I’m doing this because last night, before Paul started recording us for the latest Subs podcast, we talked about the new Superman movie. (I know, that’s a real stretch, Legion of Super-Heroes fans having thoughts about the new Superman movie.) In the discussion, I said what I’ve said a thousand times before: I’m not a Zack Snyder fan, but I don’t dislike his Superman-related films (“Man of Steel,” “Batman v. Superman,” and his “Justice League” cut) as much as some of his most virulent haters.
Which turned into “Alan’s defending the Snyderverse.” Which in turn led me to get royally pissed off that once again, heaven forbid that you don’t loathe the Snyderverse. Which in turn led me to this post, where I’m going to straight-up say what I liked about Snyder’s take on the Metropolis Marvel, and all you absolute haters can go fuck yourselves if you think you’re the gatekeepers of good taste (especially given how much I dislike some of the movies y’all love).
On with the show.
“But they’re so dark!”
That’s the first complaint I usually hear about Snyder’s films. And you know what? They sure are. Colors are desaturated in the rare shots of sunny skies. It’s typically overcast if it’s daytime, or more often than not, it’s nighttime. But yes, I know, beyond the cinematography, the tone is dark. Hey, it sure is. And the complaint is, “Superman isn’t dark. He’s about hope!”
Is he, really? Let’s see about that.
Way back in the 1980s, not long after John Byrne rebooted Superman in the Man of Steel miniseries, he crippled the new vigilante hero named Gangbuster. Fast-forward less than a decade, and oh, look, Superman died. Sure, he got better, but I seem to recall Coast City going kablooey was part of the story of his return.
Then there was Infinite Crisis in 2005, where Batman tells Superman that the last time Kal-El inspired anyone was when he died. Ouch. Infinite Crisis is the story where Superboy-Prime punches Pantha’s head clean off her body, rips off Risk’s arm, and beats both the Conner Kent Superboy and the Earth-Two Superman to death. And that doesn’t even cover all the death, destruction, and mayhem going on in the rest of the DCU. Yeah, not dark at all. Not to mention that it was supposed to usher in a new, brighter DCU, which failed miserably to materialize, so much so, in fact, that next came…
…Flashpoint, the hot mess of hot messes, with an altered timeline that made the DCU in Infinite Crisis look cheerful. And to fix it all, the Flash has to run through time again (his meddling with the past is what caused this alternate timeline in the first place), which conveniently results in rebooting the entire DCU (sorta) as the New 52, which had a Superman so messed up that they killed both him and his version of Lois Lane off and replaced them with another version who happened to be married and already had a kid. Oh, and then came Doomsday Clock, where we discover Doctor Manhattan’s been fucking around with the DCU to see what would happen, including making sure that the New 52 versions of Jonathan and Martha Kent die in a car accident right after dropping Clark off at his high school prom. (At least Doomsday Clock undid that retcon. I’ll give Johns a point for that.)
And none of this even gets at all the Elseworlds stories that have Superman in some dark alternate reality, like when he’s found by the Waynes instead of the Kents and runs around burning bad guys with his heat vision as an amped-up Batman. Or like when he’s the hero of the Soviet Union. Or like in the Injustice video games, where he’s certainly not above running Earth as a giant authoritarian state. Or in the Justice Lords two-parter of the old Justice League cartoon, where a version of him summarily lobotomizes supervillains.
Oh, yes, Superman stories are never dark….
“Superman doesn’t kill!”
Is that so? Back in the Golden Age. heroes regularly couldn’t stop villains from falling off cliffs to their doom, electrocuting themselves, getting dunked in acid, and whatever other way they’d get it in the end. Sometimes the heroes even intentionally or inadvertently killed the villains themselves. Why, heck, look at Superman II—Richard Lester left us hanging about what happened to the Phantom Zone villains after they were depowered and went sliding down the I-never-understood-where-the-walls-really-were crystals in the Fortress of Solitude.
But you want the real kicker? Read The Supergirl Saga, John Byrne’s final Superman arc in the 1980s. Superman has to fight three villains from an alternate Krypton who are all more powerful than he is. Thankfully, this universe has Gold Kryptonite, which strips them of their powers (but not Superman, who isn’t affected by that universe’s Kryptonite), but by the time he does that, everyone on that Earth is dead (except for the blob of protoplasm that was Byrne’s version of Supergirl, designed to get around the “Superman is the last Kryptonian” BS that DC editorial was pushing at the time). And guess what Superman decides he has to do to three unpowered Kryptonian villains because the Phantom Zone projector’s destroyed (and the mainstream universe didn’t even have that technology) and he can’t guarantee they’ll never get their powers back?
Yup. Judge, jury, and executioner. Emphasis on “executioner.”
This leads to fallout and consequences, including sleep-crimefighting as the new Gangbuster and eventually exiling himself from Earth for a while, both of which seem pretty dark to me. So when Clark snaps Zod’s neck in Man of Steel, I may not have been thrilled, but I could see where that could’ve led to an eventual code against killing.
Oh, and let’s not forget that when Superman died, he apparently thought he’d killed Doomsday (who, in true supervillain fashion, never really dies). Or all the times he kills in Elseworlds stories and video game plots like Injustice.
No, Superman doesn’t kill….
“That’s not Krypton!”
Neither was the planet-wide crystal chandelier in the Donner films. Depending on when you got into Superman, Krypton was either
- a futuristic utopia with a rich geography and history
- a dying planet populated by an ancient, sterile, soulless culture that was dying out as well, to the point where everyone but Superman died if they left the planet
- a planet populated by a race that spread out through the galaxy in search of expansion but somehow never made much of a dent
…and the list goes on. So what version of Krypton are you talking about?
“What about the whole ‘Martha’ thing?”
Seriously, did you even watch that scene in BvS? Superman says, “Save Martha,” and Batman goes apeshit because he wants to know why the fuck this alien’s muttering the name of dear, departed, sainted Martha Wayne. It isn’t until Lois interposes herself between Bats and Supes that Bruce even finds out that Clark’s got a mama named Martha, because this version of Batman is so PTSD-ridden (as you’d reasonably expect him to be after all these years) that it never occurs to him that Superman might have been raised on Earth.
“Jesse Eisenberg sucked as Lex Luthor!”
Okay, you’ve got me there. I didn’t think much of Snyder’s version of Luthor. Still, I’ll take the manipulative genius wacko from BvS over the campy wannabe real estate mogul who can’t hire a competent henchman.
“But they killed Jimmy Olsen!”
So what? If he was going to be as useless as Jimmy Olsen was in the Donner movies, good riddance. They killed off Jimmy Olsen in Smallville, too. Oh, wait, that was Jimmy’s older brother, who just happened to go by his middle name of “James.”
There’s plenty more, but this is a good start. Got others? I’ll get to them in a later post.
Monsters—from the Id! 