kiltforhire

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

If you have any care or desire to see Man of Steel then please do not read any further. If you have seen it or you don’t want to see it then feel free to keep reading.

I love Superman. I love the ethos that surrounds him.

He is everything good in all of us.

And Zack Snyder took that away.

He took away the core of Superman. He took away decades of writing. He took away the very being of what makes Superman super. Superman is more human than any of us. That’s the point of him. His humanity is his strength. His power comes from his desire to be more human than human. And it seem that the writers and producers and director of Man of Steel had no idea about that.

I watched Superman the movie when I was a child and I told my parents I wanted to be a journalist because of Superman. I wanted to be able to connect with him. I saw a man on the screen and in my comics who was all powerful but became a journalist because he knew he could still help people doing his daily job to fit in.

I became a journalist. I did my time. I worked as one for over a decade and helped keep schools and hospitals open. I fought the good fight when I could and I still like to think I do.

So where do my issues with Man of Steel begin?

How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

There is no humour except some bizarre addition in the last scene. What the fuck. Superman is supposed to be colourful not gray, deep dark blue, dark red and black.

Lois Lane finds out Superman’s identity over the course of what seems like a week even though it would be near impossible to link all the incidents.

Superman spills every secret to her in seconds of meeting her.

Lois then decided to not tell anyone anything.

Superman spends 33 years absorbing the sun’s rays which absorb the energy to give him his strength. Zod and his followers get all the powers in the space of five seconds.

If General Zod is such a fucking amazing military genius born into being the greatest warrior that Krypton has ever seen then why does Jor-El, a fucking scientist, hand him his ass in the first five minutes of the movie?

A terraforming world builder? Really? Just so happen there was one lying around?

Why the fuck was the phantom zone linked to the planet’s death? It’s a dimension. They are trapped there. It’s not a place manufactured by Krypton and their wee machine? Pretty shit decision to send all prisoners to a place and if you destroy that machine they all come back.

Why the fuck did the Colonel in the Air Force let Lois Lane on the aircraft near the end and why the fuck did he even fly it. It’s well below his pay grade to be doing that shit.

You don’t simply decide to be a journalist and then end up working for one of the biggest papers in the world. What about his time at the paper in Smallville? What about his articles he wrote around the globe? None of that in this movie. Just day one here’s a job.

If you see a A-10 Thunderbolt unleash it’s GAU-8 Avenger cannon (4,200 rounds per minute of 30mm pure death) into a bloke standing in the street and he doesn’t flinch the 9mm rounds from your assault rifle will not do fuck all to it.

Superman could simply have used his heat vision to destroy the terraforming machine from space.

Superman kisses Lois when no doubt thousands are dying trapped in building.

Superman pauses way too often when he would be in action.

Superman would never fight anyone in the street when he could take the battle to a field or somewhere where no humans could be harmed. The only people he protected was a girl he just met and a four people in a train station at the end. That was it.

But ultimately the worst problem with the movie is one thing.

Superman does not kill. Seeing Superman kill someone broke my heart. It broke every part of my 34 years of love for Clark Kent/Superman and it has left me with an empty feeling. I remember when Clark lost his life in Death of Superman. I cried reading that comic when his punch takes down Doomsday but Doomsday’s final punch kills him.

Clark never kills. Superman never kills.

And for that Zack Snyder and David Goyer and Christopher Nolan you showed that you have no idea who Superman is or what he represents and I hate the three of you for taking something about humanity and who we are and reversing the very core of it.

He doesn’t kill. He protects.