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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Man of Steel...

You've given me plenty to think about Peter. Thanks. That should be enough for me to go and check it out.

I'll admit that as an immigration story I find "A young itinerant worker is forced to confront his secret extraterrestrial heritage when Earth is invaded by members of his race." to be easy and while topical, somewhat uninteresting. In that light I can understand your Tea Party reference. I hope there is more to it than just that. I'll be looking for ecological and diplomatic subtext as well, for instance.

Reading your mention of crucifixion imagery while considering Superman's Hebrew lineage had me looking for Mel Gibson's name on their IMDB listing. ;-)

Whenever it is that I finally see Man Of Steel, I'll be thinking of you, Peter.

Scott
Peter Moretti said:
I've seen all the other Superman movies and watched the TV show when growing up. I can't recall so may curcifixtion poses. Nor do I beleive there were scenes with a priest counseling Superman or stained glass images of Jesus in frame.

And it IS ironic, being that Superman was created by two Jewish artists: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who have said they created Superman as a Jewish hero/alter ego for boys who were like themselves when growing up. And Superman's name, "Kal-El," is Hebrew for vessel or voice of G_d.
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i personally enjoyed the movie a lot, a lot of the criticism is valid, it really could have used about 15-20 min less of sentimental "backstory" i know they were working hard on the "human" side of superman and his conflicted youth but i think that was already easy to get and didn't need to be so driven to the point.

as for the action sequences and collateral damage. this IS a reboot after all, and a much darker reboot at that. hence the color, overall mood, and destruction. wouldn't be much of a reboot if there weren't some kind of major changes here and there. and even if you look at comics are cartoons, there's TONS of destruction all over the city, buildings collapse on each other, buses are thrown at each other. it's just never mentioned people are dying everywhere. it stands to reason that if superman really existed in our world, an epic battle between people of equal power to him would cause a great deal of damage and deaths. but it's the hard choice of does he fight the battle and not hold back to win to save the world, or worry about every individual that could get hurt in this fight?

and this is technically his first real battle as well so he doesn't have the experience and foresight to try to draw the enemy elsewhere. and with Zod and his team it might not have even worked, since they were out to kill as many humans as possible to spite superman. it had a great cast, a handful of story development cliche's and flaws, but I thought it was still fun, great action, and still held to the core principles of who and what superman is. I think my favorite part was the deeper introspect on Kryptonian culture. There was a lot of thought put into it, and there are still one or two things I question about the story right now but I didn't think it was a bad watch at all.
 
I loved it, and I thought all the backstory really added to Superman's character. To me it all pointed to why Superman is great. It's not because he can fly or can't be hurt. It's because he was raised by two good people in Kansas, and he chooses to be good with all the power in the world.
 
Felt like a mashup of Thor, Avengers, and Transformers 3....
 
My Constructive criticism,

This movie sucked balls. All the money the film is making should be given to Charity. Man of Steal moviegoers cash should be bathed in kryptonite
 
Wow not a lot of ambivalence with this one... its love or hate.
 
I didn't love or hate it! :smile:

Good points:
Casting
Music
Taking it seriously
Not being afraid to be dark
Top notch effects overall
Some exploration of Krypton society

Bad points:
Not enough building of relationship between Lois and Clark
Not enough care for human loss of life in the second half
Most of the secondary female characters were wasted 1D characters

Basically, Superman is physically invulnerable most of the time, so his vulnerability was always the fact that he cared about human lives. The second half collateral damage was ridiculous in this context. It may have worked if we'd seen any attempt by Superman to prevent the human death toll, but we don't see that until the final killing of Zod.

Also, why did Zod especially want Lois on board the ship?
 
I was confused by the ancient Kryptonian scout ship found buried in the ice. OK, assuming that with a ship being thousands of years old, Jor-El could still somehow be downloaded into its computer, how is it that he had a Superman suit in there? Did he have the ship make it? And didn't he say something to the effect that he helped build the ship? The space warp drive of Kal-El's and Zod's ships eliminates the notion that it took thousands of years to reach Earth from Krypton.

Though I seem to recall the original Donner "Superman" also having a somewhat confusing timeline, I think Jor-El tells Clark that he's been dead for many thousands of years, but for some reason Lex Luther figures that its taken a few decades for pieces of Krypton to reach Earth? I'll have to take a look again...
 
Scott Crawley said:
... I hope there is more to it than just that. I'll be looking for ecological and diplomatic subtext as well, for instance.
...

Whenever it is that I finally see Man Of Steel, I'll be thinking of you, Peter.

Scott[/FONT][/SIZE]


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Oh you'll find that too, LOL! :) And thank you Scott. ;)
 
Biggest problem: Two invincible people fighting isn't interesting. Who wins? The guy who just gets tired first? Do they take breaks and eat lunch while the other keeps punching them. Why even bother throwing a train at someone who obviously isn't going to be hurt? It's like watching a sport which you have no understanding of the rules. It's tough to cheer on someone when you have no idea how they win, if they're winning, what losing looks like etc... Just stupid.

I thought the Krypton stuff was the most interesting. People were mortal and seemed to have a real problem... kind of. Never really understood the "blood lines" thing, even after it was explained or why it was so bad. So it's a caste system... but why not just tweak the castes?

I hated the micro-shakey cam. I dont' mind handheld... I'm not sure how they got such large cameras to have such high frequency shakiness though. I suspect it was added in post. It felt fake and annoying.

Music was amazing.

Ultimately the biggest failure was Superman himself. From the flashbacks I could tell that the director was trying really really really hard to give Superman a reason not to help humanity. But Superman didn't seem to face any bigger challenges in gradeschool than your average nerd. "oh no, he got picked on... but they couldn't actually hurt him." Superman needed to be about 10x more of a loner. Being an alaskan fisherman doesn't count. I wanted to see some serious--can't live with humanity anti-social loneliness ala Wolverine. Then we could see some real conflict between him and a world which really seriously rejects him. Give him a little temptation to join his own people. Don't reveal Zod as super evil in like the first 30 seconds. If I was confused by the caste system... leave it ambiguous to Superman as well. Maybe castes aren't so bad. Maybe Zod won't wipe out humanity. And then Boom! Betrayal. Without any ambiguity there was absolutely no clark kent -> Superman character development. He just started as superman... and then put on a cape (suddenly discovering he could fly?)
 
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