Hmm, coming from someone who didn't hate the movie (but was nonetheless irritated at Supes killing a dude, especially with how contrived the situation was) I was thinking that it's actually pretty hard to make Superman interesting.
I thought that for a long time. My view now is that he's not inherently any more difficult to write than any other superhero; there are a lot of shitty Superman stories, but there are a lot of shitty Batman stories and Spider-Man stories and X-Men stories and Green Lantern stories and 90% of everything is crap.
Superman BECOMES difficult to write when you declare the superhero genre to be a No Fun Zone. When you try to turn every fucking character into Batman. (Barry Allen appeared on Arrow a couple of weeks ago and my wife is already sick of hearing the "Why does every superhero need to have Batman's origin story?" rant.)
There's a fucking treasure trove of absolutely wonderful Superman stories. Siegel and Shuster created him as, essentially, FDR with super-strength, trapping corrupt businessmen in their own unsafe mines and telling central American generals to duke it out among themselves instead of making their armies kill each other for no reason. Nobody has the balls to write an explicitly political Superman anymore, except Grant Morrison, who got bored with it halfway through the second issue and started meandering into the crazy Silver Age stuff instead.
And that stuff is ALSO wonderful. The Binder era, the transformations of Jimmy Olsen, Krypto and Supergirl and Kandor and that straight-up fucking CRAZY shit with Super-Horse and Superman shooting a tiny Superman out of his hand.
If you're going to make a movie about Superman being a dick, why can't it be a comedy?
The movie approached Superdickery in two places, and it wasn't very much fun in either one. There's the bit where he wrecks the dude's truck, which is played for laughs but really just comes across as passive-aggressive and douchey. And then there's the bit at the end where he wrecks the satellite, which they don't even TRY to play for laughs, just douchiness.
The thing is, you have to maintain Superman's bright, optimistic outlook while at the same time giving him problems that require him to grow as a character. If everything always works out for the best because Superman can do anything, he's stagnant. (Yes, I know comic books are mostly stagnant. But even they have character growth at a glacial pace. Until they get rebooted for the nth time.)
I've mentioned before that you can really trace the stagnation of superhero comics back to National nixing The K-Metal from Krypton. It was a story Siegel and Shuster pitched which introduced a precursor to Kryptonite, which, in addition to taking away Superman's powers, also gave ordinary people powers. (A scenario which would be revisited in Smallville, except more boring and mopey.) Lois finds out Superman's secret, gains superpowers, and joins him as a partner -- no reset button at the end; this was going to be the new status quo. National decided that fucking with the formula was too risky, so they put the kibosh on the story, and I think you can trace a lot of what's wrong with superhero comics back to that single moment.
I am so fucking sick of seeing New York and New York-alikes being blown up that it actually really negatively impacted The Avengers for me.
Chris Sims did a piece awhile back contrasting Avengers with Dark Knight and noting that, while Dark Knight is a hard slog and Avengers is a lot more fun to watch, Dark Knight is the more optimistic movie. The Avengers win by beating and killing a bunch of dudes, while Batman wins by holding the line until the people on those boats can prove that even the worst of us are fundamentally decent.
(Holy shit. I just realized that the climax of The Dark Knight is pretty much the same as the climax of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.)
MoS had neither Avengers' levity nor Dark Knight's optimism. It's like if, I dunno, Batman had killed Harvey Dent on purpose and told Morgan Freeman fuck off, I'll spy on whoever I want and they should just trust me.
Amy Adams was an amazing Lois?
She really was pretty great. Not the spunky Lois I'm used to (Delany is still my definitive version, Durance was one of the best things about Smallville, and then you've got your Margot Kidder, Teri Hatcher and, briefly and recently, Stana Katic), but she really nailed what the character is all about -- her tenacity, her courage, her intelligence, her strength of character.
There were a couple of things I liked about the movie. Switching things up so that Lois figures out Clark Kent is Superman before she ever meets him is one of them.
Because it shows Superman not as someone that doesn't inherently know how to do the right thing even if he wants to, and tries to do the best he can based on the conflicting advice of figures he respects and his own inner moral compass?
Superman trying to figure out his place in the world is a perfectly excellent premise for a story, and all the Birthrighty bits where he's just living like a nomad, traveling the world and righting wrongs are really the high point of the movie.
But a Jonathan Kent telling him he should have let a busload of kids die just flat-out fucking sucks. This is one of those cases where everything that people got concerned about in the trailer turned out to be absolutely, 100% the things that were wrong with the final product.
I mean, I can understand having Jonathan be concerned about Clark outing himself. But it could have been done COMPETENTLY.
That conversation shouldn't have been "I dunno, maybe you should have let those kids die." It should have been "You could have found another way." THAT could have been the lesson Jonathan taught his son. And then Clark finds a way to save him from the tornado without revealing his identity (well-timed burst of super-breath). And then he finds a way to stop Zod without killing him (hands over his eyes).
Because that's the fundamental rule of aspirational children's fiction: when presented with an impossible dilemma, the hero finds a way to do the impossible, finds a way out. That's the difference between Doctor Who and Torchwood -- the Doctor always finds another way, while Torchwood...well, Torchwood makes up stupid, ridiculously contrived children-in-peril scenarios that force its characters into doing horrible things and passing it off as something mature and edgy.
tl;dr the one with Richard Pryor was better.
