By I’m probably the only person on staff who outright hates Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, which Matt enjoyed but also found problematic as a Superman movie. To me, Man of Steel is a film so joyless and unheroic that it makes Superman Returns seem Capraesque by comparison.
Some of my issues with the film come from its destruction porn finale, in which Superman is so busy throwing Zod through buildings that he doesn’t bother to consider the wanton collateral damage. How bad does it get? Buzzfeed asked Watson Technical Consulting to estimate the scope of destruction in Metropolis, and the numbers are mind-boggling:
- 129,000 people confirmed dead
- 250,000 people missing and possibly dead
- 1 million people injured
- $750 billion in physical damage
- $2 trillion in overall impact
By comparison, 9/11 caused $55 billion in physical damage and The Avengers would have resulted in around $160 billion in physical damage. For a film trying to root itself in realism, this staggering amount of human tragedy strangely isn’t addressed at all. Check out the Buzzfeed graphic about Metropolis damage in the gallery.
[via Buzzfeed]