Man of Steel Trailer #3

[Stark]

Change isn't bad just because it exists and anyone who thinks so is an idiot. As you can see right here, people are interested in this movie SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE it isn't yet another soulless rehash of a boring-ass story nobody likes - they're CHANGING it.

That superman is shown for a few moments not wearing a corporate brand (as mocked by Mystery Men a decade ago) is not a minus for most people, and 'most people' are the market, not small-minded obsessive fat people.

[jollyreaper]

And if you would have read what I wrote, you would have seen the following:

All that having been said, there does seem to be hints in the trailer that they might have found an interesting Superman story to tell. Watchmen was excellent, 300 not so much. If the movie delivers, who cares about the costume? I was pretty skeptical about the Ledger look for the Joker when the first promo shots were leaked. I remained skeptical after the first trailers. The performance convinced me. He made it work. The same might happen for Dingy Superman.

[Stark]

You also said you didn't understand why people change the 'iconic'. This attitude - that tradition is a reason to do something - is stupid. I don't care about your waffling paragraph where you hedge bets; that this movie changes something 'iconic' is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF THE APPEAL for many people.

If you honestly think the presence or not of a stupid symbol on a cape for maybe 3 seconds is relevant to your enjoyment of a film, you're stupid. This is inescapable. Batman is exhibit 1-200 for this.

[jollyreaper]

No, what you just said is stupid. People aren't sitting around saying "Well, I wasn't really interested in seeing this film but ZOMG Superman doesn't look like Superman anymore! Now I'm totally interested." Some people might be interested in seeing hints that they'll do something with the story other than a formulaic superhero movie. But formulaic does sell so I won't discount the appeal.

Tradition isn't stupid in and of itself. I consider it more of a neutral; how it is employed determines whether it is smart or dumb.

There's art in figuring out why something works. It's trendy to invoke deconstruction and reconstruction but it's part of the process of figuring out what makes a story tick. It's artless to throw in something because it's expected but it's artful to put it there because it's necessary. It takes keen judgment to tell the difference.

And for the record I can't remember whether or not the traditional costume had the symbol on the cape or not. I never brought it up.

[Lord Relvenous]

I would white your post, but I'd rather it not get posted twice as the board only has so much capacity for bullshit

Don't try to sell this as art or some deep contemplation of what makes Superman who he is. You flat out said you didn't like the new costume because it wasn't the costume of the 80's. "This isn't what I liked before, therefore bad." It's a hilariously transparent stance to take, no matter how you try to sell it. Your very first paragraph in your first post states it outright.

Also, have you considered that maybe the darker tones of the costumes of the two recent movies are thematic choices on the part of the director to represent that Superman isn't as simple and pure as his old incarnations? Superman Returns featured a Superman returning to a world and woman he had left, dealing with loss, and then learning of a son. Clark in Man of Steel hides his nature and struggles with his place in the world. A darker tone of costume fits their stories. But of course because its not bright primary colors like Reeves, its a bad change.

[Stark]

That's right JR; a bunch of people literally saying 'wow that looks different I like it' and then the board cretin showing up and crying because in a single brief shot there was no Superman logo (a logo he doubtless uses to promote his media empire I guess). That this is totally appeal to tradition and the inability of nerds to learn is shown by the way it totally ignores that the changes to the story may be such that Superman SIMPLY DOES NOT CARE, because his values, goals and beliefs are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT to 'regular' boring old Superman.

That it is typical SDN-style 'invent entire movie in your mind based on trailer and then hate your made-up version' because it seems quite possible those shots are related to those where he journeys to the fortress as an adult and thus could be one of the first times he even wears it is the big joke for me. Why the fuck would there be a symbol for a name he doesn't have on his fucking cape in this situation?

WHO CARES WAAAAAH THEY CHANGED IT WAAAAAH NEED MY SECURITY BLANKET WAAAAAH

[Zablorg]

Arguably you could justify the existence of the symbol on the cape as serving the function of the front one, but on the back! Maximum hope market exposure for forward and behind demographics!

i should stress that this doesn't change the fact that the S on the back of the cape is awful so

[Stark]

Maybe Russell Crowe put a range of decals in the pod, for names like 'Jesus' and 'Darth Vader' and shit but he went with 'Snake Man' instead.

[Zablorg]

man superman has all sorts of goofy shit in the fortress of solitude i won't believe he doesn't have a kryptonian textile workshop

[Stark]

In uh, Kingdom Come (I am reliably informed the only Superman story that isn't terrible) he has like a space robot and all this other crap. And I mean, Batman is insane and how could Alfred move a robot dinosaur anyway, but Superman has no excuse for hoarding so much crap.

I mean KRYPTONIAN WAR ROBOT what the fuck?!

Possibly used in the war in this movie that was last seen in the Avengers!

[Zablorg]

well according to wikipedia the fortress in this is apparently a fucked up scout ship Russell Crowe sent ages back OH NO HOW WILL I COPE WITH THE CHANGE OF THIS ICONIC ELEMENT

so there's talk that if Man of Steel works out DC's obviously going to try to desperately catch up to Marvel's shared universe strategy

anyway sometimes i fantasize about DC attempting to make a shared universe

but not just any shared universe will do, no

a SILVER AGE universe



SUPERMAN: EVIL FACTORY coming june 2017

[Stark]

Hopefully they can learn from Marvel's 'movies that don't suck' strategy too; although if this one is as interesting as it looks I'm not sure it'll have the same knock-on effect as the Marvel one.

[Zablorg]

yeah frankly i don't see it working out i mean Marvel's strategy grew relatively organically after Iron Man's success

a forced approach will just kind of look sad in comparison

and anyway WB has not shown any capacity to make good DC movies beyond the Batman series which frankly i think was a fluke

[Stark]

Imagine if this is really tonally different and has a Superman who isn't some ridiculous Uncle Sam figure of absurd stupidity.

How would this actually help them build up to JUSTICE LEAGUE? Messiah needs massively less powerful friends because he just likes company! Captain Marvel just didn't feel like fighting Zod!

I guess they could go literal Jesus and play the meta games they did in the 90s where villains tried to go as far as they could without appearing on Superman's radar because of the instant fail that would result... but I don't see this having the mass appeal of SQUAD OF AMERICANS PUNCH FOREIGNERS.

[Zablorg]

Yeah, for all that they want to make a Justice League they're not really playing the individual characters in the right way for that. I mean, the only popular Justice League stuff was the cartoon, and that reduced Superman's power to "float and punch pretty hard woah" so as not to make everyone instantly redundant

If anything could work for these people, I think a Justice League Unlimited kind of direction would: in the cartoon they essentially had a huge, organized, and ultimately intimidating superhero bureaucracy which was never really accountable to anyone, and the story took deliberate advantage of this, which was nice because it was the natural direction for the story to go (Watchmen themes and all that). I think this would effectively utilize the over-all tonal differences between Marvel and DC, where the DC characters are generally more god-like and scary.

[Stark]

The issue this faces however is that the movie world will diverge more and more, rather than remaining basically recognisable right down to the super rich killing foreigners. I think a big draw is that sense of normalness in super stuff, and a twisted myth world bestrode by titans wouldn't have that.

[weemadando]

Superman is a dead boring hero because his powers are so overwhelming and his weakness is so trite.

But as a man, he is interesting. When writers go to work on him as a character and let the story turn slightly philosophical and into questions of morality, rights and privilege is when Superman becomes interesting. And there's only a few arcs where they've done that.

[Borgholio]

Didn't see anybody commenting on some other obvious changes to the Superman canon. First, Krypton didn't simply explode...it looks like it was destroyed in a war. Second, it seemed a fair number of those Kryptonian war machines made it to Earth...possibly with pilots and crew? If that's the case, we're talking way more than just a handful of surviving Kryptonians. Could be many many more...

[TOSDOC]

Is the trailer music itself representative of Zimmer's score? It sounds like something from Two Steps From Hell, but I've been searching all over and can't find evidence of either.

[Stark]

I think the clear implication is that Zod destroyed Krypton in an Avengers Ending.

[FaxModem1]

I will be wanting to see this, but why are the film's colors muted? It looks a bit lifeless in that way when we're not looking at the devastation of Krypton.

[Stark]

That sort of thing is what NUA was talking about, I think. Everything is a bit blue, which is not uncommon these days.

Giving Krypton it's own look I think is fundamentally a good idea, since it makes it a different place, but I'm not sure we see enough to know what's what.

[Connor MacLeod]

I never really understood the temptation to change the iconic. I suppose with most franchises that span decades, you'll never forget your first exposure to it, that sets the tone. Reeves was Superman for me and the late 70's/early 80's costume was simply how Superman looked. Bright, primary colors. A fit build but not bulked out like Arnold.

I can understand trying to fix things that might work in a comic that simply can't be pulled off convincingly in live-action, yellow spandex joke in X-Men. The blue and gray Batman uniform might be unconvincing. Iron Man's suit in the comics can sometimes look more like a leotard than a set of full-body armor. I have no idea where they got the idea to texture the hell out of Superman's suit and make it all dingy.

Ask yourself this. Is it 'interesting' to see Star Wars continually take Skywalkers and Solos to the same locations (like Tattooine) over and over again, or having to save the galaxy from some evil Sith/Dark Jedi/Evil Empire plot/menace every other year? Is it interesting to read 40K and have it be nothing than 'Space Marines kills army of millions with 1000:1 kill ratio' with nothing else happening?

Repetition is not neccesarily a good thing, and sometimes people want to change things around to try for something different (even if its a half-assed change.) Look at the new ST series, it tried changing some things around.

Ask yourself also: 'Why do I find something other than what I define as "Iconic" bad? Is it objectively bad, or is it just because it isn't something I find appealing?'

[jollyreaper]

Note that I only discussed cosmetics, the suit, nothing about storytelling. I'm actually all onboard with trying to find a story to tell that's good but not a rehash.

As far as the storyline goes, I plan to keep myself as unspoiled as possible and simply hear if people are happy or upset with the movie. I it's good, I want to go in knowing as little as possible.

[Stark]

He asked a pretty specific question. Why even reply if youre going to ignore it?

I wish Tucker would post and tell us if the colour thing is a colour timing choice or what. I like how the red planet and blue planet have a totally different sensorium.