By The conclusion of Man of Steel was a bit off putting for many people as Superman is basically responsible for the deaths of thousands without blinking an eye until suddenly he cares for a random family in front of him. It’s bad character development, it’s bad plotting and it basically made Superman not Superman. Thanks to the film premiering in Japan recently Snyder has been able to attempt to defend the ending of his film.
“I wanted the movie to have a mythological feeling,” the director told The Japan Times in an interview (via THR). “In ancient mythology, mass deaths are used to symbolize disasters. In other countries like Greece and Japan, myths were recounted through the generations, partly to answer unanswerable questions about death and violence. In America, we don’t have that legacy of ancient mythology. Superman… is probably the closest we get. It’s a way of recounting the myth.”
*cough* bullshit *cough* That’s like some English-101 student’s first crack at explaining The Sound and the Fury. Ranting follows.
(via IGN)
Before the mini-rant starts I want to say that Snyder’s action was awesome to watch. Awesome enough that I thought it made the movie enjoyable. No ding on his ability to annihilate an entire city. It’s just that he annihilated the character as well.
This little, and suspect, attempt at calling the massive destruction an attempt to create myth is utter crap. Here’s what actually happened: Snyder wanted action and WB/DC wanted to show they could be epic like Marvel did with The Avengers. However, they just screwed it all up by forgetting the character they were telling the story about and ignoring context for more destruction. Now Snyder has to defend his callous disregard for both human life and logical plot points by making something up about mass deaths being mythic. Superman is already an American myth and part of that myth is that he’s all about saving people.
If you’re trying to make something mythic you stick to its themes and ideals because that’s what myths are for. We’re supposed to learn from myths about how we should live life. By turning Superman into a giant wrecking ball he’s actually destroying the myth, not making it better. Of course that assumes he was intentionally trying to make the film mythic in the first place, which is clearly not the case since the rest of the story line doesn’t build the myth either, but instead steers Superman away from myth in it’s attempt to have grittiness. The only aspect even remotely trending towards myth is the lines taken from the original Superman movie, where Superman might have been played more comically, but maintained the mythic stature because of it.
In short, Snyder is retreating behind a bunch of “smart talk” in order to excuse the ending of a film that people are realizing didn’t make any sense and worse lost the character of the very myth he claimed to be attempting to create.
