I totally disagree - I think MoS did a fantastic job of trying to portray a fight between such powerful beings in a realistic way!
Take your example SR - the devastation in Metropolis was the result of an earthquake caused by Luthor's kryptonite island. He had time to fly around and try to save as many people as possible, with no immediate threat - in MoS he had to worry about the small detail of about 8 Kryptonian warriors who wanted to pummel his head into the ground, whilst also carrying out the mass genocide of the entire earth!!!
Most of the destruction was caused by Black Zero and the World Engine. Superman had to destroy the World Engine to stop it from terra-forming the earth - I think that was a bit more important than him flying to the other side of the earth and melting a bit of falling glass.... save hundreds, maybe thousands of people in Metropolis – or save the entire planet!?! And the tentacles..? We'd already seen that technology on everything Kryptonian, so why was that defence mechanism out of place?
MoS showed real world devastation that super beings like this could cause - it made the Avengers look like an episode of the A-Team by comparison.
As for a sense of danger - do you really get that in any Superhero movie? Did you at anytime, in any of the Batman films or in any of the Marvel films, think that the hero was going to die?
I loved the film – I wanted to watch it again as soon as it ended. I had no problem with the way the timeline jumps around. I loved Krypton (would have liked to have seen more of it), loved the destruction, loved the little nods to Lexcorp. I'd probably go as far as to say, for me personally hands-down the best Superhero movie I have seen - it has it's flaws, but every comic book movie does... and easy 9/10 maybe a 9.5/10 for me!
t:
One last point - as somebody else mentioned earlier, the damage such super-powered beings caused is a great thing for Lex Luthor to use against Superman - and he's gotta be in the sequel... also, the Kryptonian armour of Zod reminded me of Luthor's battle suit... and Zod left his on top of a skyscraper... hmmm
I don't like watching or like seeing my favourite characters being thrown into a third act that is essentially a glorified disaster film. See every Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay film made in the recent past apart from their attempts at low-budget cinema. It's been done before.
And just by the by, you'll notice that those Kryptonian warriors weren't actually trying to do anything except safeguard the Black Zero. They didn't attack him at the World Engine because they thought the tentacles were enough he only faced them off prior to the Metropolis action beats.
The point remains that it's about balance. I'm not expecting to just not fight the Kryptonians or destroy the Black Zero, but that conflict surrounding him choosing one or the other HAS to exist. Otherwise it's just like watching someone play the final level in some steroid pumped video game. Hell, even in video games there's clever mechanics involving not going ready fire aim and instead minding your surroundings.
As far as someone going to die? No, but you're missing the key point behind these films. Everyone knows the hero will save the day. The questions are why is he doing this and how is he going to do this? The action sequences in the Avengers and the Batman films were well done.
They were engaging and satisfying. Ditto for the Iron Man films.
It was essentially a third act packed with action for the sake of being packed with action. An endless greyscale explosion fest. If you like that kind of thing, sure. Have fun. Me? I've seen it before. A lot of times. It's not what I expected from this film. Not at all. This isn't Transformers.
It's Superman. He flies around, saves people, beats the bad guy and gets the girl. All of the while with a sense of joy at achieving the impossible. People keep talking about the concept of grounding this film in realism.
It's not about realism to me. It's about verisimilitude. It's about taking that leap of faith and suspending belief for a second. But the action scenes were so over the top but all the same emotionally sterile that I kept detaching myself from the film and waiting for the next great character moment. That's not a good sign in a film. It really isn't. And a lot of it has to do with the message this film is trying to convey as well.
In Geoff Johns' Up, Up & Away, Superman has an epiphany. He says that after watching Superboy and Superman of Earth-2 die he might have suppressed his powers in a bid to live a normal life but thinks that would have been the wrong thing to do. Why? Because whilst there's people out there with way bigger problems than a man finding a purpose behind the powers that he has.
So instead of sitting around and wondering what it would be like to live a normal life or why he's here, he just gets on with using those powers for good and saving people. In another issue by Johns, we find out that Jonathan Kent conveyed that message to him. That he needs to be out there saving people and doing it with the joy of knowing people appreciate it. Not whether they need it or not, but because they're grateful to him.
Even in Mark Waid's Birthright when Clark is a young journalist traveling the world, he saves people and does it willingly. Sure, he has pangs of guilt knowing that he's alone in this quest, but he does it anyway. Why? Because that's the powers given to him. They're a gift. And the purpose behind them is clear. Guide humanity by embodying their best qualities.
Was that evident in this film? Not really. Even at the end of Batman Begins you sense that Gotham is grateful that there's this guy out there saving people and having the will to inspire them into being better. Not here. Here those ideals are sacrificed for 'realism' in crashing alien ships and beating opponents through buildings. It's not Superman. It's just not.
In closing, you and others have harped on about 'common sense' or 'realism' means that he has to sacrifice some for the purpose of saving Earth and he can't waste time stopping a building from falling since he has to destroy the Black Zero/World Engine/Genesis Chamber/Tesseract/Death Star, but then why does Jor-El say 'You can save them, you can save all of them'? Does he mean, go forth and create wanton destruction whilst flying Zod through buildings and lay waste to an already suffering city? Nope. It's because the film isn't sure WHAT it wants to do.
Moreover, that question you asked, DorkyFresh. That's the whole point. Who will stop him? Superman will. But that doesn't mean that an assumption should be made of Superman going 'well **** the innocents, I've got a megalomaniac to kill'. Further to that, the Army got all those bloody planes to fly in and do their thing, didn't it have any ground detachments that could go in and provide support for individuals trying to escape buildings etc? Firefighters and police officers who could come in and support an evacuation of the affected districts?
You wanna go for realism? Show an equally active humanity. That's realism. Don't portray them as a group of helpless monkeys who just run from a doomsday device or stand there looking shocked as a gravitational anomaly eats them up. It's ****ing stupid. It goes for scale but forgets the minutiae like every other blockbuster and then still tries to ram home philosophical topics and ideals concerning the saving of humanity as a species.
It's got an artistic and quasi-dramatic feel to the relationship between Clark and his two sets of parents, but then it throws all that out the window in the favour of cheap thrills through explosions. Yeah. No. But I guess all this will be tackled in the sequel! For the first hour or so anyway. Then it will give way to some doomsday device designed by Luthor/Brainiac/Darkseid that requires explosions and buildings to be destroyed for the remainder of the film.
. What else is there to say? She played strong and vulnerable off each other simultaneously in a way I've not really seen before. Never really got it from Margot. She always felt like a caricature to me. Frankly, I liked Teri Hatcher best until now.
