People giving out about MoS damage..

Have they never watched the Animated Universe?

Cities get levelled on a near daily basis. It's what happenes when the antagonist keeps the fight there

pixelburp

There's a context issue here to be fair: it's far easier for any audience, including myself to be perfectly honest, to swallow the incredible or the exaggerated when the medium itself is inherently fictional, exaggerated or animated. Once you set things within 'our' world, with real people fleeing from real sky-scrapers collapsing into HD-rendered rubble, there's a more explicit dissonance at play here & the consequences of actions more acutely felt. Particularly when the Synderverse is at pains to present a more 'real' world, as opposed to the deliberately hyper-real of the MCU (not that those films don't have their own problems). You can't have it both ways.

What made Man of Steel more problematic was that the supposed 'hero' character, a character who for all intents and purposes is supposed to be this emblematic symbol of perfection, fought in the city and choose to trash Metropolis instead of doing his best to move the battle to the countryside (he also initially picked the more remote World-Builder that landed on Earth in the middle of the Indian Ocean). Now, to me it was clear this choice wasn't a scripting one but a cynical Hollywood decision. It's far easier to stage an overwhelming sensory overload of blockbuster destruction in a city than a random set of woods, despite it completely undercutting the message & tone of the very protagonist we're supposed to cheer and root for.

If you can explain how he could have forced Zod out of the city I would be delighted.

They stay true to the source they are criticised, they deviate they're criticised. No win

pixelburp

Deleted User wrote: »

If you can explain how he could have forced Zod out of the city I would be delighted.

They stay true to the source they are criticised, they deviate they're criticised. No win

It is Superman we're talking about, it's not like he lacks the prowess or power to force his opponent out of the city. Like I said, the decision seemed less a narrative one, and more about the needs of the blockbuster. Gotta have the requisite destruction to make things suitably 'epic'. The end result made Superman look pretty callous: the obvious comparison here is the aforementioned MCU, where its own city-levelling is often the result of a clear antagonist's actions, with the heroes doing their best to either prevent it or at least lessen the damage. It's an overused trope, but it's used much more appropriately in the MCU.

Nor is it a question of not being able to 'win', the context of animation is not 1 to 1 transferable to reality or live-action: despite the obvious fantasy of the entire superhero genre, it doesn't mean that once you go live action, just because the main characters are refugees from the planet Krypton, anything goes & you can get away with whatever you want (I've read similar arguments made about other genre pieces such as the Walking Dead; that somehow basic human reaction and behaviour shouldn't be critiqued because OMG-zombies like?). This is especially if you're going to go out of your way to ground the main cast in something resembling our world - politics, society etc. which Man of Steel was aiming to do - there should be some kind of recognition of that world or else everything jars.

Penn

[Deleted User] wrote: »

If you can explain how he could have forced Zod out of the city I would be delighted.

They stay true to the source they are criticised, they deviate they're criticised. No win

Superman 2, he got Zod and the other Kryptonians to follow him out of the city.

Man of Steel, he managed to do the opposite and get Zod from his farm to the town of Smallville by grabbing him and pretty much punching him there, and ended up destroying most of the town.

I'm just saying, in the MoS final fight, he seemed to make zero effort to get Zod out of Metropolis. In my opinion, it wouldn't have been so bad if not for the huge amount of destruction which had already occurred to Metropolis as a result of the World Engine thingy. That was just destruction for the sake of destruction and drove the whole thing overboard. The destruction caused by Supes and Zod's actual fight was fairly minimal in comparison.

Ben Gadot

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Have they never watched the Animated Universe?

Cities get levelled on a near daily basis. It's what happenes when the antagonist keeps the fight there

I watched the Doomsday animated film again recently and it's interesting, as the fight itself had a lot of similarities to Zod and Clark's fight in MOS. Huge collateral damage and the fight never quite leaves Metropolis until Superman flies him into space and superspeed slams him back to earth....causing a huge explosion on impact.

I guess people are more generally forgiving of these things being done in animation as it's held to lesser of a standard.

Also, in MOS, Clark is still green. He's more or less a novice in battle yet Zod is a highly decorated military leader. It's easy to say Clark should have flew away to draw Zod out of the city, yet Zod says himself what his plan is after the world engine is destroyed: to obliterate the earth that Clark chose to save over the rebirth of his own race. That became his primary objective, killing Clark wasn't.

So Clark could have flown away, but it doesn't mean Zod would have followed him.

pixelburp

Ben Gadot wrote: »

[..]

So Clark could have flown away, but it doesn't mean Zod would have followed him.

Again, it's Superman: there are few problems that can't be solved by him punching something really hard. TBH, no one said he should have flown away, but given the battle already consisted of the two characters punching and throwing themselves through buildings, it's not like the script couldn't have been tweaked a little to show Superman at least trying to take the battle from the city. But hey, those CGI Buildings plugins are expensive, so you gotta get your moneys worth.

Besides, it also didn't help that the preceding 2 hours of film didn't exactly go out of its way to demonstrate this interpretation of Kal-El as some shining beacon of purity; by the time the Metropolis battle came along I was not ready to cheer Superman, which kinda makes the whole thing a bit of a failing. Then there wouldn't have been any room for all that angst and misery that WB rationalised was the reason the Dark Knight trilogy did so well.

Ben Gadot

Each to their own but I thought they did more than an apt job in showing Clark as a hero between the oil rig save and saving the bus full of kids when he was a kid himself.

Also, these scenes showed that being a hero was an inherent part of who he is, in spite of his father's pleas for him to hide that side of himself.

Maybe these scenes didn't work for you but they did for me.

I still don't understand how Superman was expected to move the fight.

Ge didn't fight Zod from Jansas to Metropolis, Zod was defending the phantom ship there. And specifically parked it there, in the first place to cause maximum damage.

The nerd rage which exists about the damage there is completely unfounded, based on the source material.

Mickeroo

I didn't have much issue with the destruction tbh, the film had much bigger problems.

Nervous Wreck

Deleted User wrote: »

I still don't understand how Superman was expected to move the fight.

Ge didn't fight Zod from Jansas to Metropolis, Zod was defending the phantom ship there. And specifically parked it there, in the first place to cause maximum damage.

The nerd rage which exists about the damage there is completely unfounded, based on the source material.

Anything of this sort again will result in a ban. We're not tolerating that kind of crap in this forum. This can be considered a warning to all.

TonyD79

Penn wrote: »

Superman 2, he got Zod and the other Kryptonians to follow him out of the city.

Man of Steel, he managed to do the opposite and get Zod from his farm to the town of Smallville by grabbing him and pretty much punching him there, and ended up destroying most of the town.

.

In Superman 2 they then realised what his weakness was- the humans, so attacked them. In MOS Zod came to the same conclusion in the final station scene.

Superman forced Zod away from his farm towards the town in defence of his mother? I don't think the safety of others would be top of his agenda while defending her!

The original superman films didn't have the cgi capabilites for the directors to show realistic destruction. I doubt they would have even thought a plane hitting a skyscraper wound cause much damage back then.

Guy:Incognito

EDITwrong forum. Thatll teach me to have 2 windows open

Cows Go µ

I haven't seen the movie in a while and found it completely forgettable (which is ridiculous for a Superman movie) but didn't he make out with Lois in the middle of the wreckage? I thought that it wasn't so much that there was a lot of destruction but that Supes didn't even try (even if he fails, he should try) to move the destruction away and then afterwards didn't show any inclination to help the survivors.