And it has inspired some spurious thoughts for me to comment on.
So for the first act of the film it felt like they were kind of handling things very similarly to Man of Steel, and I was predicting in my head that it'll be received differently because it has a brighter color pallet and more traditional musical score. But by the end it distinguished itself from MOS in a much more substantive way.
The first main props to give this film is it playing up the Superman as an Immigrant allegory far more explicitly then any prior superman movie. I'm noting that here but talking about that aspect of the film in-depth is better suited for someone who's actually had an immigrant experience.
Batman V Superman I still feel was touching on that in a more substantive way then any prior Live Action movie, but it's also wrapped up in Snyder's other themes and Batman being the one made into a Xenophobic Bigot is something too many fans didn't wanna deal with. I of course feel making an icon like Batman the one who has to overcome being wrong in that area is more challenging to the audience, but I'm someone who feels after all the attention DKR gets that it's only fair Batman become the villain of a Superman story for a change.
The final resolution of this film is almost a case study in why perhaps Superman is better suited for Anime then Batman. Batman has gotten two shots at an Anime because, A. DC gives Batman more attention at everything, and B. I imagine everyone working at DC still stereotypes Anime as edgy 90s OVAs.
The main thing that I think would be different if this film had been done by an Anime studio with Anime writers is that even Rudy wouldn't have had to die, which is what I'd have preferred. But I imagine most negative reviews of this film (if they exist at all) will focus on how much of a cop-out it is that J'onn and Lobo both have fake out deaths.
I don't think anything gives more of a misrepresentation of my overall tastes then how often I feel compelled to defend things I'm not really a super fan of for getting hate they don't deserve. For example I defended Twilight on IMDB when my preferred taste in YA Vampire Melodrama was The Vampire Diaries (the first four books and the first two season of the CW TV Show are very different but both very good) for example.
But lately of course I kinda hate how some people's main experience with me may be seeing Tweets and YouTube comments where I defend Zach Snyder. Because the stereotype of a Zach Snyder fanboy is some edgy hipster who looks down on Superhero movies where the Hero saves a kitten from a tree and has empathy for the villains they fight. And yet I've spent most of the last month watching Sailor Moon content and Raildex Anime.
Even when it comes to my status as a defender of Hollywood blockbusters that get crapped on I'd rather the face of it be Speed Racer, Super Mario Bros, The Phantom Menace or more recently Sonic and the sequels to Frozen and Maleficent. I mainly love optimistic feel good movies.
Heck going back to The Vampire Diaries my main criticism of the show's early seasons was that they kept killing people off, like every three episodes. And what made me finally drop the show was when they started literally sending characters to Hell.
Fact is I haven't even watched any of the Zach Snyder movies I'm nominally a fan of in over a year. In fact you may notice I can't even consistently spell his name right. Lately my Zach Snyder experience has mainly been watching YouTube videos about his movies.
And of course my taste in Superman in general is much closer to this animated movie then to Man of Steel or BvS. But Superman is an Icon and a flexible one, I can respect taking him in a direction I wouldn't.
And to prove there is a limit to how much Edginess I can tolerate even for Batman. The work of the other Snyder who's famously written for Batman I absolutely despise, and yes that even includes the stuff most people seem to like.
Sometimes it seems like the problem is the internet has gotten so polarized between "Dark and Edgy" vs "uplifting and optimistic" that I guess some people can't wrap their head around appreciating both. But then people who hate on Snyder's movies will praise Logan and The Last Jedi. I guess it's easy to claim those films are less unrelentingly dark because it's harder to pretend they don't have funny haha moments. But to me Logan is the Superhero movie that flat out crosses the line into being too pessimistic to ever be appropriate for that franchise in ways DC has only ever done in the actual Comics. And the other one I don't want to get into again.
I've watched a couple mind-numbing Zack Snyder video essays where when I'm not going "no the film is literally saying the opposite" I'm instead going, "Western Superhero Comics are simply not compatible with your preferences, watch Anime instead". Of course recommending Anime can be hard, because sometimes the ones that are the least "Dark" are also the most "fanservciy". I wanna recommend No Game No Life but these SJWs will not be able to get past the amount of screen time given to the 11 year old girl's panties. I wanna recommend Railgun but then we have certain quirks of Kuroko and Saten, and then Index flat out doesn't relent. I wanna recommend a Magical Girl show but.... well the actual Shoujo ones should be fine but there aren't many of them I give a 10 out of 10.
If I tried hard enough I could think of plenty of fan service free recommendations. But I'm realizing that in every area my favorite stories are the ones who's great qualities overcome the aspects I generally don't prefer, rather then ones that are exactly like what I would write since those really don't exist, not till I get off my lazy @$$ and write something myself, and mostly the stuff that does seem close to that is what actually makes me go "I'd do that better" which is the kind of critic I'd rather not be.
And that's why I have to still consider Man of Steel a better Superman origin story then Man of Tomorrow even though the latter is in premise more like my Superman. Man of Steel has the advantage of an actual feature length to flesh itself out, and even regardless of that simply is more expertly written and directed. Still this movie is good and I recommend it for everyone who's a fan of Superman.
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