Episode 121 - Man of Steel with Jesse Fresco

Jesse Fresco joins Case and Jmike to look at Superman's last solo film!

Check out Jesse's work over at Jaguar Sharks! https://open.spotify.com/show/0z0fwhI0yEttCleRWxpAOg

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AI meeting summary:

●      The transcript covers a Men of Steel podcast episode where the hosts discuss various aspects of the "Man of Steel" movie. They share their thoughts on different elements like character portrayals, story decisions, and comparisons to other superhero films. The discussion touches upon themes such as fan reactions, comic book inspirations, cinematic styles, and potential missed opportunities in the film. There are also reflections on Snyder's directorial choices, military presence in movies, and interpretations regarding certain characters like Martian Manhunter. Overall, the conversation delves into both positive and critical viewpoints on "Man of Steel" and its impact within the superhero genre.

●      The transcript covers various discussions related to the movie "Man of Steel," focusing on themes, character analysis, and comparisons with other films. It delves into critiques of the film's storytelling, character development, visual elements, and underlying messages. The speakers touch upon issues such as political undertones in movies, filmmaking styles, plot inconsistencies, lack of empathy in characters' relationships, missed opportunities for emotional depth in scenes like Superman's conflict with Zod. They also compare Snyder's approach to directing with other filmmakers and highlight instances where the movie falls short in conveying its intended themes effectively. The conversation reflects a critical analysis of "Man of Steel" from multiple perspectives while drawing parallels to different cinematic experiences.

Notes:

●      Starts with general greetings and apologies

●      Discussion on audience engagement and episode details

●      Mentions of culture, plot, and episode structure

●      Reference to Abridged series and episode links in show notes

●      Conversations on various topics related to movies and storytelling

●      References to specific movie scenes and characters

●      Discussions on scriptwriting and character development

●      Mentions of historical references and metaphors in storytelling

●      Commentary on editing and screenwriting in movies

●      References to podcast episodes and discussions on various topics

●      Conclusion with notes on contacting the hosts and homework for listeners

Action items:

●      **Case Aiken:**. Review and assess the podcast episode on "Man of Steel". Organize potential topics for future episodes. Research and recommend guests for upcoming shows

●      **Jesse Fresco:**. Prepare talking points for discussing Superman movies. Develop a comparison between different iterations of Superman in TV shows. Coordinate resources related to comic book adaptations

●      Responsible Person: Snyder

●      Release the Snyder cut.

●      Speak out against toxic fandom behavior.

●      Ensure better scripts for actors to work with.

●      Responsible Person: Warner Brothers

●      Respond to fan demands regarding the Snyder cut release.

●      Address bullying of employees by fans demanding the Snyder cut.

●      Responsible Person: Screenwriters/Storytellers

●      Enhance empathy and love in characters' interactions, especially Superman's relationships.

●      Establish character arcs clearly within the movie script for better audience connection.

Outline:

●      I. Introduction 

●      00:50 - Case Aiken and J introduce themselves and the topic of discussion 

●      II. Background and Setup 

●      01:23 - Initial plans for the show 

●      02:08 - Discussion on the soft pilot episode 

●      02:19 - Transition to a more free-form discussion 

●      03:25 - Setting audience expectations 

●      05:39 - Emphasis on the need for discussion 

●      III. Analysis and Critique 

●      09:31 - Mention of including Justice League elements 

●      11:20 - Reference to Iron Rand's "The Fountainhead" 

●      15:06 - Discussion on the film director 

●      18:50 - Reference to a person named Jesse 

●      26:31 - Summary and conclusion of a point 

●      27:30 - Explanation of terraforming in the film 

●      29:13 - Further elaboration on terraforming process 

●      30:48 - Concept of 'Tech' and creative freedom 

●      31:10 - Importance of storytelling flow 

●      33:16 - Mention of a specific point 

●      37:19 - Discussion on imagery and emotions 

●      39:45 - Reflection on the film's context 

●      43:30 - Confirming a point 

●      44:31 - Reference to a previous discussion 

●      50:26 - Closing thoughts on the movie's vision 

●      IV. Character and Story Analysis 

●      53:19 - Reflection on character motivations 

●      56:16 - Discussion on the film's structure 

●      57:55 - Flexibility in storytelling 

●      1:00:16 - Continuing the analysis 

●      1:02:01 - Confirming a point 

●      1:04:20 - Reflection on the film's themes 

●      1:06:52 - Discussion on story elements 

●      1:15:19 - Personal story reference 

●      1:18:47 - Looking forward to future discussions 

●      1:20:11 - Completion of a point 

●      1:21:08 - Discussion on thematic elements 

●      1:23:37 - Summary of the film's narrative 

●      1:25:13 - Evaluation of conveyed ideas 

●      1:28:57 - Encouragement for attention to detail 

●      V. Production and Editing 

●      1:46:09 - Reference to extended cut of the film 

●      1:47:31 - Observations on character dialogue 

●      1:48:51 - Critique on flashback sequences 

●      1:50:35 - Analysis on scriptwriting process 

●      1:53:40 - Guest's information sharing 

●      VI. Conclusion 

●      1:58:45 - Upcoming events and guest appearances 

●      2:00:19 - Final thoughts on the conversation 

●      2:04:22 - Acknowledgment of show contributors 

●      2:04:56 - Summary of the show's purpose 

●      This outline categorizes the discussion points in the transcript into distinct chapters based on the content and context of the conversation.

Transcription

(AI Generated. Subject to Error)

00:00
Case
I actually got quoted about man of Steel in this.

00:03
Jesse
Oh, God.

00:06
Case
And, like, when I was first scanning through, I was like, please don't let this be my only. Like, I really don't want the Snyder Bros. To be on me about that shit.

00:19
Jesse
That says a lot when it's like, the Snyder Bros. Like, I hope the Snyder Bros. Don't like the fact that we treat them like they're criminals that we want to avoid. That kind of speaks volumes to the.

00:48
Case
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I'm Case Aiken, and as always, I'm joined by my host, J. Mike Falson.

00:54
Jmike
Hey, everybody. Glad to have you back.

00:56
Case
And coming over from the Jaguar Sharks universe of Montreal, medium universe of shows, we've got Jesse Fresco.

01:04
Jesse
Hello, I'm here. Yes. Talk about this wonderful piece of cinema.

01:10
Case
Yeah. So since it's a podcast, you probably looked at the title of the episode. We are finally actually talking about man of Steel.

01:17
Jmike
Percy case.

01:19
Jesse
I'm sorry.

01:22
Case
No, it's cool. So for people who are familiar with the origins of the show, we had originally anticipated doing an episode of another pass on this movie as a soft pilot and then launch the show. But then because of scheduling reasons, we ended up putting out the first couple episodes of Men of Steel before that episode dropped, mostly just so we could be relevant to a couple of movies that came out like Shazam, the original one. I mean, so that episode does exist. And J Mike and I do have a pretty good conversation about what we would have done differently. And, Jesse, you and I were recently talking about the Planet of the Apes franchise over on your show, and afterwards were talking about Superman movies and man of Steel and so forth.

02:03
Case
And I went back and checked out your episode of film Rescue, which is a very similar format to another pass. And so I'm going to say that the audience, if they want to know what we would have done differently, we all have gone in great detail about this, and I will have the episode links in the show notes, so please check those out. But today I want this to be more of a free form, kind of like, oh, what actually works in this movie? What doesn't work? What's the culture of it? It's been several years for all of us since we did those particular episodes. So where are things now considering that the Snyderverse is dead?

02:37
Jesse
God, quote unquote dead? Yeah. Aquaman two still has to come out, so I don't even know where that fits.

02:44
Case
Who can really say at this point? But the momentum of the franchise is no longer there.

02:49
Jesse
Yeah. Although the fans will still not shut up about it.

02:54
Case
So I want to note that I actually also got referenced in the new book voices from Krypton, which is an oral history of Superman for a lot of things. But one of the sections that I got quoted on was talking about man of Steel. And when I was first flipping through the book to see where I got referenced, I was like, oh, please, God, don't let it be the one quote about the nature of man of Steel, and please don't let me just paint a target on my back.

03:24
Jesse
What was it?

03:25
Case
All right, so here's my quote there. My biggest problem with the Snyder movies was they rushed into, we can't trust Superman, so let's get Batman to fight him. And then suddenly the world loves Superman after he's dead. It's like, wait a minute.

03:36
Jesse
What?

03:36
Case
I think we missed a Man of Steel two, where he's actually the good hero. The movie didn't do quite as well as they wanted, so they course corrected by trying to appeal too much to iconography that people responded to, like putting Batman in there because Batman movies sell as a result. It felt like a rush project, whereas it could have spent a little more time with Superman proving that he is Superman. It would have felt better to the folks who reacted negatively to it. The Snyder fandom online is frustrating because you can't have mixed feelings about those properties as a result. You either love it or you hate it. And I'm like, I like man of Steel. Fine. I thought it was a fine movie. I thought Cavill was a good Superman.

04:09
Case
I think the Smallville fight in act two is better than the third act fight in Metropolis. If you had a strong sequel immediately coming after that, people would look back on it, be like, it was a good movie. And I wanted to read that quote because that is actually my general sentiment about this movie. I think that the movie has a ton of problems. It also has some cool stuff. And if you think about the time of when it came out, there was, like, a lot of enthusiasm for superhero movies like the Marvel.

04:34
Jesse
The Avengers had come out one year earlier. So everyone was like, oh, yeah, this is what we got to do, right?

04:38
Case
And this had been in the works before, and people were excited about that, and people were excited to see a good Superman movie. We hadn't had a Superman movie since Superman Returns at this point, which had been several years. That movie itself felt kind of defanged from what it could have been because it was so slavish to the Chris Reeve movies as well, as Donker.

04:56
Jmike
Superman.

04:57
Case
Right? Yeah. And then going back to all of the Superman prior to that, Superman Four was the previous Superman movie. So the enthusiasm always kind of had.

05:08
Jesse
Superman existing in some form or another, not just in film, but also in television because we also had Smallville. And then you also had him now in the Superman Lois tv show on the CW, which is slowly wrapping up. He's very rarely ever been off season. He's always kind of somewhere.

05:26
Case
But the movie part of it was the exciting part there because you're absolutely right. Right after Superman Four, there's Lois and Clark, the new Adventures of Superman. Then there's the animated series that bleeds into the Justice League and all that franchise of the Deaniverse.

05:39
Jesse
And then.

05:40
Case
Yeah, again, you mentioned Smallville and Smallville. We definitely need to talk about at.

05:43
Jesse
Some point on the show because actually never watched Smallville. I've seen, like, clips, and I'm like, it's not for me.

05:49
Case
It ran too long. But there was a lot to say that was good about it. I really enjoyed a lot of it.

05:55
Jesse
Tv shows that have, like, was it 26 episodes a season? I'm just like, no, I don't have time. Just, no, I can't. I can't do it. That's why I don't watch a lot of anime. Anime is like, what, like 30 episodes a season? Fuck off. I'm not doing it.

06:11
Case
Yeah, like when the Abridged series is still like a massive project to investment of time to watch, you know, it's probably too big of a thing.

06:18
Jesse
Abridged series, as in, oh, now we're going to do 40 episodes as opposed to 80.

06:23
Case
Right. But yeah, there was a lot of enthusiasm because superhero movies were all of a sudden being done right. None of us could have seen the Avengers coming prior to Iron man one.

06:36
Jesse
I mean, even that phase one of Marvel was kind of like, it's had some stumbling blocks. Going back and looking at it now, it's like Captain America. It's like half a good movie. It's okay, Thor, the first one, it's like, compared to the mauricen one is a masterpiece. I'm not the biggest fan of Love and thunder. It was kind of a messy first phase, but then you lead up to the Avengers and it's just like, oh, yeah, like knocks it out of the park. What's the plot? I don't care. You have all the Avengers on screen. No one had ever done that. Yeah. And then DC's like, we got to put the justice league on screen now. We got to do it now we got to catch up. This whole idea of let's catch up to Marvel, what does that even mean?

07:12
Jesse
Like, your business is not impacted by them? I've never understood that from a business standpoint. People are going to pay to see this regardless. I don't have any allegiance to Marvel or DC. There's a lot of characters from Marvel. I like characters from DC. I like, one of my favorite characters is a swamp thing. But I also really enjoy the, like, I don't have allegiance. I just like a good story and a good book. That's all I care. So this idea of catch up to Marvel never made sense to me. It was just, if anything could be said about this snyderverse that happened, it was the business side took precedence over the creativity side.

07:52
Case
I absolutely agree. I want to push back a little bit on the timeline. Like, I think that incentive to catch up really kicks in with Batman, the Superman. I think that man of Steel, especially in the lead up to it, because it was well in development by the time Avengers one came out. I think that it was the limited success of man of Steel. It made its money, but it wasn't the numbers they were hoping. They were hoping that man of Steel was going to be the Dark Knight. But now in this post Avengers world.

08:17
Jesse
It came out one year after Dark Knight rises.

08:20
Case
Right, exactly.

08:21
Jesse
Everyone. It was implied it was meant to take place in the same universe, kind of because you see the Wayne Enterprises satellite and that was the logo from the Dark Knight. They just transplanted it there and they said, maybe we'll combine them somehow. But that all kind of went away and they had changed it for BBS, sure.

08:39
Case
But man of Steel was produced by Christopher Nolan. There was this vibe that they wanted to do sort of the same kind of like bleached out know. It's not all Snyder in that regard. Like, that was also part of the Nolan first Batman movies.

08:51
Jesse
Apparently they're good friends, Nolan and Snyder.

08:54
Case
So, I mean, those elements kind of make sense. Goyer's working on the scripts. That all kind of makes sense. We're creating this bigger world that theoretically could have been this franchise. And people were hoping that this would be a good paced introduction to the DC world with some actual love and attention going off of this new era of higher quality superhero movies, of actual money, going into it with real special effects and not afraid to be comic booky.

09:21
Jesse
In a lot of ways, I think.

09:22
Case
A lot of people were excited for this movie, and then it just didn't do as well as they wanted. And then you can see the pivot to be, this is what I said in the quote, like, let's get Batman in there. Let's start setting up the Justice League stuff. Let's get all that locked down because way behind on this thing. But it didn't have to be that way when man of Steel first came out. It could have been them slowly introducing their flagship characters because they know they've got a solid Batman if they need it, in the form of bale.

09:48
Jesse
And that's like, the biggest problem, I think, with this whole Snyderverse, or even just man of Steel, is that if you can't even get Superman to carry his own movie, then you've got serious problems. That's a big problem here. It's been established at this point that Zack Snyder has expressed not really hate, but a lot of disdain for Superman. Like, somebody asked him, I think it was at a watchman panel, somebody asked him, would you ever do a Superman movie? And he just bluntly said, no, he does not like. And that's if you listen to the film rescue episode of man of Steel, which is, oh, my God, it's four years old at this point. Jesus Christ. I could just feel my hair turning gray.

10:29
Case
I mean, it's literally the same for us for another past episode.

10:32
Jesse
Yeah, I just turned 38. I'm almost at the halfway point of life. I'm almost there, man. Yeah. In that episode, I went into, like, a book report about Iron Rand's the Fountainhead. Zack Snyder is a well known Ayn Randian objectivist, which, if you read into her philosophies, is completely the opposite of what Superman stands for. And that is the biggest problem. He doesn't like Superman. Never wanted to do Superman, but Warner Brothers said, hey, we'll give you all the keys to our hottest cars if you go do anything you want. Right there. That was mistake number one. He took a finely tuned Ferrari and ran it in a destruction derby.

11:14
Case
Terrible monster car.

11:16
Jesse
Yeah. Man, this really does not crush these cars very well. Wow. That's really where the problem is. You gave the wrong character to the wrong guy.

11:26
Case
Yeah. But that said, prior to this movie coming out, there was a lot of reasons to be excited about.

11:34
Jesse
The trailer. It was really good. But I was actually talking with comics writer Josh Dysart, who we've occasionally had on our show. Somebody asked him once about that first trailer from man of Steel, and he said, I think it's a trick. I think that first, because they use the music from Lord of the Rings when Gandalf dies. It's the same music. And he's like, yeah, I think that's a trick. And sure enough, you watch the movie. That's nothing like that. It's nothing like that.

11:56
Case
Well, right, exactly. In retrospect, we can see all these things should have been red flags, but it didn't feel that way prior to it because 300 is a huge success. Are there problems with 300 innately? Yes, because the source material is also kind of interesting as a piece of art but shouldn't be, like, a definitive take on thermopoly.

12:16
Jesse
Yeah, it's completely historically inaccurate. And also, if you actually read into the history of the film 300 the United States military was showing that film to soldiers during the invasion in Iraq in order to psych them up to go out and shoot people. It's called image training. Child soldiers are made to do that in war torn nations. Our government used that film as propaganda to psych up our soldiers to go shoot people.

12:44
Case
Yes.

12:47
Jesse
It'S gross, I know, but our government did this. Yeah, it's a comic book movie about spartan warriors.

12:58
Case
But that just is the seeds that then would get to all the later stuff. Well, I mean, watchmen is such a weird one because it's also a muddled movie. There's so much of the cinematography that bugs me. Just like the way that characters are sped up and are able to do these superhuman things in a piece that's explicitly about how they're not superhuman. Yeah, but it's also, at the same time, it's so slavish to detail from the comic that it can't be that.

13:28
Jesse
Bad slavish visually, but tone wise and thematically and morally, it's the opposite.

13:35
Case
Right. It's a really weird piece. The changes in the story, the ones that people tend to point to are actually the things that I don't really have a big problem with. The biggest problems I have are entirely the way things are sort of depicted. Like, yeah, you get to the same frame, but it doesn't quite work.

13:51
Jesse
Rorschach is portrayed as being the coolest guy in the world. Isn't he a racist? Isn't he, like, the symbol for the KKK and the Watchmen tv show? Which is really fucking good, by the way.

14:00
Case
The tv show is really good. And it's really good that they take that. I would generally argue that he probably was racist, but it wasn't, like, his big character defining trait.

14:08
Jesse
Maybe it was the homophobia.

14:10
Case
The character is fucked up for sure, but I would say that none of those individual vices are the issue with the character, it's just a big collection of problems a lot of people are.

14:19
Jesse
Pointing to, like, oh, they took out the squid. I know. The reason as to why that was changed, the screenwriter of the film, David Hader, who also voices solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid games. For those who don't know, he is a screenwriter and he still works to this day. He worked on that show Warrior none on Netflix. Which first seasons. It's okay. Second season, pretty damn good. Go watch Warrior none. They just finally got a third season. Thank God they rescued it. He was talking about why they changed that on another show. The day he went in. He was going to originally going to direct Watchmen and the screen test of Ray Stevenson, rest in peace and Ian Glenn as two characters from it. They're originally going to be cast and they got changed out for other actors.

14:57
Jesse
He shot the screen test when he went in to pitch the script to the executives of Warner Bros. To direct the film. It was September twelveth, 2001. Yeah. And so they just sat there in the office of the executives and they didn't say anything. And I think it was David just went, let's just go to lunch. I understand why they changed it. I get it. It was a day after 911. We don't want to do this story about a terrorist attack on New York that wipes out half the town. I get it. I am totally okay with them changing that. And also, it would be very hard to explain why the squid is there because it's very ingrained in the structure of the comic trying to explain that. Good luck.

15:45
Jesse
You need a nine hour movie, which is why the tv show is better, right?

15:50
Case
Yeah. I mean, if you look at.

15:52
Jesse
Sorry for this show is a sequel. It's not an adaptation. It's a sequel to the comic.

15:55
Case
Sorry. Anyone who was, like, tuning in for man of Steel for this big diatribe about. Because I can't resist this one. What I was going to say is that the squid, the thing about the squid that's so good is that all of the supplemental material leads up to that point. Even some of the Hollis Mason stuff, but especially all of the black freighter and all of the background interviews about different sciences that are being developed because of Dr. Manhattan. All of those things, even the supplemental material with Adrian Veidt, obviously, the supplemental material with Adrian Vet, like, all feeds into this larger meta story that gets to the actual plot that's going on behind the scenes. But that's all material that you have to stop and actually read because it's all prose.

16:34
Case
Or there's a marketing pitch for the toy line, for the watchmen, stuff that exists in the universe, which I love. Or there's like a Playboy article at one point. The prose is all over the place, and it's a thing Moore loves to do. But you couldn't explain that in the script of Watchmen.

16:48
Jesse
Alan Moore's work tends to work best as comics. Like, look at league of extraordinary gentlemen. They did the film adaptation, which is very not good. The comics, they work only as comics. You can't really adapt them. They're still trying. They're still trying to get that tv show off the ground. His work really does only work in comic form. Unless you're talking about his books. Voice of the Fire or Jerusalem, which is back there on my bookshelf, which is a massive slog to get through. My God. Jesus. It's the writings of a madman. Yeah. His work is very introspective. It's very difficult to adapt it. I mean, he does make films now with his friends in Northampton, so it's trying to adapt it. I get why the changes were made, but at the same time, again, you got the wrong guy. Right?

17:37
Jesse
Yeah, you got the wrong guy.

17:38
Case
But trying to say why we would go into this movie with a more optimistic view than we would have in retrospect. Watchman's up until that .1 of the best adaptations of a thing written by Alan Moore.

17:50
Jesse
Yeah.

17:51
Case
So it's like, oh, well, he didn't do that bad a job, and he did 300 pretty well. And that was at least visually interesting. And, okay, I can see some cool stuff going on with that. And Henry Cavill was just in Immortals at this point, which he looks great in that movie. And it's very talk about every frame is a work of art. Every frame is a tableau of amazingness.

18:12
Jesse
Immortals is an underrated film. It's not a great movie, but it's definitely underrated.

18:16
Case
Yeah. It's a really weird kind of abstract God world that you're in. It feels very much like a myth being told, which is cool.

18:24
Jesse
It feels kind of like a side story to 300.

18:28
Case
Kind of, yes. I mean, it definitely was being sold that way as well. And it doesn't make sense. It's just visually interesting to look at, and so a lot of fun in that regard. But then we look over here at man of Steel, and I think there are some solid points to this movie. I think that this movie could have relied on a stronger follow up to make us feel better about it. Jesse. So you and I were, like, messaging about the comic man of Steel shortly before this.

18:55
Jesse
Yeah, the John Byrne stuff. And it makes sense why they pulled from that, or at least why Snyder pulled from that. John Byrne is very republican, and were saying that his version of Superman, while that story that he wrote is fun, he portrays Superman as a cop. I'm sorry, cop? Did I say cop? I meant pig. It doesn't feel like traditional Superman. They have since thrown that story out of canon, which was a good decision, in my opinion. It's very eighty s. Yes.

19:24
Case
It feels like a product of the time.

19:26
Jesse
Yeah. Reagan era Superman.

19:28
Case
Yeah. But I do really like the era that ushered in the post crisis Superman era, which in a lot of ways was them going from, like, all right, let us make this as dryly, marvel in a specific sense, like, the vibe of Superman is much more like a Marvel character, and we're going to make it much more generic 80s superhero comic with as little superfluous weirdness as we can help it. And then over the course of 20 years, like, getting to the early aughts kind of era when they started kind of playing with the timeline, adding in slowly all of this Silver Age nonsense, like getting a version of candor, like, even the pocket dimension. Superboy, I've said, is like, it's an incredibly Silver Age concept in a book that is anathema to the Silver Age.

20:08
Jesse
Yeah. I've always said that DC stuff is better when it's weird. Marvel stuff is better when it's grounded. DC is better when it's odd and out there and weird. Most of my favorite characters, swamp thing, the Doom Patrol, John Constantine, when it's weird and out there, that's when it probably functions the best. Yeah, you can do weird with Superman, but then you look at these movies that this trilogy that Snyder made, they're not really weird. They're kind of, like, grounded a little bit.

20:37
Jmike
Kind of, yeah.

20:38
Case
Which is fine for a pilot to a Superman franchise. Like, if you look at the pilot to the Superman animated series, it's extremely, like, bare bones in terms of the weirdness of the world.

20:49
Jesse
And structurally, it's really similar to this movie.

20:51
Case
The first third of it is just on Krypton, so we're not really dealing with Superman until really the very end of the second episode and mostly just the third episode of that three part pilot. There's a lot of precedent for that kind of launch to a Superman platform. If the next movie was like, well, let's start throwing in some weird shit, and then we'll keep on throwing in.

21:11
Jesse
Some more weird shit.

21:11
Case
Season one of Supergirl was kind of, like, soft, connected to this movie. There were a lot of hints at it. They never showed Superman's face, so they didn't have to commit to it all costume details.

21:22
Jmike
Yeah.

21:22
Case
And I don't want to say I would get rid of Tyler Hecklin because I love Tyler Hecklin. I think he's been amazing.

21:27
Jesse
He's pretty good. Yeah.

21:28
Case
He's my favorite Clark Kent up to this point. His Superman I really like. But, like, specifically Clark Kent, especially Clark Kent, as kind of embarrassing. Dad is the best.

21:39
Jesse
It's also appropriate. We're talking about man of Steel now because just recently we had our casting for the new Superman and Lois. Recently we had our new castings, which great casting. Like, you're getting an unknown lead actor to play Superman, which is what they did with Chris Reeve, and you're getting.

21:55
Case
The marvelous Miss Maisel.

21:57
Jesse
Yeah, you're getting great choices. Like, good, solid choices. Apparently, there's been fan art already of him as Superman. I'm like, oh, yeah, perfect. He looks just like him. Well, obviously, he does look a lot like Henry Cavill, which is kind of OD. It's like Henry Cavill de aged by, like 15 years.

22:13
Case
No, what he really looks like is doing one of those face fusions of Henry Cavill and Tom Welling.

22:19
Jesse
Yeah. Like people that make the perfect Batman by Kilmer and Keaton and Clooney and. Yeah. Combine all them together and you have the perfect. Yeah, yeah.

22:29
Case
Like, maybe a bit of Reeve in him being a little bit leaner, at least as far as I can tell.

22:34
Jesse
Well, he's supposed to be a younger.

22:35
Case
Right, right. But I'm just saying, in terms of this fusion of all the Superman that we've had before.

22:40
Jesse
Yeah, I think the Superman legacy film is supposed to take place in a world where there's already heroes that have been established. Like, the Green Lanterns are already around. Batman's been operating for a while, so it's like he's the next one that shows up, kind of. I think that's the plan, which is probably better because we don't need another origin story. And I'm thankful that they're just kind of being like, you know what? Origin. Fuck it. Screw it.

23:01
Case
I agree. I do find it strange, just as a concept to have a character show up on the scene with established superheroes and be Superman as opposed to Hyperion or the century.

23:14
Jesse
I could see it being like, he shows up and it's like, oh, yeah, prove yourself. And he starts out as the underdog, in a sense, to being the leader of the Justice League. I can see that. Yeah. As an arc for a character that's a good one.

23:24
Case
If that's how he gets his name, that would be cool.

23:26
Jesse
But maybe that, no. What does the S stand for? Hope. It's like, it's not an s. It's like, shut up.

23:35
Case
All right, let's actually get into the movie itself.

23:38
Jesse
Yeah. Finally, for all you still listening?

23:43
Case
So I do want to start with addressing some things that I think are positive about this movie because part of it is that with Flash coming out and the Snyderverse being kind of dead and it's been a bunch of years since the last time I really looked at it and I've never hated this movie. Watching it. I don't get as bothered by some of the lost potential here as I would ultimately, because it's a false start and we're getting a new start. It's not like we're ruining that potential.

24:06
Jesse
I would say the new start would have been the Zack Snyder's Justice League because if you watch his version of Justice League, it's kind of a soft reboot. If you just jumped in there, you kind of sort of still get it.

24:15
Case
Which is why this movie just feels, like, so unconnected to the rest of it.

24:19
Jesse
Yeah, it feels like extraneous material that you don't really wanted to.

24:24
Case
I'll just start with, I actually like the look of Krypton. It's not perfect. I wish it was more colorful. In another past episode, I was like, oh, why can't jor El's armor be green? Like, why can't, like, looking like the silver age kind of style for him? Even if they're doing the new look for the was, this was a time.

24:40
Jesse
Frame in film where every movie looked like this.

24:43
Case
Yeah, but you look at the science council, though, and they at least look fucking weird.

24:48
Jesse
It is mean. It looks like HR Geeger was working on this. Or like, it does feel od, it feels alien, which I appreciate, which is good. Yeah. I like some of the design choices in this. It looks interesting. But I agree about the color. It's so just drab and gray and ugly, but it's realistic. I look outside my window, I see green trees. I don't need everything to look like this. And it really does kind of become painful to look at after a while because your eyes get bored of it. I know that the Superman lives, the Nick Cage one probably wouldn't have been a great movie, but it would have been fun and colorful and over the top and interesting to look at. And we did recently get Nick Cage and the Flash movie. Well, CGI, deep face, deep fake version.

25:44
Jesse
Look, I understand putting in all these different references and all these different CGI versions of characters, but, hey, warner brothers spring the extra million to get these actors on set for the day, please. Nick Cage still works and is still alive. Okay. Just get him on set for the day. Yeah.

26:02
Case
And he absolutely would do this. Like, his career is entirely about doing this kind of weird shit.

26:06
Jesse
Yeah, he wanted to do it, and it's like they just put him in. They just said, yeah, can we use your likeness? Like, all right, fine.

26:12
Case
Yeah. They even have the deepfake files. Because if you've seen the unbearable weight of remarkable talent, they've got a young version of Nick Cage in there.

26:20
Jesse
Unbearable weight of massive talent.

26:22
Case
Oh, massive talent.

26:22
Jesse
Pardon me.

26:23
Case
You know the word salad, one that created the meme of Pedro Pascal? Like, smiling.

26:26
Jesse
Yes. That one where they're high on. Are they high on, like, mushrooms or something like that?

26:30
Case
Acid.

26:31
Jesse
Acid. That's it.

26:34
Case
So krypton, like, lots of things to enjoy about that. The HR Geeger comparison is great. I was noting the tentacle kind of structure for the Phantom zone that sort of pulls them in and has these electrical effects. Like, really cool effects in that regard.

26:47
Jesse
Yeah. Heavy brainiac vibes on that one also.

26:49
Case
Yes. Like, oh, my God, can we fucking just finally get the brainiac movie? I've been saying forever?

26:55
Jesse
Snyder would never allow that.

26:56
Jmike
Too silly.

26:57
Case
It's not even that different from what we got.

27:00
Jmike
It's never happening, dude.

27:01
Case
Instead of terraforming, he's minimizing a city. That's all. That's the big change.

27:06
Jesse
God. Also, can I just point out that a lot of the fans like to defend this movie as being like, but it's a science fiction version of Superman, but the science is bad.

27:15
Case
Right? And also, Superman has always had a Sci-Fi element to him on top.

27:20
Jesse
Yeah, but, like, terraforming isn't where you screw at the planet's core. Terraforming is where you pump greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to make it hotter. Like, what we're doing right now with our planet. This is terraforming. I just heard recently that Texas is now one of the hottest places on Earth. Not in America. On Earth. It's like 125 degrees down there in Texas. It's hot. That's terraforming. That's all it takes. You don't screw with the planet's core. So, yeah, the science is bad. They just needed it to create a catastrophic world event that Superman has to stop.

27:57
Case
Right? Yeah, it was Macguffin. You could probably make an argument of the core stuff if it was like, well, we're trying to make it more like it's not terraforming it's crypto forming it. If we're trying to make a. Like, recently in the X Men books, in planet sized X Men, they actually terraformed Mars. And that was, like, this really cool sequence where all the mutants are aligned in using their powers for all. So, like, one of the things that magneto uses his magnetism powers to pull an iron asteroid from the asteroid belt, and they destabilize the core and then add all that iron to the core in order to increase the mass so that it'd be comparable to Earth's, so that the gravity would be functional for them to live on and for an ecosystem like their. Like, that was really cool.

28:37
Jesse
Is that the John Hickman run of?

28:40
Case
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Like I said, it's like forge plans it, magneto does that. Storm obviously, is doing stuff in terms of creating an atmosphere around it. Other mutants are, like, adding moisture to the planet. Iceman's creating the ice caps. It's this whole team sequence to, step by step launch a dead planet into being an Earth like condition and talking out how mutants could terraform a world. That was really cool. You could argue that they would try to do that, but they'd have to find a way to get that mass because, yeah, Krypton should be heavier than, like, that's always been a part of the Science of.

29:13
Jesse
It's like. It's why they don't know it makes sense, right?

29:18
Case
So if they were doing something where they were like, okay, yeah, we're destabilizing the earth, and we're going to be pelted by asteroids as they have this magnetic pulse that brings in iron from all over and, like, other materials, so that the world can increase in size to be like Krypton again, they were just like, we need the MacGuffin. And it's just like, oh, it's doing this thing to the planet.

29:36
Jesse
Yeah. I wish it was made more explicit in the script as to what they were doing, but. Okay. Is David Goyer a hack? Because most of the stuff he works on is, like, comic book related. I don't see him. What was the last creative thing he did that was original?

29:50
Case
So his film works. His most recent was hellraiser. Before that was Terminator, dark fate, and then.

29:55
Jmike
Oh, this is not good.

29:57
Case
Batman v. Superman. Yeah.

30:00
Jesse
I did like that new Hellraiser. That was pretty good. It was surprising.

30:05
Case
It's all ip.

30:07
Jesse
It's all IP related. That's the work of a hack. Yeah.

30:11
Case
Because then I'm, like, looking.

30:12
Jesse
Oh, yeah.

30:12
Case
He was attached to foundation and was attached to Krypton.

30:16
Jesse
I've never watched foundation. I've heard very mixed things on it.

30:19
Case
I've heard mixed things, too.

30:20
Jesse
But those books are, like, unadaptable. They take place over thousands and thousands of years.

30:25
Case
Yeah.

30:26
Jesse
So, yeah.

30:26
Case
Goyer has a mixed bag in terms of qualities of putting stuff like, I don't blame a writer initially coming up with, we need MacGuffin for having that in the script. Initially, it's then you go and research and figure out how the science would work for the whole thing. Famously, when working on Star Trek scripts, they'll often just write tech because then they have science consultants that will be like, no, it would work this way. And this is what you would call it. And all those kind of things.

30:48
Jesse
Tech. The tech. So the tech can work.

30:50
Case
Right, exactly.

30:51
Jesse
They would literally write that into their scripts. And then we start the tech in order to make the tech, and it's just there to, a lot of those scripts are like, plug and play. Just make shit up. What's that Voltaire song? The USS make shit up.

31:10
Case
Well, because when you're trying to figure out what the flow of the story is, all you need to do is say what kind of situation would occur? And then someone else could be like, oh, and it would kind of work like this. And you fill in the words that. Yeah, and that's what the terraforming thing should have been. They just had this idea of like, all right, third act situation is this. It's going to be this thing. It's going to impact Superman here, and it's going to separate the others this way. What do we call it? Fuck. It's terraforming. Oh, okay, cool. And they should have done more. That's what I'm getting at.

31:40
Jesse
Yeah. Let's try to find more positives. I would say a big positive. I like Henry Cavill as a choice for Superman. Like, if nothing else, they found a good Superman.

31:48
Jmike
They really did.

31:49
Jesse
They did launch him into the stardom he has now. Questionable, though. All these movies are. He's good. I just wish that they gave him a script worthy of talent. Yeah, they really did him dirty, stoic all the time. And I don't see Superman being like this. He does smile a couple of times, and that was a big criticism. It's like, why doesn't Superman smile? He does smile a couple of times. He does, but he always has that furrowed brow that looks like a giant mountain range on his forehead. It kind of drives me crazy. Especially in VBS where it's just like, oh, God, dude, don't you have any other facial expression? Because you look at him in, like, man from uncle or Mission Impossible, fallout. And he's like, charming and he seems fun to be just, yeah.

32:35
Case
He certainly had a charm that they didn't utilize enough. Like, most of the emoting of Superman in this movie is the flashback stuff which only once is actually Henry Cavill. Like a college age version of himself. Everything else is like a kid of.

32:47
Jesse
Various ages that he's still somehow the same size. Okay, just mess up his hair a little bit. It'll be just fine.

32:55
Case
I thought they did. He was Slouch. Like, when he's in the car, he doesn't look that jarring. It's only when he's out that he kind of still Superman.

33:05
Jesse
That brings up a point that I absolutely just checked out of the movie, which was the death of John Kent. That was the point where I was just like, yeah, I'm out.

33:15
Jmike
Zack Snyder hates dads. I put it like there. There you go. I rest my case.

33:19
Jesse
It's firmly established point that Zack Snyder really doesn't give a fuck about ordinary people. Every single one of his movies. Like, ordinary people are like the least important thing in his films. But it's weird because, like, his dawn of the dead, which we're going to be covering tomorrow on split the difference where you compare originals and remakes, that's considered his best movie because it's about normal people, right?

33:41
Case
Living in the world.

33:42
Jesse
Living in the world. And it's like, oh, look at that. When you actually have people that can emote and give you good performances, it's like you get a lot out of that. The movie itself is questionable. It's very post 911. But, yeah, there's things to like in that film. But then you get to like 300 and all the spartans are just like, godlike. And then sucker punch. Like, none of the characters take any damage when they get hit. Watchmen, all the characters, they seem superhuman, even though they're supposed to be normal people. Then you get to those DC movies and it's like he doesn't give a shit about normal human beings. He does not care. When you see the world engine, like, slinging people into the air and slamming them into the concrete and then you see that giant, gaping hole in Metropolis.

34:27
Jesse
And they're just standing in the middle of it, like, not reacting to. Like, he really just doesn't give a shit.

34:32
Case
Except in maybe the abstract. Like, Jonathan Kent does have this role in it.

34:36
Jesse
He's meant to represent kind of like the two fathers, Jord and John Kent. Like the father on Earth and the father among the stars, right?

34:45
Case
And he's very much that. Like that good american, good old boy dad. But it's the role he represents more than the character himself.

34:51
Jesse
He does recommend letting the kids in the bus die, though.

34:54
Jmike
Yeah, he's like, f them kids, man. They don't need you.

34:57
Jesse
Fuck them kids. Dad.

34:59
Jmike
What about the kids? F them kids. They don't matter.

35:02
Jesse
And by the way, going back to the whole destruction of Metropolis, do you know why BBS takes place 18 months after man of Steel?

35:10
Jmike
No. Why?

35:10
Jesse
The justification they gave was because they needed time to rebuild Metropolis. That's a bullshit statement. Because that doesn't explain why it takes 18 months for Batman to begin his hunt for Superman. And it also doesn't explain why Superman didn't go forward to Congress to explain what the hell just happened. Because by the end of the movie, the humans have no idea what the hell just happened. They have no clue. For all they know, Superman caused the destruction. So they have no idea. The actual reason is because the United States invaded Iraq 18 months after 911. BVS is a battle on two fronts. The war in Iraq, the war against Afghanistan, the war against Lex Luthor and Doomsday. The war against Batman and Superman. The heart of America, conflicted is caught in the middle of it. Not sure what to do.

35:59
Jesse
Which directly makes man of Steel an allegory for 911. What if Superman was there to save it? Well, he fucked it up. What the.

36:08
Case
Yeah.

36:10
Jesse
And that's why I really despise this movie in many ways. I know this wasn't going to be a bitch fest, but when you think about the amount of right wing stuff that Snyder shoves into his movies, he can say he's a democrat all he wants. He keeps putting right wing shit in his movies. He can't help it. That's so wronghanded. You know where the better version of that comes from? The boys. The boys in the comic where they definitely fuck up 911. In the comic, they try to stop 911 and they fuck it up. They bust onto the plane, kill the terrorists, and then they go, hey, does anybody know how to fly a plane? No. Fuck it. We're leaving. And one of the planes hits a tower, and the other one destroys the Brooklyn Bridge.

36:57
Jesse
So it's a parallel reality where 911 wasn't really prevented, but they still fucked it up. That's why this movie has such a gross feeling to it. Everyone said, why does it look like 911 at the movie when that ship is crashing into all those buildings? Because it's 911. It's 911. Yes.

37:14
Case
I hate to have the apologist moment.

37:16
Jesse
Right here because somebody has to apologize.

37:19
Case
For this 911 imagery. When this movie came out was already extremely dated. It's even more dated now, but, oh, yeah, it is coming on the tail end of when every movie had 911 imagery.

37:29
Jesse
Yeah, like Star Trek and Darkness came out, I think a month before this. Also 911.

37:35
Case
It's a sequel to one that also had weird 911 energy going for it. Yeah, a lot of movies work.

37:42
Jesse
Why did people think that made their movie better?

37:44
Jmike
Complete destruction of everything?

37:45
Case
Because it was the biggest, most important event for a lot of people. And so it's sort of like the thing that they want to reference as a way to express their emotions about it all and know that they can directly relate to other people in the audience by way of being like, hey, do you remember this horrific thing that we all witnessed on tv together? Let's reference it so that we can trigger those same emotions in our piece.

38:04
Jesse
I can understand that, but at the same time, I'm not trying to sound like an asshole or be the ultimate cynic in the room, but the number of people that died on 911 is infinitesible to the number of people that died in 2020. From COVID Yeah, Covid was a bigger destructive force. Yeah. That was absolutely preventable. Absolutely.

38:27
Case
There was a point where it was like a 911 a day in terms of lost lives.

38:30
Jesse
Yeah. On Planet Earth, that was just another day. Yeah, that was just another day. Look into every other country around the planet that's going through war torn problems right now. That was just another.

38:40
Case
I mean, and again, I'm not trying.

38:42
Jesse
To sound like an asshole. It's just I read the news and I see what's happening in the world. That's just the way it know. But immediately, all the right wingers. I used to work as a personal trainer. My boss was a massive trump supporter. And when he saw the attack on 911, somebody asked him, he's like, what's going to happen now? And he was like, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? We're going to war. This guy was a military guy, and he was like, yeah, I want to go to the desert and shoot. Fuck, yeah. He was that kind of guy. That is the audience for man of Steel, I think it's certainly part of it. There's a very heavy crossover between Snyder Bros. And right wing supporters. Very heavy crossover. Absolutely.

39:29
Case
For the most extreme fans of this movie.

39:33
Jesse
You were trying to get to an apology. What's the apology?

39:35
Case
No, the apologist part was just that there was a lot of 911 imagery at the time. So it wasn't like it was that unique that it was doing it. And it's frustrating, but it's also understandable that it existed. It was dated at this point.

39:47
Jesse
I mean, it happens in history with film. It's like, after Vietnam, we got a lot of Vietnam films. After the Cold War, we got a lot of cold War spy movies. It's like, it's normal to adapt that stuff. I get it. But you don't adapt a real world event like this and put it in a context where it's supposed to be quote unquote fun. It doesn't work.

40:14
Case
Yeah.

40:16
Jesse
And it's Superman. Like, I shouldn't be feeling miserable when I walk out of theater. Right.

40:21
Case
If they had done it where he ultimately stopped it all, that would be a different element there as well because it's at least Superman being that power fantasy.

40:29
Jesse
Yeah, and he could have. That's the thing. But every single time people say, like, well, he could have stopped it. And all the fans of these movies, they say, well, it was his first day as, like, not an excuse.

40:42
Case
Yeah, well, and the structure of it is also not really playing very well in terms of getting away from it revels in the imagery and languishes on those shots way more than it had to. When we did the another paths episode, I was saying, like, well, the fight should have not started in Metropolis. It should have ended in Metropolis. In a way, it's similar to Invincible, where it's like, oh, look at what our punches are doing. Look at the scale of destruction that happens because we are as we are and they are insignificant compared to us. That's an interesting, logical approach to it all. That's getting into the miracle man concept of, like, if you have a fight of superhumans, it's going to be real fucking bad for anyone caught beneath them.

41:20
Jesse
Yeah.

41:21
Case
Having as much imagery, especially before we even get to the fight, makes it even worse. It was crazy that Michael Bay was doing a better job with the hero, trying to avoid casualties. Optimus prime is always getting more beat up, especially in the first Transformers movie, because he's trying to avoid humans. Megatron is able to take advantage of that. And in this movie, we don't really get a lot of that, especially not in the Metropolis fight. There's more of that going on in the Smallville fight, which is why I typically think the Smallville fight is kind of the high watermark of this movie, minus, like, design stuff that I do want to get back to.

41:53
Jesse
At some point, people say, like, oh, nobody died in, like, no, their airplanes could crash in the streets. People definitely died. Yeah.

42:01
Case
At least. He's very clearly trying to stop everything that's going on, and he's having a hard time.

42:04
Jesse
He does try to save some people. He does try to actually do something. But then you get to the whole world engine thing and it's like, oh, we need to throw this thing into the world engine to make it disappear and go away. It's like, but I'm going to fly across to the other side of the planet in order to take out a giant robot in the middle of the ocean. That's not hurting anybody. It's like, well, shouldn't you do the other thing first? Because that's like attacking the city where all the people.

42:27
Case
Right?

42:28
Jesse
Yeah, yeah. There's no reason as to why Superman can't do everything here. But here's another thing that were talking about this case. This movie has a fetish for the military. Zack Snyder and Michael Bay love to do the same thing. I've worked in the film business. I do film and tv work for those who don't know. Whenever you have the military involved in a film, you get military funding from the Pentagon. So you get access to vehicles, weapons, uniforms, personnel. You get access to locations because the military is there. And that's something that Zack Snyder loves to do. He loves to have the military in his movies. This film. And, like, the military is, like, there all the time.

43:10
Jesse
They're not in Justice League very much, but they are in these first two films almost to the point where it's a detriment to the movie because it begs the question, why are you here? Superman can do all this stuff and you're doing nothing. You're just here to inflate the budget.

43:26
Jmike
They're there to give Martian Mantunter his cover, sir.

43:30
Jesse
Is that right?

43:32
Jmike
They're there to make sure that he's in the film.

43:34
Case
All right, you know what? Let's talk about that one. Because rewatching man of Steel today and having that, like, oh, he's supposed to be Martian Manhunter. He's not supposed to be fucking Martian Manhunter in this movie.

43:43
Jesse
There is no way I brought that up when we did the film rescue of Justice League. I'm just like, so he's been around the whole time? Yep.

43:51
Jmike
And not doing anything.

43:55
Case
There is one scene specifically where you could say that this indicates that he might be the Martian Manhunter, which is when Lois Lane is explaining how the thing would work in terms of the Phantom Zone thing. The general is the first guy to catch on what they're talking about, and it's like, oh, that kind of could be you arguing that this is secretly Jean Jones. However, the rest of it doesn't fucking make any sense.

44:15
Jesse
Yeah, because in the interrogation room, he can see through the glass, but you can't tell he's an alien.

44:20
Case
I mean, even if you argue his shape shifting is strong enough to bypass that whole thing, everything else doesn't make any sense.

44:27
Jesse
You were going to let the whole planet be destroyed by doomsday, and you weren't going to lift a finger. Okay.

44:32
Case
I mean, even just his knowledge of how to interact with aliens and so forth is really weird. The character just doesn't. It's not supported by any of his behavior in this movie.

44:40
Jesse
It's just another thing that's there because, hey, I remember that. That's another thing about a lot of Snyder stuff, is that the references and stuff, it's kind of dumb. I've watched some interviews with him, and I think I watched the interview, but he was talking about watchmen. He just seemed kind of like a deer in the headlights. Like, lights are on, but no one's home. I'm not trying to talk bad about him on a personal level, but he just seems like. I referenced this earlier on case. I said he's an NFL linebacker that somehow became a filmmaker, which I think.

45:07
Case
Kind of speaks to his general stance on what kind of things to reference, what kind of metaphors to put exactly. And that's why I tend to be more forgiving of his personal politics than I am of his fans politics. He's got exactly the same kind of moral complexity of. I refer to him as, like, a prep school philosophy major. Like someone who is like, man, you got to read Iron Rand. It'll change your life, man. Bro, seriously.

45:36
Jesse
I understand people that really have that same thought process. Iron Rand. The fuck you. I got mine crowd. I believed that when I was 15. I'm almost 40 now. I don't believe that anymore. It's better to be a decent person and just try to help everybody else around you. The fuck you. I got Minecrowd. Tends to be right wing voters, Trump supporters, and Snyder Bros. That's the fucked up thing. The first time I saw toxic fandom, like, oh, my God, they will not stop. It was when Force Awakens came out and everyone's giving shit about Rey being the Mary sue and all that bullshit. And it's like they were like, the movie sucks. It's just a carbon copy. Fuck this movie. It sucks. When did Snyder show up on the scene with man of Steel?

46:26
Case
A little bit before that, but.

46:27
Jesse
Exactly. And that's where they started. And it never has stopped. It's never stopped. They keep going. They keep going. And then when his version of Justice League was basically shuffled off to the side when he left the project due to the death of his daughter, all the fans were like, release the Snyder cut. Release the Snyder cut. And they were actively bullying people at Warner Brothers to do it, to the point where they're bullying people off of social media and doing these heinous things. And he never spoke out about it. If anything, he used it to his advantage. It's like, that's why I'm not so apologetic to his personal politics. It's like you're using this toxicity to your advantage. And I'm glad he got his version released. I did watch his Justice League recently for prep for this. It's not bad. It's okay.

47:15
Jesse
It's pretty good. I got lots of it that I like. It's a good looking movie, but the dickishness of his fan base is just like, God, guys, go away. You got everything you wanted and more, and you still don't stop. I really have a hard time letting this stuff slide. I really just can't let it slide. It's so just gross to me. Like, be fans of things. Be happy that you have stuff. I think it was Jay Bauman from military media said, let the media you love enhance your life. Never define it. And that's the problem here, is that they wrap their personality around this one guy. That's the thought process of a cult. It's weird. It's creepy. It's manipulative. Guys, it's just Superman. It's nothing that important. It's really not. Well.

48:08
Case
And cult kind of stake on it makes it kind of reductive in the long run. Look at the cast of this movie versus look at the cast of Justice League. Like, Justice League, aside from the actors who are being cast to be the Justice League, which are a mix in terms of their actual popularity prior to those movies coming out, we're getting a smaller universe for them to really live in. There's fewer really cool standouts that are just like, oh, that's fucking wild that they're in that movie. Like, you look at this movie. Christopher Maloney has a big part in this movie. It's a part that doesn't need to exist because it's part of that whole military jingoistic thing. But that Lawrence Fishburne as Perry White.

48:44
Jesse
It was pretty funny. He was going to try to knife fight Fiora, and I'm just. You're going to die real quick, dude.

48:50
Case
There's a good button at the end, but at that point, he is unloaded an Uzi, then his sidearm, and then he's bald.

48:56
Jesse
She didn't even blink. Although I will say she is absolutely gorgeous, that actress. Oh, my God. Oh, God, I love that woman. Isn't she in the flash for like, a half a second or something like that?

49:10
Case
I'm sure like so many other people in this. I mean, again, like Kevin Costner, Harry Lennox as the general. He's such a that guy actor, but he's been that guy in a lot of fucking things.

49:20
Jesse
I got to meet him once, actually, very briefly. I got to meet him, and I got to meet Martin Sheenan the same day, some psa that they were filming, and he was, like, working as one of the lighting guys. I don't know why. They were at the Gaylord Hotel in National harbor. They were filming something with Martin Sheen, I think this is right after Charlie Sheen had gone to rehab again. And so Martin Sheen was doing a PSA, I'm guessing, assistance to his son. And Harry Lennox was on the crew working, doing the lighting for the thing, and I had to deliver the gear. And I talked with him for a bit. He's a super nice guy. And I asked him, I was like, yeah, you're supposed to be in the new Superman, right? And he's like, I don't know, maybe so nice guy.

50:02
Jesse
Martin Sheen is also super. He just. This is a stacked cast. I love this cast. I just wish they had better stuff to work. Sure.

50:12
Case
I mean, like, is it weird that Carla Gugino is the voice of Calyx in this movie? Yeah, it is.

50:17
Jesse
Oh, yeah, that's right.

50:19
Case
She was in Watchmen. I get why she would be in it. But you just have so many people where you're like, oh, but shouldn't they be given a lot more stuff?

50:26
Jesse
No. Okay. A lot of people that work with Snyder, they say he's really nice. He's really a joy to work with. He lets actors do whatever they want. He's a super sweet person. I'm sure he is. I mean, I've heard nothing but positivity being, like, so many directors come off as complete dicks. Like, look at Joss Whedon. Like, all that giant can of worms that we're not going to open. But, yeah, apparently he's a very nice guy and very personable, and people love talking to him and love working with him. He brought back Ray Fisher for Rebel Moon. Like, he resurrected his career after Warner Bros. Tried to stomp it into a grave. So he loves giving actors a chance to shine on screen. I just wish they had better scripts to work with. Right? Yeah.

51:08
Case
And that's kind of getting back to the weird mixed bag that this movie was. I mean, again, we're not in the Snyder cult wave at this point. We're not at the point where we are building to this just CGI fest that ultimately would.

51:22
Jesse
A lot of people are still looking at Superman as either the Brandon Ralph version or the Christopher Reeve version.

51:28
Case
Right? So good cast, interesting designs. One thing I wanted to bring up that I thought was really cool was the nanotech relief system that the Kryptonians use for their communications that I think is so cool, especially if their vision works differently than ours because tv screens, especially crts, but, like, tv screens in general, rely on our eyes being bad, which I always think is like, so.

51:48
Jesse
What do you think? Most people have to wear glasses these days because we keep staring at these things all the time. Yeah.

51:53
Case
I mean, the whole concept of having frames of movement in any kind of system like film, is that our eye doesn't actually see things perpetually. It has gaps of vision. And you're able to trick it into thinking that movement is occurring because our eyes are shitty and just aren't able to process these things. There are animals on earth that couldn't look at a screen and not just see it as, like, flickering pictures until we got better and better refresh rates on things like octopuses, for example, have better eyes than we do, at least in terms of frame rate. So it was only with the breakthrough into lcd high def with 120 hz level refresh rates that they were able to interpret it as movement as opposed to just static images that they were seeing, like flickering.

52:30
Jesse
I can't wait to watch my brand new 4K tv with my pet octopus.

52:34
Case
But on that note, for a Kryptonian, yeah, sure, they may not be super on Krypton necessarily, but it's an interesting direction to be like, well, yeah, they didn't develop the same things for the same purposes. They have their own versions of things that work totally differently but for the same objective.

52:51
Jesse
Yeah, it's alien. It makes sense. They really do hammer home that he's an alien. He's from an alien world. It's not the same. I appreciate that. It's very appropriate. I think the John Byrne man of Steel story they go into that he's not of this planet. He's really not.

53:10
Case
Yeah.

53:10
Jesse
So I appreciate the effort to do that, but at the same time, it's like, you may not have been born here, but you grew up here. I'm reminded of the first Spider Man. I think I referenced this in my man of Steel pitch. When Spider man, at the end of the first Sam Raimi film, Willem Dafoe says, I could be like a father to you. And Spider man goes, I had a father. His name was Ben Parker. It's like I'm a superhero, but I have a normal father. I think that this movie really needed him to choose one side or the other. And that's another problem with the movie, is that the character of Superman doesn't have an arc. He never makes a choice. He's fairly static as a character. Things happen to him, but he doesn't affect or choose he.

53:53
Jesse
Why is he Superman now? Because Jor El told him to be. He didn't actively choose it. Jor El said, you should do this. So you guys are aware of trickle down economics, correct? Yep. And how it doesn't work. What does Jor El say to Superman when he's getting ready to go out for his first flight? You will give people an ideal to strive towards, and eventually, one day, they will join you in the sun. No, they fucking won't, because they fucking can't, asshole.

54:25
Case
I don't know if I want to compare that much to trickle down economics.

54:29
Jesse
The Iron Randian idea of he's more powerful than everybody else and no one else can ascend to him but Superman.

54:36
Case
The reason he's called Superman as opposed to alien is that he's supposed to be like a human, just evolved a million advanced version Superman because early ideas were that Krypton would be the future as opposed to an alien world. The thought was that, yeah, humanity could achieve this and that he would be the show the way character.

54:57
Jesse
That was the original Joe Schuster Jerry Siegel idea, right?

54:59
Case
Yeah. That's why the first issue of action comics has, like, how could he do these things? And they try to go into the science of it, like, oh, eventually we might be as evolved as ants to lift 50 times our body weight and shit like that. So I think that there's always this element of, like, Superman is the model that we should follow in and that in some regards, that will be innate to our society advancing to an appropriate degree. So I don't think it's automatically trickled down economics, but I do see the point you're making. Yeah.

55:27
Jesse
The idea of Jor El saying, like, you're gonna also, I pointed this out on the man of Steel episode. So they sent him to Earth because they said Earth is an intelligent species. It's like, well, wait a minute. Wasn't the probe ship that you sent there, like, from 10,000 years ago, before we evolved to actually do that? Whatever. Again, whatever the script requires at the time is what they will do. I did, like, 80 bullet points. Literally 80 bullet points where these are the things that don't work in the movie on that episode. So if you want to hear me get shitty drunk and go apeshit crazy, go listen that. It's particularly angry.

56:07
Case
Yeah, it's funny. They missed a golden opportunity to have the reason humans look like Kryptonians be explained by the fact that we could have just been a colony of Krypton that has, like, devolved.

56:16
Jesse
Oh, yeah. That was supposed to be a thing in his cancel Justice League sequels. You know what the idea for themyscarians was? They were ancient Kryptonians that didn't know.

56:25
Case
So that's annoying when it's like, specifically themyscarians. I personally subscribe to a fanon in the DCU that Daximites, Kryptonians, and humans all are from the same root species that colonize the galaxy at some point. And that sort of explains why, when the white Martians fucked with humanity, it fucked up their ability to have superpowers, but connects them to the whole fact of, like, oh, it's weird that kryptonians have similar organ placement and things like that and why they're human like species out there.

56:51
Jesse
It doesn't address the issue of, like, well, what about Zeus and Poseidon and those gods, right?

56:56
Case
Yeah, it gets a lot weirder once you start again.

56:58
Jesse
It doesn't make sense. And then, you know, who the new Batman was supposed to be.

57:02
Case
I forget at the moment. So go.

57:04
Jesse
It was supposed to be Superman and Lois's son. So he's rich and he's powerful. He's a perfect man. He's Howard rook from the Fountainhead.

57:14
Case
There we go. Continuing this whole randy and exploration shit in his movies.

57:19
Jesse
Yep. And a lot of the Snyder fans are like, oh, it's so close to canon. It's so visually close to canon. This is totally different. None of this is in the, like, I'm fine with changing stuff, but saying the femyscarons are like ancient kryptonians. That is not in the comics and makes no sense when you really sit down and think about it with James Gunn changing things for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, I'm fine with that. Because who the fuck gives a shit about the Guardians of the Galaxy? And that's the point. Nobody cares. Change everything you want. Doesn't matter. This is Superman. There is a standard you have to follow, and that's why also, I don't like the fact they took out the John Williams theme, but it really wouldn't fit right.

58:07
Jesse
Like, it would have been so awkward to see human bodies slamming into the concrete while hearing.

58:16
Case
On that note, we should probably mention the music.

58:19
Jesse
The music is great. I'm not a fan. Not a fan.

58:22
Case
I knew you weren't. But I actually think the score works well enough for this movie, and I think it works fine as part of a larger score. I do think that we need a better, true Superman theme, but there are some really good energetic bits in the score that I think works really well.

58:37
Jesse
You watched Black Adam, correct?

58:39
Case
Yes.

58:39
Jesse
Did you notice at the end with the Henry Cavill cameo that they played the John Williams theme and not the man of.

58:45
Case
Yep, yep.

58:46
Jesse
Very slick guys. They really just chucked that thing in the bin. They're like, yep, bye. After Snyder's stuff is done, they're like, yeah, let's get the fuck away from this stuff and just not even acknowledge it. They barely even acknowledged the Justice League movie in Aquaman. I don't even think they really reference it at all in the, like, they never even acknowledge it had happened.

59:08
Case
I still haven't seen the Flash, but it is wild that would be the case, considering that two of the characters only know each other because of the Justice League movie.

59:15
Jmike
They reference it. They kind of reference it twice. Kind of.

59:20
Jesse
They do go back to the attack on Metropolis, which is a weird place to set. Why would you go there? But anyways, the music for what the movie is, it's appropriately scored.

59:32
Case
Like, his first flight, for example, is like, it's a fun. There's some really good moments in there, and a lot of the tones are good. It's just we're missing a really strong, like, here's the point theme for, like, the equivalent to the John Williams score.

59:48
Jesse
Although I would say these are better than the Marvel scores. Marvel doesn't even have a score. Yeah.

59:53
Case
I mean, this is a score, and it's not a jukebox musical. Unfortunately, they didn't do a kanye power drop in this movie, which they very easily could have, as was the style of the time.

01:00:03
Jesse
The only theme I can think of in the Marvel universe is the Avengers theme. That's the only one I can think of.

01:00:11
Case
There's a few others, like Thor has one. Iron man is just ACDC. Yeah.

01:00:16
Jesse
Okay. Yeah. Well, for the first movie, and then they lost the rights. I think after the first one, he.

01:00:21
Case
Shows up with ACD playing in both two and in Avengers, it might be after that they lose it.

01:00:28
Jesse
Oh, that reminds me, going back to the whole military fetishism thing. Marvel, they lost their ability to have the military in their movies. You know why?

01:00:37
Case
Because the military was not allowed to be right in the Avengers.

01:00:40
Jesse
No. It's because Shield is a higher form of power than the US military is in the Marvel universe. And they said, yeah, we're supposed to be at the top, and they pulled their funding. It's fiction, guys. It's not even real.

01:00:55
Case
I really wish that movies that had us military funding had to have a prefix on their titles. And. Yeah, the US Defense Department presents.

01:01:05
Jesse
Yes, I agree. Yeah. Like, whenever you see the military in a movie, they really should say, this film brought to you by the Department of Defense, because it does feel a lot like propaganda. And I would even say that most of Snyder's movies feel like propaganda.

01:01:20
Case
I mean, a lot of fucking movies. Snyder's movies, yes. But, like, just a lot of fucking, like, way more movies than you expect.

01:01:26
Jesse
What else would fall into that?

01:01:28
Case
Well, obviously top gun.

01:01:30
Jesse
Oh, God. Yeah. Top gun. Oh, my God.

01:01:33
Case
But there's a lot of movies where it's not necessarily all about the military, but the fact that they'll have, like, military scenes is usually because they got some money from the US military and it gets inserted that way. It's out there a lot. I also think that should be the way for football games. It should be the US Department of Defense presents the NFL, because, holy hell. Hey, you're possibly right. I'm not saying they cheat.

01:01:57
Jesse
They have jet flyovers for the fucking Super bowl. Okay. Absolutely. They should be brought to you by the.

01:02:03
Case
They're pumping money into it. I'm not making something up right now. They do absolutely fund it.

01:02:10
Jesse
It's one of the most expensive sporting events in world history. They're absolutely partially funding it. They absolutely are.

01:02:18
Case
And this might help people remember that when they're looking at this whole, like, why is the US military always failing its audits? And by that, I don't mean that it's like spending money in weird ways. I mean, they can't account for where they spent the money.

01:02:29
Jmike
We paid for that movie. We paid for that movie.

01:02:33
Jesse
Didn't they lose, like, 5 billion recently? How do you just misplace 5 billion? Right?

01:02:39
Case
That's what we're getting at with this whole thing where they're spending so much money, it'd be nice if they could at least account for where they spent it.

01:02:45
Jmike
That's all I'm saying.

01:02:46
Jesse
Yeah, I know this is not a political podcast. With the recent fights to not shut down the government. We didn't get, like, our student loan forgiveness that got taken away recently by the supreme Court. Fuck all of you. We didn't get any new infrastructure funding. We got increased spending for the Department of Defense, even though we're already higher than the next 20 countries below us. And we got a new pipeline. That's what we got.

01:03:10
Jmike
And you'll be happy about it.

01:03:12
Jesse
You'll be fucking happy, asshole. You're living in your car. Yeah.

01:03:20
Case
Anyway, so I'm just saying that, hey.

01:03:23
Jesse
Every empire is supposed to only last about 250 years. We're almost there.

01:03:27
Case
When you're paying for your bread and circuses, it'd be nice to just be honest about where the bread and circuses are coming from. And if we're going to have those things in these movies, people should just be aware of it all, because it is kind of creepy just how much they're putting it in there. I don't mind Superman teaming up with the US military to deal with an alien invasion, like, for a long time, I was saying, like, hey, you could finally do a decent Superman movie following Independence Day, because I always was saying, hey, wouldn't it be cool if in the 90s, they made a brainiac focused movie where it looked like the alien stuff from Independence day and had Superman with the special effects of Independence Day, where the alien ships didn't look that bad?

01:04:02
Case
You could make a convincing fight in the air with something like that. And, hey, that would make sense for some military stuff. And this movie is pretty close. There's a lot of Independence Day parallels, like Zod appearing on tv. I was like, oh, right. This is very much just like how Independence Day worked.

01:04:18
Jesse
The beam going down into the city. It's like. It's just like Independence Day. Yeah, that's the attack part.

01:04:22
Case
But I mean, like, the actual beats of the alien approach and like, oh.

01:04:25
Jesse
It'S actually an alien movie countdown.

01:04:27
Case
Yeah. Like this war of the world kind of. And actually, on that note, the fact that the world inches a tripod like, this war of the world kind of component to it all isn't bad. And fuck, man. Like, Superman plus War of the Worlds is so goddamn good. There's a comic they did in 1998. They put out a crossover book where it's golden age Superman dealing with radio broadcast War of the Worlds. And it was written by Roy Thomas. And it's fucking awesome.

01:04:50
Jesse
I think I've read it. I think I might have it here.

01:04:52
Case
Yeah, it's a one shot. It's really fun because the aliens are powerful and Superman's powerful, but neither are quite so crazy. And it's this weird world of, like, what the hell? And it's two different alien groups and people are scared of both as a. Like, that easily gets updated with an Independence Day style lens. And you're not too far from what this movie is. It's just they didn't cement it in ways that would be really kind of interesting and beyond. Just like disaster porn.

01:05:19
Jmike
I will only agree to this if we get a shot of Superman, like Falcon punching one of the brainiac clones and saying, welcome to Earth. That's the only way I'll agree to this.

01:05:29
Jesse
That's the other issue with the movie, is that there's no stakes. I pointed this out, and I think Seth Decker, my co host, one of my co hosts, we said, why is it that neither Superman nor the Kryptonians are taking any kind of damage? Like, there's no blood bruising, broken bones, nothing. I understand. Like a human punching Kryptonian, you're not going to hurt them. I get it. But a Kryptonian punching a Kryptonian, you should see something. Yeah, and there's nothing. There's one moment when he's, like, dragging Zod across the edge of a building and he's wrecking the fucking thing. And I'm like. He just gets up and it's like there's not even a scratch. It's like, well, all tension is diffused. The only thing I feel sympathy for is all the people that are in those buildings wondering what the fuck is going on.

01:06:14
Jmike
There's also the part where they go through this whole thing about Clark having to adapt to his powers and things. And then Zod masters it in like 30 seconds.

01:06:23
Jesse
Yeah, again, whatever the script requires at that time, that's what the logic is supposed to be. The end fight has to happen. We got to do this. We need to have them fight. Okay.

01:06:36
Case
Yeah. The movie actually is playing very aggressive with canon of Superman, like, trying to deviate in specific ways. While they mention the yellow sun, a bigger issue is the atmosphere and how it relates to everyone. Like, them breathing that. And that makes it weirder that they're trying to terraform the planet. There's all these elements to it. Like, well, why are you doing that? If it would work this way?

01:06:55
Jesse
Yeah. Why would you not want to have powers? Exactly. Why would you not want to fly?

01:06:59
Case
And I have a very easy explanation for what could have been that canon, which is just, like, under Earth's atmosphere, they're Carol.

01:07:05
Jesse
Or you could do the all star Superman storyline, where eventually it gives them. Yeah. Anything, please. Yeah.

01:07:14
Case
There's just so easy ways where you could explain it with it not being an issue or you don't do it and you're just excited to have superpowers on this. Like, certainly they seem to gravitate towards it pretty quickly when they first arrive for that Smallville fight. Again, that Smallville fight has a lot of things that are really good. I love the fact that the two kryptonians are way weaker than Superman in terms of raw power. But between their armor and their presence on the planet and their military skills, they're keeping up pretty well. And that collectively, it's working really well and that it's his hometown. All of these are things I really like.

01:07:46
Jesse
I just realized something. So if the big dude, I can't remember his name, and Fiora, if they haven't adapted, why are they moving super fast?

01:07:56
Case
Yeah. So that's sort of the thing where it's probably the armor.

01:08:01
Jesse
I just realized, oh, my God, how did I miss that one?

01:08:05
Case
So it's probably the armor.

01:08:06
Jesse
No reason they're supposed to move that fast.

01:08:08
Case
And you could argue that maybe some of the solar radiation part of it all, or the gravity, there are lots of reasons why it would be working. Just, it wouldn't work all the way on them. Regardless, we end up in a scenario where they're like, golden age Superman versus someone who is like, burn era Superman. Power wise, that fight's really cool. I like that element. I like that Zod is at first fighting in that sort of style, but once he becomes more adapted to our atmosphere, he's able to actually do the fight stuff. You could make arguments for why him being there longer. And I know in it, they're like, well, he's a soldier, so he is trained to focus on his senses, so he's able to get there. Those are all good moments, or at least like, explanations for it.

01:08:46
Jesse
What Seth brought up is that he was bred to be a soldier, and so he's meant to adapt quickly so you can kind of sort of forgive that one. But it doesn't explain the other two characters, right? It doesn't explain Fiora or the big dude.

01:08:59
Case
And that's why I think that the armors and their technology as the reason for it. And I like in your pitch, for example, you really focus on their weapons. But I think the armor itself also plays a really good part of that because the armor is designed in such way that it looks a lot like the Bronze Age Lex Luthor armor. And it would have made so much sense if the progression of weird shit coming from Superman was a world of kryptonian tech influencing humans tech and going in that sort of direction and starting to open up all the weird crap that could be out there. If it was just the dry start of a much progressively more insane kind of world, we probably would look back much more fondly.

01:09:34
Case
But now we're several years out from the last real entry into the Snyderverse, from the perspective of a Snyder movie, and the movies that are kind of sort of still tied to it are diminishingly so in a lot of ways.

01:09:50
Jesse
It's, like, so tangential at this point that it's kind of its own thing. The flash has kind of thrown everything out of canon. Isn't Barry, like, caught in the Batman and Robin universe now or something like that?

01:10:01
Jmike
Spoilers case. Have you seen it?

01:10:04
Jesse
Nobody?

01:10:04
Case
I haven't seen it yet. Okay.

01:10:07
Jmike
I think so. I was very confused about that part because I was like, I don't know where he popped out. Well, he didn't pop out.

01:10:13
Case
It's certainly an alternate timeline with the multiverse stuff going on.

01:10:17
Jesse
Yeah, when you get into multiverse, it's like, fuck it, anything goes, whatever. Doesn't mean canon. Is that not canon? Sure. Snyderverse still exists. It's just kind of over there in the corner by mean, because like Jesse.

01:10:31
Case
As you said, we always have some kind of version of Superman out there. If nothing else, we have the comics, and the comics are constantly reinventing themselves as well.

01:10:38
Jesse
And I have a feeling that when the Superman and Lois show wraps up on the CW, they're only getting, I.

01:10:43
Case
Think, like five episodes next season, ten.

01:10:46
Jesse
They'Re wrapping up the show, and then by that point, Superman legacy will be in theaters, right? So we will have another Superman just right away.

01:10:55
Jmike
We also have my avengers of Superman.

01:10:57
Jesse
Yeah.

01:10:57
Case
So we're constantly getting material. So, like, I'm curious to go back to this movie once Superman legacy comes out, to see how it feels.

01:11:06
Jesse
I really needed to be hopeful. I was thinking about the other day, like, how do you open a new Superman movie? Remember in all star Superman, the story of the girl that was going to jump off the building? She was depressed. That is the first scene. And he rescues her and he hugs her. That right there got the whole audience on board. This is not the Snyderverse. As far away as you could possibly go because they parodied that on the boys with Homelander going like, yeah, jump. It's like, that is Snyder's Superman. And then you look at how they made fun of the justice league with the dawn of the seven. And Snyder's like, laughing at, it's like, dude, they're making fun of, like, you. You do missed the joke.

01:11:48
Case
And this is why it's like, well, it's hard to necessarily get that mad because he plays along with it and I just don't know him personally, so.

01:11:54
Jesse
I don't want to does. When I see him interviews, it seems like he's kind of dim. A lot of people say, like, oh, his movie has such great visuals. All that shit is a green screen. Anytime he has to film, like, an actual scene with actors in a scene, very rarely is the shot composition very unique. It's very kind of standard shot reverse shots. He doesn't do any complex camera moves. It's typically just let the CGI guys handle the shit afterwards. 300 is all plate shots? Yeah, it's all plate shots. All it is. Watchmen. Most of it's plate shots. Army of the Dead was filmed entirely on a green screen. Why? It's a zombie movie. It's just a zombie movie. Why is it a green screen?

01:12:36
Case
Well, so you can seamlessly integrate tig notaro into it.

01:12:41
Jesse
Oh, God. That is like the most hideous looking movie. I swear to God, I hate it. The shallow depth of field drove me crazy, which, by the way, the tail end of his Justice League. I'm pretty sure that was all filmed on the same location as army of the dead. It's shot with the same cameras and the same lenses. You can kind of tell it's that very shallow depth of focus. It's all close ups. You can just see, it's like, yeah, we're attacking this on just in case I ever want to come back. You're not coming back, dude.

01:13:11
Case
Looking at this movie, though, I will say and again, kind of like going from the perspective of what was it like to be excited for this movie beforehand versus then how we felt afterwards. We do also have to remember the previous movie was Superman Returns, which, oh, God, has things to like about it. The plane sequence is really cool.

01:13:28
Jmike
People talk about that for days.

01:13:29
Case
But in terms of muted colors, fuck. The movie itself has this sort of like faux Norman Rockwell kind of feel to it with this kind of amber kind of hue to it all. Yeah, but there are at least colors. Except for on fucking Superman.

01:13:43
Jesse
His suit is so muted.

01:13:44
Case
Yeah.

01:13:45
Jesse
So ugly.

01:13:46
Case
So at least in this movie, his cape is red, so that's a good start sometimes exactly. Like there's a blue filter in so many scenes. There's like all this stuff going on.

01:13:55
Jesse
And somebody did a YouTube video. They said, what would it look like if man of Steel was in color? And like, all the colors, they got rid of the desaturation and they made the colors pop. And I was like, wow, it looks really good. Again, this was a time frame when every movie looked like this. Kind of. We're getting to the tail end of this post 911 feel where it's like everything's just drab and desaturated. Like the Jason Bourne movies all look like, oh my God, those movies are hideous. Now that's the thing, is that these are all watershed movies spiraling down and everything just eventually just looks like this.

01:14:31
Case
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly iterated upon anybody's fault.

01:14:34
Jesse
It's just what was popular, which is weird because I think in 2010, Scott Pilgrim versus the world came out one of the most colorful movies ever made.

01:14:42
Case
And Bond at the time.

01:14:44
Jesse
Bond.

01:14:45
Case
But as a cult classic because it was just the wrong movie for that era.

01:14:48
Jesse
Yeah, that reminds me, Skyfall is also very post 911. It has that kind of brutal, or even maybe like the first three of that. Casino Royale.

01:14:57
Case
Yeah, I was going to say all.

01:14:59
Jesse
Of the Daniel Craig three feel very like post 911. The spy agencies are there to sort of be paranoid of everybody around you.

01:15:08
Case
Although Skyfall is actually a good one to bring up in the sense that movie specifically was kind of breaking away from the grim, dark post 911 kind of vibe that had been coming in from casino and from Quantum.

01:15:19
Jesse
Personal story about.

01:15:20
Case
Right. A lot of people remarked that, oh, hey, we're getting back to a Sean Connery style kind of James Bond like. We're getting a classic Aston Martin, we're getting more gadgets, we're getting more of like a conventional villain.

01:15:30
Jesse
It's a lot of member berries.

01:15:32
Case
Yes. But that is the one that's coming off of two movies at this point. And that, I believe came out the same summer. Or was it this year before? Either way, we're in a very similar kind of time frame.

01:15:42
Jesse
I want to say it was 2011 or 2012 because it was like four separate movies. Did the whole, oh, the bad guy got called on purpose. Yeah. So it was that. And I think the Avengers did the same thing with Loki intentionally getting.

01:15:54
Case
But it was fall of 2012, and then this is coming out in the spring of 2013. So we're not really talking about, like, massive difference in timeline. My point is, that was a movie where they were like, okay, we did that a couple of times. Let's get out of it and get back into the things people really love about the franchise. This movie hadn't learned that lesson yet. This movie was just like, well, we've got better CGI than we used to. We can do Dragon Ball Z type fight sequences if we really need to.

01:16:20
Jesse
Hope our co host is going to hate you for that because she hates Dragon Ball Z is just fighting. We know. It's not all fighting.

01:16:26
Case
I love Dragon Ball Z.

01:16:28
Jesse
We know it's not all fighting. We know. It's just funny to say it.

01:16:33
Case
Yeah, I just mean that the anime esque, kind of like more exaggerated fight sequences that first became popular in western made live action movies. With the Matrix, there was a direct line in terms of what they could actually do in terms of fight choreography with superpowers coming from the Matrix films to this. And people wanted that. So there was a lot of enthusiasm about that. And when you got the guy who did a cool fighting movie, the, like, 300 people were excited about that, too. We all complained that Superman returns was too boring, that it wasn't interesting enough, that the stakes were too human level. Like, ultimately it was like, okay, we're creating a new island for real estate schemes and you're going to fight Lex Luthor while we get Lex.

01:17:12
Jesse
You can do better than that.

01:17:14
Case
But the point is like, let's do a Zod movie. Let's do a big movie like that. Let's do big action, big destruction. Let's have like, yeah, when superheroes fight, there's collateral damage because the ultimates was still fresh on people's minds where it was like, oh, yeah, the Hulk fucking killed, like, hundreds of people in New York. The one time he rampaged.

01:17:30
Jesse
Didn't they actually release them himself in order to give the Avengers something to fight?

01:17:34
Case
Part of that was to quote unquote, give them something to fight. And part of that was so that he could get revenge on his.

01:17:39
Jesse
Does his first Suicide Squad movie copy that plot? Because that's the same plot.

01:17:46
Case
It's wild when it's like, oh, man, Mark Millar has really shaped the nature of the comic book film industry.

01:17:51
Jesse
God, there's been a whole tirade against Mark Millar. Recently. I've been seeing a ton of tweets being like, man, we hate that. Like, yeah, I agree. He's an asshole.

01:18:01
Case
I mean, I don't need to go too deep on that specifically because I think that Mark Millar has a mixed portfolio as well. But the big thing is that we're talking about a movie that felt like a product of its time, but it was already feeling dated by the time it hit theaters. And tastes had started to change in very specific ways by the time we got here, and this movie hadn't caught up to that yet, it had been.

01:18:23
Jesse
Twelve years since 911. It's like, God, we're still doing this. Still doing this. People shouldn't walk out of a Superman movie feeling grim and miserable and depressed. Neither should they walk out of a Star Trek movie feeling grim and miserable and depressed. People walked out of. Into darkness feeling like, just blah. And by the way, that's, I think, our first episode for season nine of film rescue. You're supposed to be on that one case.

01:18:46
Case
Yes. I'm looking forward to dusting off my notes.

01:18:50
Jesse
I have not watched that movie in a long time, and I'm going to get very angry.

01:18:55
Case
And here's the comparison between Star Trek and Superman. Both are inherently optimistic franchises, and also both of those have a worse taste in your mouth when that is where the franchise is currently existing, versus in retrospect, when you're looking at Star Trek into darkness from the perspective that we would get strange new worlds, it is a different taste because, hey, there's fucking amazing trek now that people can easily access. It sucks that series like prodigy are being canceled and pulled from their networks. But that's the industry.

01:19:23
Jesse
We really don't want to pay our writers, do we?

01:19:26
Case
That's the industry and not the franchise. The franchise is in pretty good shape, and as a result, the bumps in the road feel less damaging.

01:19:33
Jesse
The bumps in the road are just Alex Kurtzman after I ran over him with my car. So if it's Alex Kurtzman, don't threaten.

01:19:40
Case
Me with a good time.

01:19:42
Jesse
If it's Alex Kurtzman, Star Trek, don't watch it. If it's Terry Mattela, Star Trek. Fucking watch it. It's good. Yeah.

01:19:47
Case
I mean, if he's a producer, it's like whatever his name is on all.

01:19:50
Jesse
Of it, but, like executive producer code for I got a paycheck.

01:19:54
Case
Right? Exactly. Fail upwards, you know?

01:19:57
Jesse
John Peters, who was supposed to produce the Superman Lives script, is a producer on this one by name only because he's had his name attached over so long, he's got some kind of rights contract with it. He started as a Barbra Streisand's hairdresser. Yep.

01:20:12
Case
Yeah.

01:20:12
Jesse
If anyone has upward.

01:20:14
Case
Yeah. If anyone has not seen the Kevin Smith speech about working on the Superman Liz project, go check that out. It's worth buying the dvd set for an evening with Kevin Smith, volume one. Just for that.

01:20:25
Jesse
There's a documentary called the Death of Superman lives that was done by John Schnepp, I think is his name. He got interviews from cast and crew and everybody that was involved in all the different designs for the suit. And it would have been interesting. I don't know if it would have been a good movie, but it would have been definitely unique. More unique than, I would say, than man of Steel, which, if you really think about it's a watershed of the post 911 style of filmmaking. This is a fairly safe way of making film because it's hard in the opposite direction from Superman returns. So it's like, oh, that movie was too boring. Let's put in the action 911 movies are popular. Let's put in 911. It's just like ticking boxes. Like, check.

01:21:10
Jesse
Get Snyder, who will do what he's told by the studio and then give him all the keys to all the best cars and then let him wreck them.

01:21:19
Case
Yeah. Well, can you do a Michael Bay Superman? And can that Michael Bay Superman be slightly smarter? And I think that's the big line here for why people like Snyder. He's got the Michael Bay aesthetic in terms of the way more clever. Yeah, exactly. Again, it's that prep school philosophy student. He's like, no, this is analogy for this thing, but that thing is 911.

01:21:39
Jesse
It's prep school philosophy with very amateur style filmmaking. Because I always love to point out the church scene.

01:21:46
Jmike
Oh, yeah.

01:21:48
Jesse
So did you notice that he's Jesus? He's 33, he's in a church, and he's questioning what he should do with an image of Jesus behind him in the garden of Nazareth. Do you get it? Yeah.

01:22:03
Case
And then later, when he leaves the ship, for whatever reason, Christ arms. Worst part is that church scene, you could just cut. Watching it today, I was just like.

01:22:12
Jmike
Oh, yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

01:22:14
Case
You could just totally remove it. And, of course, there's the incredible how it should have ended, where it was just like, what if instead it was just like, no, I should probably talk to someone who knows him. My space dad.

01:22:26
Jesse
Yeah. Like, you had access to the ship. You could just go back there. Hey, how did Clark learn how to fly the alien ship?

01:22:34
Case
I'm assuming Jor El flew the alien ship, but also, it moves, and that's why it's like, well, it's not in the location that all the Americans know where the fortress of solitude is, because that's a weird choice.

01:22:43
Jesse
There's satellites in the sky that could literally look down and look at the thing.

01:22:46
Case
But isn't it so much cooler to be like, yeah, it's buried in 20,000 year old ice, or whatever it was saying in the sequence. That is such a cooler. This is where the fortress of Solitude is. Than it's an alien crash ship. Like, just somewhere on top of a glacier somewhere.

01:23:02
Jesse
People can say the Donner movies are outdated. I agree they are outdated. But I love that design for the.

01:23:08
Case
Fortress of solitude in its own way. The Krypton tech for that, also very cool. That's a weird part where both this movie and that had very, like, the Krypton tech specifically, was one of the highlights of the design working.

01:23:21
Jesse
I mean, it really does integrate the anatomy and the mechanics of Krypton into the story. I get the fact that they tried to make it more Sci-Fi esque, and I appreciate that. But at the same time, it doesn't really help the story. The story itself is kind of basic. It's just an alien invasion movie. There's not a lot to like. It's a dumb movie that thinks it's smart. Like, people that read Ayn Rand, they're dumb. People that think they're.

01:23:50
Case
No, that's. That is exactly it.

01:23:53
Jesse
And for all the problems of this movie, for all, like, the plot issues, the bad color grading, the terrible dialogue, this only ends one way, Cal. Either you die or I do. Just fuck you. Okay? That terrible line that I will never forget, that means you. Only one way that's going to. Well, this only ends one way. Either you die or I do. That's an either or. It's not one way. That's either. Oh, for God's sake. For all the problems of this movie, the biggest problem is a lack of empathy. You don't care, and the characters don't care.

01:24:33
Jmike
Superman doesn't care.

01:24:35
Jesse
There's no genuine love in the film. Snyder doesn't like Superman. So Superman doesn't like Superman. So Superman doesn't like people. No one loves anybody in this movie.

01:24:50
Case
Yeah.

01:24:51
Jesse
John Kent acts very cold and standoffish with his own son. Martha is in the film. Yes, but her scenes are very minimal.

01:25:02
Jmike
Are we sure it's Martha? It could be Martha right under Martha.

01:25:07
Jesse
Why'd you say that name? That's what they hinged all of this universe on that scene.

01:25:13
Case
Well, that's the whole thing about all of these movies, which is that there are ideas that are being expressed in this movie, but are they properly conveyed in the actual text of the movie? The idea of Superman being upset that he had to kill Zod, part of that is that he should have been excited to find his own people. Zod should have been exciting to, like, compare it with X Men, first class, where the rift between Magneto and Xavier, that's such a strong element there that when they actually have to face off against each other, that is a moment of great sadness. That kind of is how things should have been with him and Zod, where it's like, oh, hey, this Kryptonian arrived, and he shouldn't have just immediately known that Zod was a bad guy.

01:25:52
Case
It could have been like, hey, it's so exciting that we have Zod here. Zod seems pretty cool. Like, my people are back. They're survivors of my world. I have felt so alone on this world this whole time. And now look at them like, this is great. Wait, what are you guys. Sorry. You're going to do what now? Hold on.

01:26:07
Jesse
Wait.

01:26:07
Case
We shouldn't allow that. Don't make me do this, guys. Don't make me do this. And then Superman fights them and wins. And then at the end, when he has been forced to kill Zod and all of his people have been stripped from him, he is truly sad because he is truly alone as far as his species goes. And that loneliness that he has felt this whole time on this planet is there. But now he has new acceptance as a hero of, like, that's the arc that should have been in this movie. And I think Snyder thought it was because every time that this comes up, people are like, oh, it's because he's so upset that he killed Zod, the last member of his race. But that's not in the text. What that is a commentary, track level analysis of it.

01:26:46
Case
Like an interview describing what that scene looked like. It's someone who's too close to the material, saying, this is what it's supposed to represent, but not actually doing the work to have that be in the actual piece itself.

01:26:57
Jesse
That's the thing that the Snyder fans love to point out is like, oh, well, he feels upset that he had to kill, like, but it's never established he doesn't like to murder. Like, you see so many times when he's a kid. This kid had a terrible upbring. He was bullied constantly and treated like dog shit, but he never seemed like he was ever having a genuinely positive childhood. So wouldn't he grow up to become a psychopath? I pointed this out on our man of steel episode. There's a comic called irredeemable by Mark Wade. And the character, the Plutonian, is evil Superman. He's straight up evil Superman. And it's what happens if Superman grows up in a terrible environment and his parents treat him like shit. He's constantly insulted and picked on. Well, he goes apeshit crazy and destroys half the planet.

01:27:43
Jesse
Like, there's a moment when he just breaks out of his prison, goes into the atmosphere, and literally carves into the continental shelf. His symbol, a giant design of his symbol, and he just, like, burns away a huge chunk of planet Earth. That's this version of Superman. He doesn't seem like he's very happy to be there or happy to help. Like, because the rescuing sequence that's in bbs, that was mandated by the studio because they were like, yeah, why is Superman not saving anybody?

01:28:18
Case
Yeah. Again, this movie, I think, hasn't really fallen into that trap as is. He does save people, especially the flashback stuff. We get the oil rig scene is pretty good, and then Lois does have a bunch of lines about it, but they don't do enough with. That's. That's kind of the like. They set up that. His backstory is that he has always felt the need to help people, but they don't really like, that's never in his present. The last time we see him do that is the oil rig scene at the beginning of the movie. And then after that, it's not until it's like, well, I better put on my super suit and go deal with the Kryptonians.

01:28:48
Jesse
Isn't the bar scene right after the oil rig scene? Why did he get scared and run away? The guy was like, five foot three. Come on, man.

01:28:58
Case
It is the weirdest scene where it's, like, the guy that they choose because that's such a great moment where he tries to shove. Exactly. That's great. And, yeah, the waitress comes up and she says, he's not worth it. But how not worth it.

01:29:13
Jesse
Isn't that your job?

01:29:15
Case
Yeah, kind of. There's a very similar scene to that in the current season of Superman and Lois.

01:29:20
Jesse
But I can't do a root canal on you right now because I'm having an existential crisis. It's your job.

01:29:26
Case
Well, so there's, like, a very similar sequence in the current season of Superman and Lois where Clark goes and confronts someone who is just like a near do well in town who does the same shove and nothing happens because he's Superman and then tries to get more aggressive and he effortlessly pins him to the table of this diner that they're at.

01:29:45
Jesse
Oh, yeah, that's right. I saw that scene.

01:29:47
Case
Yeah. And that's basically what should have happened right there because it's not even like, oh, I might accidentally kill you. It's like he could have defeated him without even extending that level of effort.

01:29:59
Jesse
This was also in Superman two, right? Richard Lester version. I think it's also in the Donner cut as well.

01:30:04
Case
Yeah, it's in both. That's where he's depowered when he encounters him and then comes back with his powers at the end.

01:30:10
Jesse
Yeah, which doesn't make any sense in the Donner cut because it's like, wait a minute. Didn't you rewind time so we wouldn't remember? That movie is kind of, like, stitched together with, like, bailing wire and duct tape if you really break it down. I like the Donner cup, but it is definitely like, why'd you do the reverse time thing again? It does feel like they wanted to have that moment of Superman going back to Zod being killed. They wanted to have that moment of, like, oh, man, he's really upset about this. But they didn't establish that he doesn't want to do this. Right. Plus, you just spent, like, 40 minutes wrecking the entire town. Who knows how many people are dead and you're not giving a shit about them. This family of four people. Why do you now suddenly care?

01:30:53
Jesse
Oh, because the movie needs to end. Like I said, whatever is appropriate for the script, that moment, that's what they go with. And that's another thing in objectivism, is that metaphor is not important. A equals, like, well, what you're seeing is Superman is defending that family and he really want to protect them because he's Superman. But you haven't established that because the script is bad.

01:31:22
Case
Right. Again, almost all of these either could make sense or would work fine if set up or the idea is fine but not developed. Like him saving a bunch of people and killing him and being upset. Those all make sense as sequences. If you really needed to do that.

01:31:39
Jesse
On paper, it sounds fine, right? But it's just not well set up. You were saying about commentary track having to fill in gaps and like that. That's a common thing with Snyder in his movies like this whole trilogy. The justification for why the boxes come alive in Justice League is because he says in his commentary, when he was doing a watch party before the Snyder cut was released, he said, well, it's Superman's yell. Awoken the. It's like, well, that was never in BBS. Only in the opening of Justice League is that revealed, because he mentioned it in a watch party during bbs. So it's like they're almost kind of like retrofitting all the stuff. Like, I meant to do that, I swear. I promise. It's like building a car and driving it at the same time.

01:32:30
Jesse
You didn't have a plan going into this again, it feels like the machinations of a guy that's just not the brightest. I'm sure he's a nice person, but I have more faith in James Gun. Here's the thing. I will say why James Gun was a good choice to take on Superman. James Gun had a really shitty life growing up. He's been very kind of nebulous about it. He doesn't talk about it much, but he had an alcoholic father. He was actually curb stomped when he was younger. A lot of his teeth are actually fake. So he had a really rough upbringing. He's come from really shitty beginnings, working at trauma, working on crappy know, grinding his way up to the top, and now he's in charge of the biggest franchises on the planet. Zack Snyder.

01:33:15
Jesse
His mother was a famous photographer, and he's always kind of had money. He's always kind of had it on easy street. So he's never really had to struggle too much. James Gunn has something to say. Those Guardians films, they are about human trauma, about therapy, about getting past your own personal problems. What is this trilogy? Man of Steel, BBS and his Justice League about? What is he trying to say? The only thing I can come up with is, what if Superman was evil? Because the nightmare sequence at the end of Justice League is like, oh, well, what if he's going to go evil?

01:33:57
Case
Yeah, well, what if he cracks? What if Atlas shrugs?

01:34:00
Jesse
What if Atlas shrugs. That's it. That's literally all he has to say.

01:34:03
Case
And I think with your, like, this movie less so than the others, which is why I just genuinely think this is the best of the Snyder DC movies. Like, the Snyder helmed DC movies because this movie actually had an editorial process.

01:34:16
Jesse
Even his Justice League.

01:34:17
Case
Yeah, from a construction standpoint, BVS is the worst.

01:34:20
Jesse
Oh God.

01:34:20
Case
Yeah. Not the point. The thing is though, he has never had as much pushback from the studios in terms of what he was allowed to do just by virtue of the fact that he was kind of given the keys when DC didn't know what to do, especially for BVS.

01:34:35
Jesse
Yeah, they announced that. What was that like ten movie stretch of things. It was like, give me Green Lantern Corps and Wonder Woman, Flash. And most of those never came to pass. So they immediately chucked that plan out the window when BBS didn't do as well as they'd hoped. It is worth noting that another thing that Snyder fans defend is that, well, man of Steel and BBS, they made a ton of money. If you really add them all up and everything after that's been financially failing. Well, yeah, because we saw through the bullshit. We got burned once with man of Steel. We're like, okay, maybe BBS will fix it. We got Batman in there, we got Wonder Woman, maybe it's going to be good. And we saw it was even worse and then it's like, well, yeah, I'm not going back.

01:35:16
Jesse
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I'm not going back. Like, that's why people stopped going. And now we're at the tail end of the Snyderverse with the flash and no one showed up. It failed. These first two movies made money. Yes, BVS made a ton of money. Transformers makes tons of know. It doesn't mean anything. Who gives a shit if it makes their. So they made their quota for their taxes for the year. Congratulations.

01:35:47
Case
I mean, money is important. Like having a movie that sells perception.

01:35:51
Jesse
I was talking with Bob Shipman about this movie. Bob, perception means a lot. Like Thor, love and thunder. And I think it was across the spider verse, I think are generally doing the same financially, right? Like, one is not very beloved, the other one is. Or when Birds of Prey came out, it made the same amount of money as Ford v. Ferrari. One got mixed reviews and was said, oh, it's a financial bomb. The other one was like, oh, it's a critical darling. Got nominated for awards and it's a financial success. Like, perception means a lot. People expected Birds of prey to make a bazillion dollars and it didn't. It's fine. I like the movie. It's good. It's not my favorite of the DC movies, but it's pretty good and it's got charm to it.

01:36:35
Jesse
It's more than I can say for the Snyder stuff. It's almost like Harley Quinn pushing away from the, like, get off of, like, that's what it feels like. So perception counts for a lot. And people just, they saw that Justice League coming down the road and they're just like, not doing it. I don't want to do it well.

01:36:53
Case
And, like, the fandom itself has really made it very difficult to be even a moderate fan of this property.

01:36:59
Jesse
You're either all in or you're, you know, and it's. It's creepy. Like I said, it's a cult. It's creepy. Yeah.

01:37:05
Case
Thank you for mentioning movie Bob. I was debating if I was going to bring this up. He had a point that I actually kind of agreed with at the time, which was like, his initial review of the movie, when it came out was positive, and then even like, a week later, it was already like, actually, I think that I was just kind of caught up in the hype cycle. I related to that because I also came out and I was, like, excited. I told my then girlfriend, now wife, like, I'll go see this again, because I think it's actually a really good one.

01:37:29
Jesse
You had a very different opinion.

01:37:31
Jmike
Oh, God. We did the same thing, case. We just did the same thing. Because I went to go see that movie opening night and with my then girlfriend and one of her friends, and.

01:37:42
Jesse
I was like, oh, my gosh, this is great.

01:37:45
Jmike
I went home and I thought about it. I was like, wait a second.

01:37:49
Case
Which is not weird. Like the phantom menace. I had the same reaction.

01:37:53
Jesse
Yeah, Pat and Oswald did the same. Is like, yeah, go see man of steel. It'll turn your spine into powder. And then, like, a couple of weeks later, he's like, yeah, this movie is not that great.

01:38:01
Case
Right? Which is why I think it gets more hate than necessarily it deserves relative to the later stuff, by virtue of, like, well, it wasn't that bad. It's just in retrospect. But also, at the time, there was so much hype going into it felt more disappointing than necessarily bad.

01:38:16
Jesse
It's also the watershed of the Transformers movies, where it's like the movie itself, like the sound design, it's so loud all the time that it's almost punishing to watch it. I've grown to not like loud movies anymore. Something like Mad Max Fury Road. That's a loud film, but appropriately loud. There's a rhythm. There's a melody. There's a harmony to it. Like the engines revving and then the guns fire and the clanking of the metal, it feels harmonious at times. This is just like, boom, boom. It's like having two jackhammers, like, slamming into your skull. Like I said, there's no sense of empathy or joy. There was no sense of empathy or joy in the sound design either, because it doesn't feel like any one sound takes precedence over another. It's just like, no. Slam it at level ten on the audio track, everything.

01:39:07
Jesse
And it's hard to sit through, in my opinion. It's very kind of annoying. And then that world engine starts up and it's just.

01:39:19
Case
Yeah, I mean, compared with, like, Star wars, which is actually fairly loud at specific points, like, even just the original Star wars, like the tie fighter noises, the lightsaber sounds, the blasters, but the.

01:39:29
Jesse
Music, when the music needs to come up, it comes up. Right? That attack on the Death Star, that music going down the trench, it's like, oh, man. You're just like, yeah, come on, man. Do it, do it, do it. It hypes you up. Whereas when you get to this movie, did you notice that the man of Steel theme doesn't really play during the fight scenes?

01:39:50
Case
Right. While there are good themes for Superman in this, they don't have a good Superman theme.

01:39:55
Jesse
Yeah.

01:39:56
Case
Like, great first flight song. Great. Here's time for a fight. There's no moment, though, where we get, like, the true John Williams successor in this whole piece.

01:40:04
Jesse
I've always said they shouldn't have changed it. Granted, you can't really put the John Williams theme into this one. With the regards to the Superman theme, it's one of my favorite musical compositions ever. I love that theme. And if you're going to do, like, a remade version of it's like, I'm going to propose a challenge to you, case. Rewrite the Star Spangled Banner and don't include anything from the original version. Can't do it, can you?

01:40:27
Case
No.

01:40:29
Jesse
That is Superman's theme. That is what it is. That is why John Williams is one of the best composers of all time. That is theme. Like the Star wars theme. That is theme. It's hard to change it when it's so ingrained in culture.

01:40:45
Case
Yeah.

01:40:46
Jesse
I admire the audacity to say we're going to try to do a new theme. We're going to fail, but we're going to try. Yeah.

01:40:55
Case
I mean, we did an episode on Superman themes and there was an element were talking about all the different ones. And the John Williams one is so strong, and it influences the later ones and ones that are strong that come after it clearly pay homage as much as try to deviate from it. And this one is the one that doesn't pay as much homage to it. It's focusing more on the deviation side.

01:41:16
Jesse
Again, Snyder doesn't like Superman, so he's like, yeah, screw that theme. Yeah.

01:41:20
Jmike
We came to the point of where the better Superman themes have the horns come blasting in at certain points to lift everything back up. This one, I love this soundtrack, but it's more percussion than anything else.

01:41:35
Jesse
That's Hans Zimmer's thing. He loves.

01:41:38
Jmike
It's so much percussion throughout theme of this Superman.

01:41:42
Jesse
It's great in Dune. It's great in Dune, but it does not work here well.

01:41:47
Case
So in that episode I brought up that the big theme for this movie sounds more like Kal El than. If you think about the horns in it, you can almost hear the phrase, kal El. The problem there is that is the starting point for the story. And we don't get to the Superman part of the story.

01:42:04
Jesse
Well, they never really call him Superman, except for one time somebody says, hey, Superman's out there. And Harry Lennis goes, Superman? It's like, yeah, that's what we're calling him. It's like ashamed of its origin.

01:42:15
Case
Yeah, it's definitely that post the original X Men kind of like yellow spandex, like embarrassed about comic book thing kind of vibe.

01:42:24
Jesse
Thankfully, we're kind of getting away from that because Hugh Jackman is supposed to have the yellow spandex outfit in Deadpool three. He's supposed to have that. They're finally getting it in there on the last time he's going to do it. Well, about fucking time. Only took you like 25 years. Jesus. Yeah. Another thing I'd also like to say is not only should the military have been putting a disclaimer in front of those movies, all the product placement should have also put a disclaimer at the front of this movie.

01:42:51
Jmike
You don't like to go eat at IHOP? Or was it Sears everywhere?

01:42:58
Jesse
The product placement in this movie was obnoxious.

01:43:02
Case
Some were less bad. The IHOP is actually not really the worst of it.

01:43:05
Jesse
The Sears one is worse at the IHOP. You go right down there, I'll fuck you.

01:43:10
Case
You know, that's a fairly realistic worst. No, I think the Sears is the worst because the shot, I said, nokia, he flies up and the soldiers all look up, but what they're doing is effectively they're looking up at the loco.

01:43:25
Jesse
Wasn't there a Superman commercial for, like, arby's or something like that where like, lands in the street and he wrecks the street and just kind of goes, sorry. And he flies off. I could swear there was an arby's commercial for that and Henry Cavill was in it.

01:43:39
Case
I don't remember where there was.

01:43:42
Jesse
Yeah.

01:43:43
Case
I mean, the thing is, like, smallville, having a bunch of small town kind of big businesses that have taken over are fine. The gas station that blows up is a 711 gas station, but that's not really called attention to. It just happens to be a real brand.

01:43:54
Jesse
711S are everywhere. That's fine. Right?

01:43:56
Case
Yeah. Again, it could better, could be worse. It wasn't as funny as the Krispy Kreme in the Power Rangers movie. Oh, God.

01:44:05
Jesse
Where they literally stopped the movie.

01:44:07
Case
Like, that's fucking hilarious the way they play that scene and the fact that they got the money for it. This one, yes. The product placement's like, not great. But I guess they could have justified it if there was a conversation about massive corporate entities taking over small town America and sort of like, wiping it out. But instead it kind of doesn't really comment on it. And so they're not doing anything with it. So it is distracting when we have these big shots of it. Like I said, the Sears one is really painful. The Nokia phones are really painful. That said, that was a common practice. Still is for the equipment that they get. Apple does a fuck ton of that.

01:44:44
Jesse
Every Sony movie. They don't have any Apple products.

01:44:46
Case
Right? Everyone's, here's a Sony Erickson phone. Here's another one.

01:44:50
Jesse
Who the fuck still uses an Erickson? Apparently only actors in Sony movies.

01:44:56
Case
Yeah. Or what was it? LG ones in the Marvel or like the early Marvels, like Iron man two.

01:45:03
Jesse
Didn't they use a BlackBerry in one movie or something like that? Like, people still use BlackBerry.

01:45:09
Case
There was the big one that stands out to me was an iron man two with that LG wing.

01:45:13
Jesse
It wasn't the wing because that was.

01:45:14
Case
The more recent one that had that format. But it was that same style phone where the screen rotated and created a t bone shape.

01:45:20
Jesse
I think I had one of those.

01:45:22
Case
Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of those weird product placement ones.

01:45:25
Jesse
I understand product placement is a normal thing. I understand it. But when it's, like, dead in your face like that, it's like where it's.

01:45:34
Case
Particularly like there is an interesting through line to what goes on with Pete Ross in this movie. It's jumbled and weird, but I actually rather enjoy the fact that we get him picking on Clark earlier than he's the one helping up Clark after the bullies are, like, picking on him at the later sequence, and then he's on this down in his luck. Kind of like, yeah, he's a manager at an IHOP, but, like, all right, well, never. Kind of like, there is an interesting story going on with him in that movie, even if he never has any lines.

01:46:02
Jesse
Well, he does have a little cameo at the wake for Clark at the end of bbs.

01:46:07
Case
Oh, that's a nice detail. I don't think I.

01:46:09
Jesse
It's in the extended cut. It's in the extended. There's a lot of stuff that's added into the extended cut, which everyone says, oh, it makes the movie work now. No, it still doesn't. It still doesn't explain why Lex Luthor is a raving psychopath. I hate Eisenberg so much.

01:46:27
Case
And the worst part is that opening sequence, if it wasn't Batman, if it was Lex Luthor, would have been so good as a set up for Lex Luthor. If instead of it being Bruce Wayne, that is like witnessing the fight in Metropolis.

01:46:40
Jesse
Yes.

01:46:41
Case
Especially.

01:46:42
Jesse
Oh, my God.

01:46:43
Case
Going with the 911 imagery. If there was, like, dust clouds, asbestos, all that stuff. And that's why he loses his hair. And so we get a silver age nod combined with this fucked up imagery, that could have been kind of a fun setup for why this Lex Luther.

01:46:55
Jesse
Is so fucked up. But instead, we just get Eisenberg being weird and creepy because he's representing a character from the Fountainhead. By the way, the fountainhead was the structural basis for the entirety of bbs. So if you're wondering why it's all a jumbled mess and makes no sense, that's the reason. Yep. I hate to keep coming back to this, but it's like, it's so in your face, the whole, like, it's so.

01:47:21
Case
And because Ayn Rand fans are the most annoying when she ended up as a welfare queen at the end of her life.

01:47:27
Jesse
Yeah, way to stick to your principles, right? God. And that's another thing I will say, is that with regards to the Ayn Rand stuff and the lack of empathy, people like Ben Shapiro and Rush Limbaugh, people that follow that philosophy, now that Rush Limbaugh is dead, nobody talks about him. Nobody quotes him. Nobody references him. Even his people that were his fans have forgotten about him because he was an asshole and never did anything fun or interesting with his life. He never had anything positive to say. He just spewed hate. What a pathetic way to live your life.

01:48:01
Case
Yeah, I was really glad. In the current season of strange new worlds, there is very clearly a Ben Shapiro stand in one sequence, but it is very hard to tell. It's just if you're paying attention to what this character is saying, he doesn't say it exactly. He says, like, facts don't care about your emotions is the line that he gives.

01:48:19
Jesse
And it's a Vulcan character saying, fuck your feelings.

01:48:22
Case
Yeah, exactly. Facts don't care about feelings. And I was like, I like that right there. And also, I like that no one's going to pick up on it if they're not aware of what they're talking about because it still fits the scene and the character is still an asshole. That's how you do metaphor well, where it works with the scene, regardless of if you get it or not. But if you get it, there's this extra layer that you're like, oh, I.

01:48:40
Jesse
See what they're doing here.

01:48:41
Case
Again, this movie could have used a stronger editorial pass in the screenwriting phase in the actual edit because, man, the flashbacks are all jumbled in terms of where they fit. Dan Olsen has a really good video talking about how if you would just move the flashbacks into different spots, they would just make more sense.

01:48:57
Jesse
I agree.

01:48:58
Case
Yeah. Every single one is, like, in the wrong spot. Have the bullies picking on him right before he encounters the Kryptonians. Have the census thing be it, all of these are at the wrong locations for it all. But that all said, again, this movie is jumbled. It's disappointing. It was probably overhyped because of the era of comic movies that were in. We were getting away from the down and dreary, and this is more of the down and dreary. But there was a lot of reasons that were looking forward to it. And I think in the long run, in the canon of Superman movies, there's a lot of misses in there, too. So this is still going to end up being, like, kind of in the.

01:49:32
Jesse
Middle of the pack, regardless, it's not Superman four.

01:49:35
Case
Right, exactly. And there's some decent stuff that spawned off of it just by virtue of, again, Supergirl was kind of a spinoff of this movie. From that, we get Superman and Lois and Superman and Lois has the weird, desaturated look like crazy in that series. There's a lot of elements that are very similar to the style of a Snyder kind of Superman power set, in part because they figured out how to do it in after effects and got it to be cheap. Like, that's how it all was happening there. And that is ultimately a really good work of a similar kind of vibe.

01:50:06
Jesse
One other thing I wanted to address is that I think that filmmakers like Zack Snyder or Michael Bay or James Cameron, they're not really filmmakers, they're engineers. They structure the shots appropriately so that the people in the editing bay and the special effects department can make it look good. Yeah, like, James Cameron is not a filmmaker. Like, he is a tech bro. That's what he like, those avatar movies are basically just animated movies. And he just says, yes, no, yes, and then takes all the credit. The scripts are basic. It's just like plug and play. Like, copy this from that script. Copy this from that script. Plug, plug and done.

01:50:44
Case
Unobtainium. Unobtainium.

01:50:50
Jesse
It's my favorite. Swear to God. It's not vibranium.

01:50:54
Case
Anyway, I think while this movie has a lot of flaws and it has some strengths, it's so middling and frustrating at times, and that we're kind of going to walk away from it being like, wow, that was a lot of really good casting choices and a lot of things that, on paper, should have worked really well. And ultimately, what a way to say.

01:51:15
Jesse
A lot of nothing. Yeah.

01:51:17
Case
But I'm happy to finally talk about it on this show. I am going to say that everyone needs to check out because we've referenced it to death. And you should actually listen to those episodes. The another past episode that J Mike and I did on man of Steel as kind of a soft pilot for this series, as well as the film rescue episode that you did with Seth and the crew. And those are really in depth ones where we go into how we could have restructured this movie into actually something that's in a bit better shape. Because this movie had potential and were hyped about it for a reason. And there are things where you're coming out of it and you're like, God, wouldn't that movie have been great if it was better?

01:51:50
Case
The fact that we have emotions about it is because it had potential, and we can see some of that potential in the end product for it to have been a good movie. And it was frustrating that it wasn't. That's that fascinating but flawed kind of equation that makes a good movie to talk about how you would fix it. Because if it was going to be bad from the start, who the fuck cares?

01:52:09
Jesse
I'm going to say I'm not like a super in love with Superman guy, but I do really like the character. I just got the death of Superman omnibus. Holy crap.

01:52:20
Case
Nice.

01:52:21
Jesse
The new printed version, it's longer than the Bible.

01:52:26
Case
We are very aware, since we just.

01:52:29
Jesse
Got fridge, it's 1400 pages. Yeah, so I got that for myself because while the story itself does have issues, it's all here. Everything like the death return, everything. The good, the bad and the ugly.

01:52:45
Case
The weird side stories.

01:52:48
Jesse
I mean, I'm sure someday we'll do bbs on this show because, man, did they fuck up Doomsday. Good God.

01:52:57
Case
Yeah.

01:52:58
Jesse
Why does Doomsday have, like, no personality to absod. It's the same guy.

01:53:02
Jmike
That's a good question.

01:53:04
Jesse
You killed me, Superman. I'm back.

01:53:06
Case
I have a response that is a massive spoiler for a thing that is pretty new. So I'm not going to say it, but there was a very easy workaround that they didn't take that would have been much more interesting.

01:53:18
Jesse
You were about to say much more annoying.

01:53:20
Case
I know, but that was more annoying. The way more annoying where they took it. They could have done something that was much more interesting. A related piece of media has recently done something like that worked very well while watching it. I just couldn't stop.

01:53:34
Jesse
I know what it is. I know what it is. Yeah.

01:53:37
Case
On that note, I think we've wrapped up our conversation of man of Steel. So Jesse, as our guest, please tell people where they can find you, follow you, give plugs for everything you've got going on.

01:53:47
Jesse
Okay, so I'm on, God, how many shows at this point? We have jaguar sharks on Apple Podcasts, iTunes. We're everywhere you can find. Just look up Jaguar Sharks podcast online. You can find us. We have wrapped up film rescue season eight recently. The fact that we've gone down the rabbit hole for eight seasons. My God, we're going to be going into season nine pretty soon. Our first episode is going to be Star Trek in the darkness. Case is going to be on that, where we basically do kind of the same thing as another pass, but we get a little bit angrier. Yeah, it's another pass.

01:54:21
Case
The two drink minimum.

01:54:22
Jesse
Yeah, two drink minimum. Yes. By the way, you always like to do on another pass. You always say, our next episode is going to be Highlander two. The quickening. We're actually doing it next season. You fucking coward. You coward. We're doing it. Our guest on that episode, comics artist Jason Lennox, said, yes. Hurt me. I was like, okay, here you go. There's your assignment. And he messaged me back and saying, I don't know how to fix this. It's like you asked for it.

01:54:48
Case
I actually have a pitch, but I've committed to saving that for the funniest circumstance that I could come up with.

01:54:59
Jesse
Or when you finally decide to end the show, it's like, yeah, we're going to do it now.

01:55:04
Case
Kind of. Yeah, that was sort of the original idea.

01:55:07
Jesse
We also have split the difference. It's my show personally that I run, where we compare originals and remakes. Tomorrow we're doing dawn of the.

01:55:16
Case
Hey.

01:55:17
Jesse
You know, another Zack Snyder thing that's actually still considered his best movie, even though it has major problems.

01:55:25
Case
It makes sense. It's where a lot of people learned about him. And I'll note that I was recently on split the difference. We were talking about Planet of the apes, so people should check out that episode.

01:55:34
Jesse
Yeah, it's fun episode. And we also have mind brain movies. That's Hope's show where we talk about films from a psychological perspective as sort of cinema therapy. That's kind off season at the moment. And we have two whatever's way up where we just kind of chat about random stuff. We just did a whole episode about AI usage and how ethical it is in film and compared it to what happened with secret invasion. What a catastrophe that is. Oh, God. And the show is not even that good. It's not even worthy of a long, in depth discussion. Like, the show is just kind of like, yeah, it exists.

01:56:11
Case
Sometimes that can lead to the most interesting, tangential bits of analysis, and other times it's a struggle to get through.

01:56:19
Jesse
But also, we do have a TikTok page where I kind of like pull out little snippets and I edit little video clips to it. We just had to restart our TikTok page.

01:56:27
Case
I was about to ask, was it.

01:56:29
Jesse
Did we had to make a new one? For those who don't know, we had another one. We had a bunch of videos on it, and we had a bunch that went viral. A lot of Star wars one went viral. Warner Brothers directly nuked our TikTok page because we pointed out something that they don't like. Are you aware of the Rabbit season episode from Meat Canyon Case?

01:56:50
Case
Well, I mean, you shared me the whole info on this.

01:56:53
Jmike
That's right.

01:56:54
Jesse
I shared that to you. Yeah. So there's a whole thing about Meat Canyon and wabit season, and Bugs Bunny is apparently canonically now considered a recovering rapist. They didn't like us pointing that out. And they immediately filed copyright infringement against us and they nuked our whole channel. So we had to restart. But yeah, we did start up again. It's Jaguar sharks yt, I think is what it's named. Jaguar Sharks network is what we've changed the name to. But yeah, we're slowly re uploading older episodes and I'll be cutting together new ones. Pretty awesome.

01:57:26
Case
Awesome. Jimmy, where can people find you and follow you?

01:57:30
Jmike
Oh, my gosh. Is Twitter still a thing? I don't know if it's a thing anymore.

01:57:35
Case
Twitter exists. It might even better by the time it keeps on limping on. So it might be in a better space by the time we get back or this episode drops.

01:57:43
Jmike
I'm not holding my breath on it. I am on Twitter at jmike 101. I sometimes reply to funny tweets and jokes. I might even post something occasionally. Who knows if I can log into my Twitter.

01:57:56
Case
Also, you can reach both j Mike and myself on Discord at the certain POV discord. We've got a permanent invite link on our website, certainpov.com, and most of us have links all over our profiles that will direct you over to our discord server. It's a lot of fun. We've got channels for all of the different shows also. Just like a lot of fun interactions about things like ttrpgs, like what music you're listening to. Fun and games is a backlog of video games that they have recently finished. So people are posting screenshots of in screens, which is just kind of fun from a community standpoint. So you can find that, and that's a good way to contact us. You can also find me on Twitter at case aiken. You can find me on Instagram at Ketzel Coattle five because I'm holding on to that aim.

01:58:36
Case
Screen name for dear life. You can find the show on Twitter at Men of Steel Pod. And I am throwing out there a little bit of a contest that we're.

01:58:45
Jesse
Going to be running.

01:58:45
Case
I have a bunch of copies of voices from Krypton, the oral history of Superman that I referenced at the start of this. We are going to get Ed Gross, the writer of the book, on soon. We'll have the scheduling announced. But if you join the certain Pov discord and you just put a message in the Men of Steel episode chat that you're interested, we will enter you in a drawing to get one of three copies of the book that I will then send to you. So join our discord in the Men of Steel chat. Drop that. You're interested. And when we actually put the episode out, I will do a drawing live and we'll figure out the three people who are going to get copies of the book. So that's out there.

01:59:22
Case
I'm going to be dropping that in future episodes as we go get closer to actually getting that scheduled. So that's out there. We're doing a contest. We haven't really done one before.

01:59:32
Jesse
First time for everything.

01:59:33
Case
Yeah, it seemed like a fun one. If you're a Superman fan and you want a copy of the book, a physical copy of it, because you could also get it on Kindle, I want to provide that for people. It's a cool book. It's a Tome. It is massive. But Jesse, thank you for coming on. This was a lot of fun revisiting this movie today.

01:59:52
Jesse
Of course, I haven't watched this movie since I did the man of Steel episode for film rescue four years ago. I'm never going to ever come back to this. Well, sure enough, I can't seem to get away from it because Zack Snyder is the bane of my existence. I really do not like his movies. Like I said, sure, he's a nice guy, but it's just like, there's just something about the way he makes his movies that's compelling to me even though I don't like them. I don't know why.

02:00:17
Case
So again, thank you for coming on. I hope for listeners this was a fun conversation despite the fact that we gave everyone homework to go check out two other podcast.

02:00:28
Jesse
Mean. Here's the way you look at it. Man of Steel, that episode is about 3 hours. Listen to it in chunks. The BVS episode, it's 5 hours. In the Patreon version, it's only about two and a half in the regular version. And then the Zack Snyder Justice League is like, yeah, it's a nice little addendum. I'm happy with that one. I pitched a dark side movie that was kind of fun. I pitched a dark side movie that was basically dread 2012, cross with God of War, fight your way to the top, claim the throne. That was it.

02:00:58
Case
Yeah, people should definitely check out those pitches because those were really solid, fun ones. And our man of Steel episode, because, God damn it, did I not think this through when I named the podcast Men of Steel? Our man of Steel episode of another pass is a lot of fun. It is not quite that long. It's about an hour and a half, so it's a little bit easier to squeeze in there. But both are really great. Conversations about the things that could have been done to make this movie that had all this hype going into it, a tighter movie that would have been a more solid foundation for what was to come. And it sucks that it didn't happen. It's fun to think about it. I'm glad that we're getting more Superman material.

02:01:40
Case
I'd be really sad if this was sort of the thing that killed the franchise and we're thankfully getting another shot.

02:01:45
Jesse
I have faith in James Gun Guardians three hits, so. Well, it's very difficult for it to fail.

02:01:52
Case
Yeah. I mean, he's used to working with adversity, like we said. So we're excited about the future of Superman productions. Even if there's going to be hiccups along the road. Even if Max or HBO Max or whatever thing they want to call themselves next week.

02:02:06
Jesse
I refuse to call it Max. Yeah. Want me to start calling Peacock cock? Come on, man.

02:02:13
Case
Well, it also comes from the Cinemax part of the brand. Even if the state of our ability to access content is constantly getting worse and dumber and things like DC superhero Girls is being pulled from all streaming services, including your ability to buy it on Amazon. Yeah. And like, that shit made money for DC.

02:02:34
Jesse
Holy crap. It's that bastard Zaslav at the top. Yeah.

02:02:38
Case
So even if the state of media sucks, the franchises themselves in a lot of cases are in good shape. And I'm excited to see the future of the man of Steel and what comes from all, you know, when copyright expires and he's fully in the public domain and people can start making their own stuff, we'll see some additional things and people will start releasing all the material that had been difficult to find the way that they do for, like, the Fleischer Superman stuff. I don't know. It's an exciting future for Superman.

02:03:06
Jesse
Is it only like a couple of years from now that he becomes public domain?

02:03:08
Case
Real close. Mickey Mouse, I believe, is next year. So that's why Mickey Mouse is next year, five years after that or something.

02:03:15
Jesse
Superman. Yeah, pretty close.

02:03:17
Case
It's real close at this point. So we'll see what the future brings. But this has been a fun look back at the past of what was kind of the launch of the current era of Superman media. You can still feel a lot of reverberations and everything that has come out since, but we're getting away from that era. And it was fun to go back and look at it again and see strengths and weaknesses and all of that because it is a flawed movie. However, fascinating from a certain perspective.

02:03:46
Jesse
Sorry to bring up 911 so many times.

02:03:49
Case
Yeah, it's right there in the movie. Oh, it certainly is. It certainly is. And it's a thing.

02:03:57
Jesse
But yeah.

02:03:57
Case
So I am not entirely sure what we've got next time because our production schedule has been real weird since I had a baby. So I wish I could tell you, but we will be back soon with another episode. And until then, stay Super man.

02:04:19
Jmike
Of Steel is a certain pov production. Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and case Aiken. The show is scored and edited by Jeff Moonin, and our logo and episode art is by case Aiken.

02:04:39
Case
Video games are a unique medium. They can tell stories, immerse us in.

02:04:44
Jesse
Strange, fantastic worlds, blur the very boundaries of our reality. But at the end of the day.

02:04:50
Case
Video games are fun. Whatever fun is to you.

02:04:53
Jesse
I'm Jeff Moonan.

02:04:54
Case
And I am Matt, aka Stormageddon.

02:04:56
Jesse
And on fun and games, we talk about the history, trends, and community of video games. It's a celebration of all the games we play and all the fun we find within them. And there's so many more games out there, so we hope you'll share in that conversation with us. Fun and Games podcast with Matt and Jeff. Find us on certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts and happy gaming.

02:05:18
Case
J Mike, was there anything that we haven't talked about that you wanted to bring up?

02:05:22
Jmike
Ask some kids. No, it.

02:05:28
Case
Cpov certainpov.com close.