MARK WAID Is Wrong Wrong Wrong In His MAN OF STEEL Review

By all audience accounts, Zack Snyder’s MAN OF STEEL was one of the best summer movies of the past five years, but as you’d expect, a few Superman fanatics disagree. Among this group of semi-snobby purists is Mark Waid, the man responsible for Superman Birth Right and Kingdom Come (both of which are terrific Supes stories). And while I should admit that everyone here at UTF adores Mr. Waid… in my humble opinion, he’s written a pretty petty review. I’ll let you read the best bits of it below, and then I’ll swing back with my thoughts.

Be wary, spoilers await…

“And then we got to The Battle of Metropolis, and I truly, genuinely started to feel nauseous at all the Disaster Porn. Minute after minute after endless minute of Some Giant Machine laying so much waste to Metropolis that it’s inconceivable that we weren’t watching millions of people die in every single shot. And what’s Superman doing while all this is going on? He’s halfway around the world, fighting an identical machine but with no one around to be directly threatened, so it’s only slightly less noticeable that thousands of innocents per second are dying gruesomely on his watch. Seriously, back in Metropolis, entire skyscrapers are toppling in slo-mo and the city is a smoking, gray ruin for miles in every direction, it’s Hiroshima, and Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich are somewhere muttering `Too far, man, too far’…but, you know, Superman buys the humans enough time to sacrifice many, many of their own lives to bomb the Giant Machine themselves and even makes it back to Metropolis in time to catch Lois from falling (again), so…yay?”

Disaster Porn? Is that how we’re going to describe this entire scenario? So… you’re telling me a battle between Superman, the most powerful character in the DC Cinematic Universe, and 6 other equally mighty villains (who are hell bent on terraforming Earth, which incidentally results in the extinction of humanity) would be a clean and sober encounter? No… there’d be bloodshed, mayhem, and civilian casualties. And let’s not harp on about the source material. “Oh, the comic books don’t flaunt destruction. That’s not what Superman’s about, man”

Here’s some Destruction Porn from one of the most iconic Superman tales

Oh hell yes it is. Superman goes round for round with some of the most terrifying baddies in existence, often in the heart of Metropolis… does no one remember Doomsday?

Waid wrote this series… looks like he’s guilty of peddling Disaster Porn!

How about Waid’s own Kingdom Come? Admittedly, the greater breadth of stories are focused on the traditional “truth, justice, and the American way”, but long time comic readers have also witnessed their fair share of carnage. So when Zack Snyder is gifted the keys to the kingdom, and allowed to bring breath to a silver screen Superman romp, why would he not capture this mayhem on camera? Why would you expect a movie like this, so desperately drenched in “alien invasion” tropes, to abstain from depicting human kind on the threshold of annihilation.

Make no mistake, that’s a crucial part of the plot: the impending doom of humanity (and the eventual rise of a hero). It is a messianic tale, after all. As the audience, we witness humanity confronted by an insanely powerful evil in the form of Zod and his accolytes, and we’re well aware that there’s only one force that could defeat them. And it’s through Superman, who’s struggling to embrace the ideals of 1) Pa Kent 2) Jor El 3) Utilitarianism (to an extent), that the world is saved.

Oh, and there’s one really basic fact that Waid neglected: Superman saved more lives by destroying the machine and directly confronting Zod than by any other action.  The goateed General transforms into a flat out  genocidal nihilist at the film’s end… and there’s not much Supes can do about that (besides snapping a neck or two). I discuss all of this in more depth below, but first, I want you to read this next excerpt from Waid’s review.

Superman wins by killing Zod. By snapping his neck. And as this moment was building, as Zod was out of control and Superman was (for the first time since the fishing boat 90 minutes ago) struggling to actually save innocent victims instead of casually catching them in mid-plummet, some crazy guy in front of us was muttering “Don’t do it…don’t do it…DON’T DO IT…” and then Superman snapped Zod’s neck and that guy stood up and said in a very loud voice, “THAT’S IT, YOU LOST ME, I’M OUT,” and his girlfriend had to literally pull him back into his seat and keep him from walking out and that crazy guy was me. That crazy guy was me, and I barely even remember doing that, I had to be told afterward that I’d done that, that’s how caught up in betrayal I felt. And after the neck-snapping, even though I stuck it out, I didn’t give a damn about the rest of the movie.

So… what were you saying about Superman not killing folks?

As the credits rolled, I told myself I was upset because Superman doesn’t kill. Full-stop, Superman doesn’t kill. But sitting there, I broke it down some more in my head because I sensed there was more to it since Superman clearly regretted killing Zod. I had to grant that the filmmakers at least went way out of their way to put Superman in a position suggesting (but hardly conclusively proving) he had no choice (and I did love Superman’s immediate-aftermath reaction to what he’d done). I granted that they’d at least tried to present Superman with an impossible choice and, on a purely rational level, and if this had been a movie about a guy named Ultraguy, I might even have bought what he did. But after I processed all that, I realized that it wasn’t so much my uncompromising vision of Superman that made this a total-fail moment for me; it was the failed lead-up TO the moment. As Superman’s having his final one-on-one battle with Zod, show me that he’s going out of his way to save people from getting caught in the middle. SHOW ME that trying to simultaneously protect humans and beat Zod is achingly, achingly costing Superman the fight. Build to that moment of the hard choice…show me, without doubt, that Superman has no other out and do a better job of convincing me that it’s a hard decision to make, and maybe I’ll give it to you. But even if I do? It’s not a victory. Not this sad, soul-darkening, utterly sans-catharsis “triumph” that doesn’t even feel like a win so much as a stop-loss. Two and a half hours, and I never once got the sense that Superman really achieved or earned anything.

Now, concerning the death of Zod… I can partially sympathize with that point. I don’t fully understand the “Jump up in my seat and ruin the entire movie for a packed house of audience members who really enjoy the flick” reaction that Waid described in his review, but transforming Superman into a murderer is some controversial stuff. Of course, Zack Snyder tried to perfectly capture Superman’s reasoning onscreen, and I think he succeeded. When I left the theatre, I didn’t struggle to pinpoint reasons for Superman’s first kill. As I’ve said previously, the crazy Kryptonian general was pretty damn adamant about his intentions: now that his sole reason for living was gone, he was going to torture and kill every inhabitant on Earth. That doesn’t leave many recourses for Superman, does it? He couldn’t have tossed him into the Phantom Zone at this point, since he already used that piece of Deus Ex Machina on the other meanie Kryptonians. And no Earthly bounds could contain Zod, at least none that were readily available.

Superman was HEROIC in killing Zod. And for dedicating himself to one game plan, instead of vacillating between this or that as more innocents died in the mayhem (as so many onscreen superheroes do… Spider-Man, I’m looking at you). After the whole nasty affair, KalEl’s expression of utter disgust revealed the personal cost of this action, and provided perfect origin to the classic Superman rule: the Big Dude doesn’t kill.

He’s pretty distraught on account of his murdering, and such

I gotta say, Mark Waid… I love your work, but you’re dead wrong about Man of Steel. It’s a great Superman flick. If you want to see a mature, non-murdering, experienced Blue Boyscout on the big screen, then you’ll have to wait until MAN OF STEEL 2.

What did you guys think?  Am I magnificently full of it?  Or is there some truth to my fat, bearded musings?

SOURCE: Thrillbent