Thursday, July 4, 2013

The Dude of Steel

How is it that Superman is
"the man of steel" when this
guy exists?
After Krypton blew up, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about how much better Man of Steel would be if it were written by the minions from Despicable Me. What else was I supposed to do? It's not like Kevin Spacey was in this show or anything.
The movie itself is generally pretty vapid so I'm just going to transcribe a direct dump of what my brain did through the show.

So Paul Ballard and Boyd Langton are incarcerated in The Attic where they are forced to work in the most hellish place that a Rossum employee could be sent: Canada. Which is also the afterlife that Capricans go to as punishment for mutiny.
Actually this afterlife thing is starting to make more sense since this is also the kind of Hell I'd send anybody from Waterworld to; "You wanted to find land so much? WELL HERE YOU GO! LAND THAT IS BORING AND HAS TORNADOS!"

Holy crap, this entire film is a montage of unnecessary flashbacks.

Okay, I'm willing to suspend all sorts of disbelief on the "gravity is weaker" thing but very much of this is clearly not a matter of just jumping really hard. Further support of the afterlife story as this smacks of the dream-like logic of a near-death experience…. whereupon, Superman isn't a messiah as he works to keep people in this afterlife. Also, why's there that rumbling and gust of — IS HE PROPELLING HIMSELF BY FARTS?

"On my planet, it means hope." Because suddenly a farm-boy from Kansas is an expert on a culture from kiloparsecs away that's been extinct for thirty years.
Why doesn't Superman go for Faora? She's prettier and probably way more likely to … um… be able to keep up with him. Being his species is also a plus. When my in-laws ask "How was the Superman movie?" I'm pretty sure my wife would slap me if I told them it was a story about bestiality.

"The slow blade penetrates
the shield."
If Colonel Hardy actually gets into a knife fight, he and Colonel O'Niell can start the "Airforce Officers Who Discovered Blades Work Better Than Bullets On Aliens" club. We know this because Zod killed Jor not with his pewpewlayz0r but with a shiv. Whoops! Nevermind. Superman ruined that interesting possibility, too; back to the fruitless, brawling.

OoooOOOOooooh! Yeeeah. She just got a line and… yeah, I totally understand why Kal's not into Faora-Ul now. Anybody who says crap like that is not worth continuing the species with. I'd go panda, too if I were him.

Man, if I were a Keynesian, I would want for nothing more than to live in a comic book movie universe as a window salesman.

Wait! Is this a flashback to a previous scene in the movie? Oh, I guess not. It's just that Lois falls a lot. Wait! Is this a flashback to the fight from five seconds ago? … I can't tell.

"I killed you too quickly
the first two times.  A mistake
I do not mean to
duplicate tonight!"
They need to find another slot to cram that USB stick into just so we can watch Jor have a third defiant death. Little does Zod know that when everyone takes off their Fawkes masks Jor will be standing there in the crowd.

Oh, hey! It's the ending I wished that Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Koneitzko were man enough to write.

"Welcome to the planet!" So punny!

They need to round-off the flashback thing in this ending by cutting to Lois and Superman's 25th wedding anniversery party and having them say to the crowd "and that's how we met!"