This is surprising from Nolan, but it's a problem endemic to Snyder's work, and part of what makes him such a baffling choice to helm this movie: He's all flash and no substance. He also pretty much commits genocide, or at least heavily and knowingly abets it, although I'm genuinely unsure that the filmmakers realized the latter part, or that they considered it a moral event horizon more significant than- spoiler-snapping the neck of his Kryptonian nemesis, General Zod.ĭirector Zack Snyder ( Watchmen) and screenwriters Christopher Nolan and David Goyer (the Dark Knight film trilogy) can't seem to wrap their brains around the idea of Man of Steel containing tension without violence, or a meaningful victory based on anything but martial strength. In case it's not obvious from the preceding paragraph, Superman straight-up kills a guy in Man of Steel. It's yelling "Look at me! Look how transgressive I am!" so loudly that it distracts the audience from the fact that there's no actual innovation going on. "A story where Superman kills people" isn't an edgy Superman story it's a lazy one, taking the shortest, most obvious path to define this Superman as different from that one. This isn't to say that it's impossible to tell a dark Superman story, but it takes more nuance than the standard grim and gritty surface treatment. And- no matter how quotable David Carradine was in Kill Bill-the best, most persistently definitive Superman stories are about his humanity.
He's the hero the other heroes look up to, not for his superior power set but for his unflagging decency and compassion. Superman's all about finding-or, in its absence, being-the light in the darkness. In the wrong hands, that casts him as bland in the right hands, it's a powerful and poignant statement about what heroism can and should mean. But apply the same formula to Superman, and he stops being Superman in any of the ways that matter. Grim and gritty are part of the Batman base set. Batman is one of them: He's a fundamentally dark character with a dark premise, a man whose humanity has been utterly subsumed by his mission. It's worth noting that there are lots of superhero characters who grit up well.
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