MAN OF STEEL SPOILER THREAD

[DerickA]

So a bad guy loses and takes the last few minutes to kill everybody? That's never been in a movie.

[Wolfe]

I agree, having the bad guy kill a million people in the last ten minutes of a movie without it being allowed to matter is fantastic.

[DerickA]

So any time a bad guy detonates a bomb at the last second after the hero saves the day, it has to matter? Villains are allowed to go "fuck you".

[Wolfe]

So any time a bad guy detonates a bomb at the last second after the hero saves the day, it has to matter? Villains are allowed to go "fuck you".

Does that happen that often in movies? At that scale of death, most last-ditch villain schemes would be foiled before they happened. To have him succeed in killing that many people and then ending the movie without allowing it to mean anything came off tasteless and nihilistic. And nihilism isn't something STAR TREK in particular wears well.

[nate.3.0]

Guess I don't have to see ST:ID now...

[sean]

I guess I just associate deliberately crashing large vehicles into major cities with the intention of killing a ton of people with terrorism. Not sure why.

So when the aliens in War of the Worlds attack and the movie is obviously evoking 9/11, that makes the aliens terrorists?

I think they should keep the Star Trek movies off earth in general, but the ship crashing into a city just seemed, to me, like a build off that time the ship crashed into grassland in Generations, and that time the ship crashed in Search For Spock.  But it is definitely weird that they would have a scene like that after evoking 9/11 conspiracy theories so much in the first half, definitely a strange dissonance there.

Also, let us not forget that this is Star Trek, where people who know that a ship is crashing into San Francisco can beam immediately to Los Angeles, or the moon, or whatever.  So it may not be that the casualties didn't matter, there should not have been a significant number.

[DerickA]

Has there been a superhero franchise where a villain HASN'T tried to bomb the shit out of everyone or kill a random at the last second?

[sean]

The Spider-Man villains don't.  doc Ock almost does but then does the opposite instead.

[Wolfe]

Has there been a superhero franchise where a villain HASN'T tried to bomb the shit out of everyone or kill a random at the last second?

Tried, sure. Any maybe they kill someone or a couple of people. Fake Khan killed half a city.

Sorry, Nate.

[DerickA]

I still don't understand why a villain killing people upsets you so.

[Wolfe]

A villain kills millions of people at the buzzer without the movie making it a big deal and you don't see why that might stick in a craw? It was meaningless disaster porn as an afterthought. At least when they blew up Vulcan, they allowed that to have an emotional impact. But Kirk did say "Never forget the events of Stardate 000911" for two seconds at the end, so I guess that was sufficient.

[sean]

I don't age, but I get it.  It is definitely a weird side effect of the insistence that "photo realism" is always desirable.

[Wolfe]

I like how sean just tossed in the revelation that he doesn't age.

[Hawkboy]

I thought his name sounded familiar, but I always thought it was "Swan".