This is subjective. As you say those fight scenes had arcs, I say MOS's had one too:Started with zod announcing his new found purpose, ended with his logical resolution to that purpose(nothing left to life for).
That's not an arc. An arc involves escalation. It involves rising and falling tension. It involves changes in the conflict. Their fight scene had one steady tone and one steady pace the whole way through until the very end.
Raising tension: the situation became increasingly more and more dire, there is a Zod's use of his powers is becoming equal to if not greater than the hero. Heat vision, flight...a declaration of fighting experience..etc.
Except the film did not demonstrate that the fight was becoming more desperate to the hero. Superman and Zod both still went through the fight relatively unharmed and on equal footing.
As for damage, superman was visibly hurt throughout the film. Just cause he gets up and walks away doesn't change that.
Yes it does. There's no sign that the fights are taking any kind of toll on him. There's no real sense that he might lose.
Superman is not invincible, as you keep implying, he can be killed just as zod can. This much at least should be clear to you know.
He's portrayed as invincible. There's no sign that he gets wounded. There's no sign that Zod's blows are hurting him at all or that his blows are hurting Zod. They just bounce each other back and forth.
I don't think I'm projecting, I just think you aren't putting all the pieces together in the same way. You say things like indestructible people, I see things like people who can hurt each other on a different scale than we're used to. Like I said, there is a scene where superman is out cold, two of them and due directly to being hit by his peers.
And then he gets back up and he's fine, no worse for the wear.
Like I said, I saw and felt plenty of escalation. With zod becoming increasingly more formidable(story telling), and the city consistently present. these people provide the greater sense of vulnerability on the protagonists side, in a way a desert/space fight simply can't. You saw what you saw I suppose.
What people? People we never meet or are given a reason to care about?
Not once does Superman show concern for the people of Metropolis during that fight, not until the very end. We don't even SEE any civilians at all during the fight until the very end. Having civilians and Superman attempting to save them and Zod attacking them directly would have generated that kind of pathos and those kids of stakes. In the fight scene we got the film completely ignores the realities of civilians and civilian casualties until the very end, so how is that supposed to raise the stakes of the fight?
I just think if you sit down and really digest what happened over the course of that fight, you wouldn't simply keep throwing around this punching each other hyperbole.
I have, and yet I still do. Maybe it's because there isn't that much there besides what we bring to it.
Oh wait, I stand corrected, superman did have to save one group of people mid fight........in the train station scene
It's not mid fight. It's at the very end of the fight. I'm saying that the fight could have benefited from this throughout it's run. Sticking it on the end doesn't making everything that came before it retroactively compelling.
You gotta stop ignoring this.
I'm not ignoring this. I have never ignored this. Please stop saying that I'm ignoring this. In what way am I ignoring this? My whole point has always been that there's a long stretch where stuff like that is noticeably absent.
Superman got his ass kicked in smallville, if it hadn't been for the fact that they may have needed him alive who knows what would have happened. Fortunately when Zod fought him at the end it was for keeps and he made that clear. Still, I don't get why adding saving faceless victims improves a superman fight wheres such a thing isn't needed for batman. People say the Smallville fight needed more lifesaving(than it already had) too. Because....that's what a superman fight needs to make people happier?
Partly yes, and I don't see how that's not a valid complaint.
But the bigger reason is that it would have added a lot more tension and raised the stakes.
You say that you don't get how saving faceless people improves a Superman fight, and yet you say that the desperation and tension of the fight escalates because Zod is a threat to civilians
who we never see until the tail end. Adding that element would have added a face and a humanity to the tension.
And the reason it's different for Batman is because
Batman and Superman are different characters and
Bane and Zod are different characters and
the contexts are different. Genre movies aren't these modular things where you can swap elements in and out between two films and everything works out the same, every story requires a different approach based on it's characters and the structure of the narrative and the world the story takes place in.
The reason Batman saving civilians during his fight with Bane is is unnecessary because the scale of their fight is different and the nature of his opponent is different. They're not flying around at high speed, they can't lift superhuman weights and they don't have lightening fast reflexes. They're two dudes punching each other during a gang brawl outside of city hall. They're ability to move around and do things is limited by their very nature. Also, during that fight, Bane only poses a direct physical threat to Batman. Sure, he's the leader of the League of Shadows and his goons are ****ing stuff up, but in that moment he personally can only really hurt Batman. The whole notion of Zod as a threat is that he, personally, as an individual, can exterminate the population of Metropolis if Superman doesn't stop him. Actually involving the population of Metropolis in that conflict throughout the fight makes that threat tangible.
Nothing else going for it
All substance phoned in
Only actual focus was self indulgent nonsense.
All things I would love to argue the opposite for but its' been done to death. I will just point out that those three criticisms are probably far more appropriate to Avengers, and even if you say avengers succeeded in those, i would ask by how much more...
I'd say it succeeded by quite a bit more.
The dark knight had meat in other scenes,but not that moment. Just like MOS had meat in other scenes(see superman killing zod in that same fight), just not in that moment. It was a glorifed car sequences with a pointless explosion count and horrible editing, a drive though a mall and funky physics defying motorcycle maneuvers. It's almost as bad as the tank on the rooftops scene(cringe) Indulgent but forgiven.
The batpot deployment is added to look cool. Thank god it wasn't in a snyder movie or people might not have enjoyed it but rather spent their time moaning at it's inclusion.
It's a pretty cheap rhetorical tactic to imply that people only dislike a director you like because of an irrational bias. I mean, that doesn't even make a whole lot of sense. Who dislikes a director for
absolutely no reason?
As for this:
The dark knight had meat in other scenes,but not that moment. Just like MOS had meat in other scenes(see superman killing zod in that same fight), just not in that moment.
I gotta disagree man. In what way was Superman killing Zod meat? What I mean is, what purpose did it serve? How did it relate to what the story was about? How did it relate to anything? What of the movie's themes did it actually convey? What did it say and what was it saying things about? How did it effect the rest of the film? How did it change Superman as a person and how did that change carry through with the rest of the film? This all boils down to two questions, really:
What was the point of it?
What did
you actually get out of it?
And that leads me to ask another question, the big question that I ask of every work of fiction I see:
What was this movie
about? And try to answer that question without naming any characters or describing the plot. What was this movie about
thematically? And how did it reflect that in every scene?
I don't think Man of Steel has any meat. I think it has a lot of serious scenes where people are conflicted and upset, but I don't think any of them really say anything about anything and I don't think they have a cohesive point.
t: I will now imagine that whenever I revisit that scene.
