1) Too much collateral damage. That just means that there were a lot of buildings being destroyed, to the point where people got weary of it. You don't need long-winded explanations about aliens and the resulting catastrophe that would ensue. Duh. But there was SO MUCH of it that people noticed that the sequences dragged on, and remarked that there didn't need to be so much. It is the most collateral damage I've seen in a movie outside of an end of the world movie. So cram those long-winded explanations down the crap hole. This criticism doesn't even have anything to do with motivations or Superman or Zod, it has to do with god damn editing issues. Jesus christ.
I'm not really sure why you think anything I said was supposed to be a response to there being "too much" collateral damage. That's pretty clearly a matter of taste. Extremely physically powerful and technologically advanced aliens invading our planet and trying to kill off
every living human being is pretty smurfing close to an "end of the world" scenario, though, so I'm not sure why anyone
wouldn't expect a lot of people to die in such a case. If anything, the past films that depicted such scenarios
without lots of people dying are probably being a bit optimistic about how well humanity would actually fare.
2) Regarding Superman himself's apparent lack of initiative in helping people out during the trout storm that happened in Metropolis. So you have all these excuses about how Superman is so inexperienced and did you notice that he was being punched into builidings and how can we expect so much of him when he's being pummeled and losing a fight and also maybe he is trying and it's just not super clear and and and.
You complained about Superman "seemingly being indifferent to the deaths of anyone aside from a speaking role character". My point is that your assumption that he is indifferent is not warranted by the actual film.
So you're delving into all these psychological and physical issues when that's not even what we're talking about. We're talking about freakin' FILIMMAKING DECISIONS. They could have done a tiny little extra dialogue, or a few extra close up reaction shots from Superman, or even just a 2 second action shot to help make this particular criticism go away. People aren't questioning Superman's motives or his psyche, they're questioning the filmmaking. I mean, god. Is this not clear? This is the crux of why I think your arugments are dumb, because they're UNNECESSARY
There
was dialogue addressing this, as already addressed in the quoted text I posted above. Almost at the very beginning of the fighting, as mentioned at the end of the second paragraph, Clark tells everyone to stay inside or get the hell out of the way. After that point the pace of the fighting has picked up far too much for him issuing any further warnings to be plausible. I mean, they could have thrown in him trying to issue further warnings to people, but (1) the intended recipients probably wouldn't have heard them in time to get out of the way, due to the pace of the combat and Clark being thrown around so much, and (2) you probably wouldn't have been able to hear them over the fighting anyway.
3) Superman only saving Lois during the trout storm. Your answer to this particular criticism I made is basically, "WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? VULCANS?" Can you really not see how ludicrous it is? Now we have to shoe-horn in explanations about how Superman had just had a traumatic experience, and you can't blame him and he just wants to feel his emotions? How about this for an explanation: Lois needed a way to get from Point A (plane) to Point B (ground) and Superman was the best way to do this. But in doing so, it made it seem like Superman only really cared to save Lois and not the other people simultaneously dying. And secondly, they hadn't kissed at this point yet and time was running out so they decided to do it then. Which resulted in a kiss happening after a near genocide, in the presence of dead/wounded/dying/etc.
First of all, Superman
doesn't only save Lois; there's also the man he saves from falling to his death after the big Kryptonian destroys his helicopter. Again, discussed above in the long quoted text that you obviously didn't read very carefully or at all.
Secondly, you apparently want to disregard Watsonian interpretations as much as possible for extremely cynical Doylism, to the point where you repeatedly outright dismiss Watsonian interpretations as "ludicrous" and "dumb" (if memory serves, you did it in the Star Trek thread too, even though the Watsonian interpretations turned out to be correct). And no, that isn't the entirety of my argument: the more important point is that for the overwhelming majority of the action he
couldn't have saved anyone.
You're basically criticising the depiction of a character spending roughly thirty seconds indulging his emotions after surviving a battle to the death as though that is at all unrealistic. What if he stopped thirty seconds to
catch his breath? Would that also have been Superman not giving a trout about saving others?
The simple fact is that, after surviving a battle to the death, the last thing
anyone is going to be doing is thinking rationally.
And by the way, I have a pretty obvious Doylist explanation for why the film is the way it is, as well: they thought Superman being overmatched and unable to save people during the heat of combat, as well as being too drained after the fight to think about immediately rushing back to Metropolis to save people, would be obvious and didn't want to insult the viewers' intelligence.
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Originally Posted by Shiny
