. SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale, I guess.

** The real problem with this plan is that, even assuming he had managed to destroy California without irradiating the new coastline, what makes him think he's going to profit from it? Has Luthor never heard of Emminent Domain? Even though the Constitution requires "just compensation" for property, Luthor's already a known criminal - Otis was being tailed to the lair so police could catch Luthor before Superman is even on the scene. There's no way he's going to keep the new coastline if Phase 1 of his plan worked.

* In Fortress of Solitude, Jor-El says that he has probably been dead for thousands of years. Later, Luthor says that Krypton was destroyed in 1948, and that it took Superman's spaceship 3 years to reach Earth. So who was right and who was wrong? Let's see our options:

** When he is chasing the missiles, he's inside the atmosphere, when he travels back in time, he goes to outer space. It is possible if you want to theorize that way, that him reaching subluminal speeds inside the atmosphere might set it on fire; besides, he catches the first missile and DRIVES IT OUT TO SPACE; and he prevents a lot of damage in real time. He just fails to reach lois lane in time (he even manages to save jimmy) and that is what drives him to try the time travel gambit; he Is superman, he will set it right, all of it. By the way, even tough Metropolis is an expy of New York, it's not the same city so he wasn't anywhere near either missile, and he still managed to go from outer atmosphere to california; that is, the opposite side of the country in enough time to save everybody (including LIFTING the whole state).
** Basically, Luthor underestimated him- Superman ''was'' fast enough to stop both missiles, and perhaps would have done so sooner if Luthor didn't mention having a convenient detonator to blow them up right away. If Clark had flown off to stop them immediately, he could have found and stopped them in a few seconds.

*** He was probably at the fastest speed he could safely go in the atmosphere while chasing the missiles- he goes into space to turn back time, and could go much faster.
*** ''And'' it is stupid. Atmosphere is not so thick, some kilometers around the Earth. If the atmospheric speed is topped to "Air burst and everyone dies" (''could'' make sense), it's easy to do a vertical climb to space, zoom before the missile and dive to intercept it. It's like having to cover a long space swimming near the shove: you can cut lot of time simply exiting the water, running, and diving back.

*** Luther has BatDeduction, as shown by his determination of the Kyrptonite weakness.

** Superman's speed is never consistently shown, but then again, neither are any of his other powers. We sometimes see him appear to strain to lift a bus, but he can lift California from sinking into the ocean or push a Kryptonite continent into space. I think all of his powers can be summed as, "Strong as the plot demands." That said, here's a possible FanWank explanation for the time travel: Superman didn't make the earth spin backwards - he himself went back in time, and the image of the Earth spinning backwards is merely how Superman would have perceived it. How'd he do this? By flying faster than the speed of light. The Earth's about 25,000 miles around, and Superman's flight in TheMovie is a good 2 or 3 diameters larger than earth, meaninging that he was flying in loops anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 miles - in less than a second. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. At the speed at which he's depicted flying, Superman is flying much faster than light, and given the dubbing from Jor-el about relativity, we can probably assume that Supes was just traveling back in time, and seeing events play out in reverse.
** Said FanWank doesn't hold up based on what's present in the actual scene, however. People often overlook that after Superman reveres time / the rotation of the Earth, he then flies in the opposite direction to return the planet to its proper rotation again. If all he was doing was flying back in time at a speed faster than light, and the Earth's reverse-rotation was merely a visual metaphor, then he wouldn't need to fly in the opposite direction once he had already made it back to the point where he could save Lois. He'd just need to stop flying, go down and save her.

** An entire civilization where absolutely anyone can obliterate a continent with a single punch? That's going to be easy to police/govern. It's clear that access to yellow-solar radiation and the means to generate it would be strictly limited, and probably banned outright for the civilian population. Granted, that doesn't explain why no one thought to apply it to military or emergency services (and of course criminal) applications, but I think "common as coffee machines" is a bit unlikely. It's for the same reasons (aside from logistical/economic) that everyone in the Western world doesn't have their own nuclear reactor for their home- it's too much power to trust with just anyone.
*** That's a horrible example. People don't keep nuclear reactors in their homes because ''no nuclear reactor on Earth would fit into any person's home''. The safety issue is entirely secondary to that. A yellow sunlight generator would be completely safe and very easy for any ordinary citizen to create, given the level of Kryptonian science. In order for your suggestion to work we would have to assume the Kryptonian government is most dystopian, fascistic, totalitarian regime in the history of the universe. Not that that's ''impossible'', mind you, but I'm not sure there's enough evidence to support that conclusion.

*** Thinking about it further, it wouldn't even be in the Krypton government's best interest to have their own squad of supermen or sanctioned superhero. The moment they let one man fly around and perform superheroics, people would start asking how that's possible. And when the answer's as simple as "shine a certain color of light on you", that's the one question they can't afford to let anyone wonder about.

*** The only thing I can think of is that it's hugely time consuming and easy to lose the powers. If it takes years for a kryptonian child growing up in a sun rich Kansas farm to develop superpowers, it must take even longer on Krypton with the potentially power draining red light. Even if it's only "does not recharge" as opposed to actively weakening, it would mean anyone(s) wanting superpowers would basically have to live in climate controlled rooms and walk around in environmental suits to avoid losing their nascent powers-- ''for years'' -- before the first signs of power manifest. Granted, with such a huge payoff there would be those willing to make the sacrifice, possibly even making their brainwished TykeBomb children go through this. On the other hand, the time and energy required to pull this off would at least give the authorities time to detect the "[[PersonOfMassDestruction PMD]]" threats before they're ready, but this is still an imperfect deterrent.
** My first thought was to agree that lack of superpowers on Krypton was pretty ridiculous, but Krypton apparently is something of a facist state, at least in the movies. Although Jor-el could build a spaceship in his house, the Council could apparently stop him from leaving until the planet was about to explode. They probably had the ability to stop people from building solar suits to gain superpowers, if such things could even be built. The bigger question is why Kryptonians weren't already immigrating to similar stars. I can only imagine that the Yellow Sun phenomenon just wasn't very well known by anyone, except for Jor-el.

* How the hell does Krypton have information about Earth like Eistien's Theory of Relativity and Chinese language grammar? We could probably assume that Krypton has some faster than light spaceships that would allow their citizens to travel to other planets. But it doesn't really acknowledge the implications that some Kryptonians actually did some research about Earth for a good number of time. All this knowledge of Earth by Kryptonians and none of them ever decided to think 'Hmmm... this planet Earth does look better than the icy civilization that I was born and raised in.' Look, whatever the answer may be, I'm telling myself that there's no way that Kal-El is the last living member of Krypton not trapped in the Phantom Zone. There is bound to be at least one space-nut from Krypton who decided that hanging out on Earth was more interesting and cooler than Krypton, and had the audacity to send his/her findings about Earth back to Krypton rather than Kryptonians having set research teams to observe Earth because... space civilization reasons.

*** Problem 4: How long would it take after the deaths of [tens of millions of Americans] before thoughts turned to ''beach-houses''? It's been nearly twenty years since the deaths of ''five-thousand'' people in New York and it is still a cornerstone of modern sensibility.

*** Problem 4: How long would it take after the deaths of *tens of millions of Americans* before thoughts turned to ''beach-houses''? It's been nearly twenty years since the deaths of ''five-thousand'' people in New York and it is still a cornerstone of modern sensibility.