Jochimus
Autobot Slacker
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What would I want to see?
2nd Film:
I'd lean toward CADMUS/Amanda Waller as the major threat to Superman, sponsored by the newly-elected President of the United States (hint, hint) and embodied in particular by two products of their studies of Kryptonian biology (Zod's corpse) and their salvaging of Kryptonian technology, both of which Clark Kent is attempting to investigate when he learns that the bodies of soldiers fallen in battle as well as the ruins of the explorer ship have disappeared without a trace.
One product is a failed super-soldier created in an attempt to splice Kryptonian DNA into the body of a soldier grievously wounded in the battle against Zod, that soldier being Clark's old childhood bully Kenny Braverman who as a result of the splicing possesses powers that are a mirror image of Superman's (ice vision, flame breath, skin that's not only bulletproof but crystallizes on impact with weapons fire); and he's looking to finally give Kent that beating he's been waiting to dish out for ages now that he knows what kind of monstrous freak Kent is, in spite of getting himself dubbed "some bizarro Superman wannabe" by Jenny. (Basically, Conduit refashioned into Bizarro)
The other product is a prototype military robot constructed from an alloy representing CADMUS' 15th attempt to replicate Kryptonian metallurgy (Metal-O) and operated by a remote-control system crudely mimicking the means by which Jor-El encoded his consciousness into the Command Key. Despite the protests of the prodigious Lieutenant in charge of much of the project's legwork, John Henry Irons, the supervising Colonel John Corben - himself as much a hater of Superman for being one of the Kryptonians that killed his entire troop (however unintentionally in Superman's case) as Braverman hates Clark Kent just for being a goodnik freak - commandeers the robot on its initial Superman-hunting trial; he gets himself backfed into a coma instead, but his subconscious mind is still keyed into the robot's processors and proceeds to drop in on Superman and Bizarro for a three-way showdown which ends up leveling the town of Midvale. (Metallo, obviously, with maybe a little of Col. Hardcastle from the DCAU in there)
There's obviously some things in here that would lead into the third film, like the inclusion of Irons and Midvale; plus the final battle is on a smaller, more intimate scope to contrast with the pure spectacle of MOS' climax (plus I'd probably set it at night). And turning Braverman into a CADMUS-created variation of Bizarro rather than Conduit would serve to turn him into a fractured version of Superman, who not only knows how to hurt Superman AND the ones he loves but also how to take advantage of people's lingering hysterics over Superman's presence on Earth...in that regard he would also sort of be an echo of Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman (it also helps avoid going back to the Kryptonite well yet again, as with having Metallo constructed from Earth-based equivalents of Kryptonian alloys).
3rd Film:
The Coluan techno-organic insectoid Vril Dox heads for Earth looking to harvest fresh genetic material for his experiments in creating a new master race with himself as its figurehead. He's exhausted his existing "resources" - cities full of beings from other worlds that he subjected to an interdimensional matter-reduction device (which functions in a similar fashion as Krypton's Phantom Zone portal did) and kept in storage until such time as he was ready to experiment on them to hideous, deformative effect: one such city is the Kryptonian capital of Kandor, which now no longer possesses "pure" Kryptonians but bizarre fusions of Kryptonian and otherwise DNA who have become resigned to their ghastly fate, except for one who looks to resist their captor by any means necessary - Ceritak. It is he who inspires the younger Kandorians to hold out hope with the tales that Dox's ship has been receiving from Earth's broadcasts of the Son of the House of El. He's not alone, though: tailing Dox's ship to Earth is a Kryptonian AI named Kara - so named in honor of the space-faring ancestor of the House of El, which, in addition to her refusal to cooperate with the crew's intent and the difficulty they had in trying to deactivate her (she was programmed as a sort of 'warden' aboard the Black Zero), goes some way to explain why Zod had her ejected from the Black Zero before exiting the Phantom Zone years ago.
Long-range studies of Superman's bio-signature indicate the presence of the fabled Codex encoded into his genetic structure, which Dox realizes would be an ideal asset in his experiments. As Kal-El is unwilling to offer up his body for Dox's study, Dox instead fires a rocket to Earth carrying a genetic code he developed years ago for a biological weapon, of a kind: the missile makes its way to the Arctic, where the explorer ship once rested, and comes into contact with a Kryptonian astronaut's body frozen in the ice where it was thrown clear (given the masculine nature of the body, the implication would be that this was Dev-Em for those following the tie-in stories). The body mutates into a ten-foot-tall Gojira-looking thing, awakens in a rage, and beelines for Metropolis on a pre-programmed course for Superman. The battle takes longer than Dox had been planning on, though: Earth's conditions render the beast's mutated makeup unstable, turning it into a nuclear reactor getting ready to melt down. Despite the aid of Irons, now a steelworker resigned from the military, who gets buried under rubble for his trouble, and a former CADMUS security officer named Jake Delgado who was discharged in CADMUS' efforts to scapegoat the Bizarro/Metallo incident, Superman is forced to headlock Doomsday from behind and hurl them both towards the sun, whereupon Doomsday detonates halfway there, apparently atomizing Superman.
From there, Dox attempts to console his loss by taking root on Earth instead and treating the population there as his newest genetic playground, and exterminating any population foolish enough to protest, but with one last little push from the Daily Planet - and a boost to Lois' morale from the new intern and Superman groupie on staff, Midvale resident/survivor Linda Li - the seeds of uprising are sown: as CADMUS struggles to mount an effective counter-offensive, Ceritak manages to escape from the shrunken Kandor and, with the aid of a figuratively-AND-literally growing number of his fellow Kandorians, starts tearing down Dox's forces from within Dox's spaceship-citadel; and in Metropolis, Irons goes to town on Dox's drones in patchworked body armor and his steelworker's hammer, Delgado cons some SWAT gear off some old friends and rides through the city taking out as many as he can, and when she's mortally wounded protecting children from a drone onslaught Linda gets a boost of her own when Kara, inspired by Linda's selflessness, fuses her energies and consciousness to Linda's own to give Irons and Delgado a super-powered assist. And just when it seems Dox himself may be too much for the city's newest defenders...after a brief sojourn through the beyond, to both of his fathers - and with a little solar-powered assist from the Codex within him - it turns out the Son of House of El may not be all that dead after all.
Obviously I'd take some more Byrne-era influences and also want to steer more in the direction of Superman as an inspiration to drive home Jor-El's own beliefs from the first movie, because not everybody in the world can fear Superman forever. I also went with some more character combining - in this case Jake Jordan and Jose Delgado into a single character who's more Guardian than Gangbuster; it would also restore, to some extent, the 'band of heroes' aspect of the climax of the Death & Return arc that would have been absent from "Superman Lives". And bringing in the Kandorians as these more alien beings would provide a great final means of really blasting down the walls of where this universe can go after years of stagnation on WB's part with the Superman mythos, and also would contribute to that theme of unity in the face of a massive threat that I would lean the climax toward.
2nd Film:
I'd lean toward CADMUS/Amanda Waller as the major threat to Superman, sponsored by the newly-elected President of the United States (hint, hint) and embodied in particular by two products of their studies of Kryptonian biology (Zod's corpse) and their salvaging of Kryptonian technology, both of which Clark Kent is attempting to investigate when he learns that the bodies of soldiers fallen in battle as well as the ruins of the explorer ship have disappeared without a trace.
One product is a failed super-soldier created in an attempt to splice Kryptonian DNA into the body of a soldier grievously wounded in the battle against Zod, that soldier being Clark's old childhood bully Kenny Braverman who as a result of the splicing possesses powers that are a mirror image of Superman's (ice vision, flame breath, skin that's not only bulletproof but crystallizes on impact with weapons fire); and he's looking to finally give Kent that beating he's been waiting to dish out for ages now that he knows what kind of monstrous freak Kent is, in spite of getting himself dubbed "some bizarro Superman wannabe" by Jenny. (Basically, Conduit refashioned into Bizarro)
The other product is a prototype military robot constructed from an alloy representing CADMUS' 15th attempt to replicate Kryptonian metallurgy (Metal-O) and operated by a remote-control system crudely mimicking the means by which Jor-El encoded his consciousness into the Command Key. Despite the protests of the prodigious Lieutenant in charge of much of the project's legwork, John Henry Irons, the supervising Colonel John Corben - himself as much a hater of Superman for being one of the Kryptonians that killed his entire troop (however unintentionally in Superman's case) as Braverman hates Clark Kent just for being a goodnik freak - commandeers the robot on its initial Superman-hunting trial; he gets himself backfed into a coma instead, but his subconscious mind is still keyed into the robot's processors and proceeds to drop in on Superman and Bizarro for a three-way showdown which ends up leveling the town of Midvale. (Metallo, obviously, with maybe a little of Col. Hardcastle from the DCAU in there)
There's obviously some things in here that would lead into the third film, like the inclusion of Irons and Midvale; plus the final battle is on a smaller, more intimate scope to contrast with the pure spectacle of MOS' climax (plus I'd probably set it at night). And turning Braverman into a CADMUS-created variation of Bizarro rather than Conduit would serve to turn him into a fractured version of Superman, who not only knows how to hurt Superman AND the ones he loves but also how to take advantage of people's lingering hysterics over Superman's presence on Earth...in that regard he would also sort of be an echo of Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman (it also helps avoid going back to the Kryptonite well yet again, as with having Metallo constructed from Earth-based equivalents of Kryptonian alloys).
3rd Film:
The Coluan techno-organic insectoid Vril Dox heads for Earth looking to harvest fresh genetic material for his experiments in creating a new master race with himself as its figurehead. He's exhausted his existing "resources" - cities full of beings from other worlds that he subjected to an interdimensional matter-reduction device (which functions in a similar fashion as Krypton's Phantom Zone portal did) and kept in storage until such time as he was ready to experiment on them to hideous, deformative effect: one such city is the Kryptonian capital of Kandor, which now no longer possesses "pure" Kryptonians but bizarre fusions of Kryptonian and otherwise DNA who have become resigned to their ghastly fate, except for one who looks to resist their captor by any means necessary - Ceritak. It is he who inspires the younger Kandorians to hold out hope with the tales that Dox's ship has been receiving from Earth's broadcasts of the Son of the House of El. He's not alone, though: tailing Dox's ship to Earth is a Kryptonian AI named Kara - so named in honor of the space-faring ancestor of the House of El, which, in addition to her refusal to cooperate with the crew's intent and the difficulty they had in trying to deactivate her (she was programmed as a sort of 'warden' aboard the Black Zero), goes some way to explain why Zod had her ejected from the Black Zero before exiting the Phantom Zone years ago.
Long-range studies of Superman's bio-signature indicate the presence of the fabled Codex encoded into his genetic structure, which Dox realizes would be an ideal asset in his experiments. As Kal-El is unwilling to offer up his body for Dox's study, Dox instead fires a rocket to Earth carrying a genetic code he developed years ago for a biological weapon, of a kind: the missile makes its way to the Arctic, where the explorer ship once rested, and comes into contact with a Kryptonian astronaut's body frozen in the ice where it was thrown clear (given the masculine nature of the body, the implication would be that this was Dev-Em for those following the tie-in stories). The body mutates into a ten-foot-tall Gojira-looking thing, awakens in a rage, and beelines for Metropolis on a pre-programmed course for Superman. The battle takes longer than Dox had been planning on, though: Earth's conditions render the beast's mutated makeup unstable, turning it into a nuclear reactor getting ready to melt down. Despite the aid of Irons, now a steelworker resigned from the military, who gets buried under rubble for his trouble, and a former CADMUS security officer named Jake Delgado who was discharged in CADMUS' efforts to scapegoat the Bizarro/Metallo incident, Superman is forced to headlock Doomsday from behind and hurl them both towards the sun, whereupon Doomsday detonates halfway there, apparently atomizing Superman.
From there, Dox attempts to console his loss by taking root on Earth instead and treating the population there as his newest genetic playground, and exterminating any population foolish enough to protest, but with one last little push from the Daily Planet - and a boost to Lois' morale from the new intern and Superman groupie on staff, Midvale resident/survivor Linda Li - the seeds of uprising are sown: as CADMUS struggles to mount an effective counter-offensive, Ceritak manages to escape from the shrunken Kandor and, with the aid of a figuratively-AND-literally growing number of his fellow Kandorians, starts tearing down Dox's forces from within Dox's spaceship-citadel; and in Metropolis, Irons goes to town on Dox's drones in patchworked body armor and his steelworker's hammer, Delgado cons some SWAT gear off some old friends and rides through the city taking out as many as he can, and when she's mortally wounded protecting children from a drone onslaught Linda gets a boost of her own when Kara, inspired by Linda's selflessness, fuses her energies and consciousness to Linda's own to give Irons and Delgado a super-powered assist. And just when it seems Dox himself may be too much for the city's newest defenders...after a brief sojourn through the beyond, to both of his fathers - and with a little solar-powered assist from the Codex within him - it turns out the Son of House of El may not be all that dead after all.
Obviously I'd take some more Byrne-era influences and also want to steer more in the direction of Superman as an inspiration to drive home Jor-El's own beliefs from the first movie, because not everybody in the world can fear Superman forever. I also went with some more character combining - in this case Jake Jordan and Jose Delgado into a single character who's more Guardian than Gangbuster; it would also restore, to some extent, the 'band of heroes' aspect of the climax of the Death & Return arc that would have been absent from "Superman Lives". And bringing in the Kandorians as these more alien beings would provide a great final means of really blasting down the walls of where this universe can go after years of stagnation on WB's part with the Superman mythos, and also would contribute to that theme of unity in the face of a massive threat that I would lean the climax toward.
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Just kidding. I totally agree with you. While I like that MOS and Batman Begins each had a more broad scope, with stories that span the globe or the universe, I do agree that a more centralized approach (like TDK) is the way to go with MOS. Not saying that the film has to stay solely in Metropolis (after all, TDK did take a brief detour to China) but most of MOS 2 should focus on that area, with Clark establishing himself at the Planet and Lex scheming his various misdeeds.
you knew exactly what I was expecting 
