The handling of Superman’s turn towards sacrificial hero is hardly any better. During a pivotal moment, after he stands around in a flaming courtroom not really bothering about those injured, he tells Lois he fears he didn’t see the bomb coming because he wasn’t looking. That’s a potentially interesting starting point for his journey (some 90 minutes into the film) but the very next thing he says is something that contradicts the entirety of Man of Steel. He refers to Superman, the saviour of humans, as a farmer’s dream – his father’s dream. The conflict here is that this may be someone he doesn’t want to be, but it goes against the entire basis for this version of the character. Not the fact that he’s questioning heroism, but that he’s doing so as a rejection of his father’s wishes. In the first film, the whole reason Superman questions being a hero is because that’s exactly what his father instilled in him. It’s a weird piece of retconning that, while bringing his origin closer to the comics, ends up making Superman even more of an ******* here. In this moment he isn’t struggling with heroism, caught between a desire to do good and a sense of pragmatic self-interest. He simply doesn’t care. In Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan’s aloofness and disinterest in humanity came from being able to see its cosmic insignificance. This Superman, on the other hand, comes off as a sociopath.
And in a few months we get the Rebirth series.
