thedeadparrot | (no subject)

Crossposts: http://thedeadparrot.livejournal.com/535742.html

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movies,
superman

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I have so many rage feelings about Man of Steel already and I haven't even seen it.

ooh, curiosity peaked. What are your specific rage feelings? (I haven't been paying much attention to Man of Steel, but I do have Thoughts about Superman adaptations and superheroes in general, &tc, &tc.)

Ugh, okay. This may get super long and super incoherent and super ragey, because I have been hating on this movie for years at this point, and I have been defending Superman from the haters for even longer.

So, to start off, I saw that post about Superman as the immigrant story you reblogged and I was amused, because I had been saying the same thing! In a bid to update and 'modernize' Superman, they stripped him of what makes him so powerfully American and instead made him a thin Jesus parallel (which, to be fair, earlier movies did too, but it sounds like it was more egregious this time around than ever).

I think it's because white guys don't understand what it means to be an immigrant in America, to bring with you your own cultural baggage and also to feel distinctly American at the same time. Remember when our American cultural myth was that we welcomed everyone, that we are a multi-cultural society made stronger from our differences? Yeah, what happened to that?

I love Superman as a character (at least partially because Lois is seriously one of my favorite female characters out there), and I hate having to justify him to all the awful white dudes who like wallowing in their own tragic power fantasies of being super rich and super cool and hunting bad guys in the dark. Things are so much more badass in the dark! Things that are not in the dark are not worth watching or caring about! This is not to say that I don't like Batman as a character, but I have zero patience for the people who talk about how much deeper Batman is than Superman. He's really not.

Superman, at his core, is about being responsible with the power that has been given to you. It is about looking at a flawed, imperfect world and doing what you can to make it better in whatever way you can. It's about being reminded that cynicism in the face of suffering does nothing to help anyone. It's about remembering that the world is beautiful and it contains beautiful things and it is worth saving. It really is. I think as I grow up, I appreciate that reminder more and more. This movie seems like a transparent attempt at a darker and grittier Superman. Why do we need a darker and grittier Superman? Why?

I have been hating on this movie since I heard Goyer, Nolan, and Snyder were making it, because well, I think Goyer and Nolan have no respect for Superman as a character and Snyder has a shallow love of comic books without any of the intellectual depth to bring to the table. And I also think he probably hates Superman, too. He managed to perfectly replicate Watchmen panels without understanding the underlying themes of Watchmen at all. Nolan could make great Batman movies because of his own obsessions with identities and masks, but Superman has nothing to do with masks. The people who get into arguments about whether Superman is the real person or Clark Kent is the real person are wrong, because they both are fundamentally true (much in the same way both Batman and Bruce Wayne are fundamentally false).

Zod (or any Kryptonian) is an awful villain for a Superman origin story, because a Superman origin story is about establishing Superman's relationship with Earth, and any origin story involving Zod is about his relationship with Krypton, and that is just so useless on so many levels. Also, some of the spoilers I have heard are so fundamentally awful and sickening that I refuse to engage in an argument about them. Ugh. NERDRAGE EVERYWHERE.

There were a lot of problems with Superman Returns, like its refusal to accept that post-Crisis Superman is far better than pre-Crisis Superman, but I felt like it was a movie that loved Superman. I think that this is clearly a movie that does not understand him at all. It doesn't even sound like a half-decent critique of Superman. It sounds like it just flounders around looking for depth and meaning and half-baked Jesus parallels and occasionally the US Army? I don't even know, man.

Okay, I think I should go read Secret Identity or Birthright or something and I will leave you to enjoy this wall of text.

I think Nolan has no understanding of or respect for the comic book characters he's making movies about, period. I don't have a lot of feelings for Superman as such so I can't really comment on this movie yet, but I do have many, many Strong Opinions about the Dark Knight movies and his handling of the Batman-mythos.

I think his Batman movies are flawed in a lot of ways, and I don't think he respect comic books as a form of art, but I think his Batman movies at least have something to say about Batman. I feel the same way about the movies as I do about The Dark Knight Returns, where I may disagree with the interpretation, but I think it's willing to be part of the conversation around Batman.

I feel like this movie has nothing interesting to say about Superman.

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