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I'm literally pulling this stuff out of my ass on the spot.

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Literally?!

DallasTeleAg said:

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I agree, there was some really good casting. I definitely would have taken Smallville Lex Luther over what we got in Batman vs Superman ANY day.

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Top 5 worst casting ever. Terrible.

Superman has long been my favorite comic book character. Dating all the way back to Saturday morning cartoons in the early to mid '70s and a plastic Slurpee cup that I snagged on a trip to the local 7-11 with my grandmother when I was probably 4 years old. When that first movie came out in December '78, it was a gold standard in comic book movies. Of course, in those days comic book movies just really didn't exist, at least not on such a grand stage as a major Christmas-time cinematic release.

Superman: The Movie still stands up very well for me 42 years later. For years, I thought Superman II was an awesome movie ... but when I re-watched it not too long ago, it has become about as close to hot garbage as can be, well, excepting entries such as Superman III and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, that last which is legitimately one of the worst 5 movies ever made.

In 2006, I remember being so very pleasantly surprised to hear John Williams' Superman theme during the credits of Superman Returns. The movie was so-so, way better than the previous 2 entries and even better than Superman II.

In 2012, when I saw the first still image from the upcoming Man of Steel, it featured Superman standing in front of a crushed bank vault door. I knew next to nothing about the plot of the movie, but I did learn early on that John Williams was not doing the score (not that he had done a Superman score since 1978). The Superman theme that I had grown up with had been woven into all of those original movies plus Superman Returns. That theme went with Superman just as the Indiana Jones defines that Harrison Ford charcter, the Imperial March is closely associated with Darth Vader ... I could not really get enthused about a Superman movie without some form of John Williams' music.

So when MoS came out in June 2013 ... I was pumped to see it but didn't expect to truly love the movie like I do the original movie from '78. Then, the depiction of Krypton, Russell Crowe's take on Jor-El, and everything related to Krypton was just so different from the sterile look of these things depicted in the original movies, and I loved it. Absolute perfection. The movie did a good thing from there, in that it didn't follow a linear timeline in telling the story of Clark Kent and Superman. We first see him as a rookie on a shrimp boat that gets called in to an oil rig disaster; later we see young Clark Kent, so it was kind of all over the place, and that worked for me. (In an aside, audiences don't ever need to see another depiction of young Kal-El's arrival on Earth and being adopted by the Kent's, growing up in Kansas, all of that, much like we never need to see another mugging in an alley resulting in the deaths of Bruce Wayne's parents).

I loved the depiction of Krytonic technology in this movie. I thought General Zod and his cohorts were far better realized than in Superman II. I generally liked Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Pa and Ma Kent; Pa's death was poorly handled as opposed to the original movie, and it really didn't resonate on any emotional level as it should have. Amy Adams as Lois Lane didn't move the needle for me, but she is a better looking woman than was Margot Kidder.

And since I commented so much about a concern over the lack of John Williams' theme in the score by Hans Zimmer? Yeah, I never missed the JW theme. Zimmer's work is not hummable for this movie, but it works well. Zimmer did some of his best work with both MoS and Batman Versus Superman.

While I do enjoy BvS quite a bit, that movie should never have been made at the time that it was made. To me, that movie's existence is purely a result of Marvel's unprecedented success with a slate of lesser-known characters. DC showed a remarkable lack of patience in developing their own series. There should have been solo films from each of their primary characters before considering anything like either BvS or Justice League. Granted, doing so takes time, and they were well behind on the scoreboard, but there was not a game clock winding down in the 4th quarter.

agracer said:

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I thought it was you but maybe someone else who said when it was released that problem with going form Clark to Superman was he did not earn the cape. He just gets in the ship and BAM, he's got a costume and cape.

I thought that was a good take.

Also, someone DL the movie and increased the brightness/contracts and put parts of it on YouTube and it looks 10x better.

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Yeah, that was one of my biggest issues. I just remember seeing this awesome shot in the trailers of Superman emerging from the ship, thinking what a cool moment that's going to be on screen...



... but then upon seeing the movie itself, thinking how utterly unearned that moment felt in execution. The Jor-El hologram is basically like "Here's your suit" five minutes after meeting Clark, and then two seconds after that... SUPERMAN. I don't have a quick fix for how they should have handled it in-story as-is, but in a completely different iteration, yeah, I would have made a whole thing of Clark either having to "earn" the suit somehow, or treat it like the original movie, where he's basically in hibernation in the Fortress of Solitude for a few years, learning, growing, etc, and then finally emerges as Superman. I think the latter is less dramatic, and they definitely needed to do something new this go around, but anything would have been better than what we got.

What sucks is that the sequence leading up to that moment/reveal is so good, with Jor-El giving the history of Krypton and all that. And even the way he reveals the suit to Clark at the end of that spiel is awesome. But there should have been another other beat or sequence or something between the end of that sequence and the above shot. Just some kind of earn-it challenge or test or lesson or something; like a mini Yoda-with-Luke-on-Degobah kind of thing, at the very least.