Is Superman brave?

I would consider him brave because he wouldn't stop trying to defeat the bad guy just because he is affected by Kryptonite.

He and Batman are of similar heroism although they may go about it differently.

His being indestructible just makes him boring.

Yes he’s brave. For one thing he’s not indestructible; he actually died fighting Doomsday. He can also theoretically be killed by other beings more powerful to himself like Darkseid, or the Guardians. He has a vulnerability to magic as well. Both Dr. Fate and Mr. Mxyzptlk could kill Superman if they wanted to. Removing the source of his power (yellow sun rays) for any appreciable amount of time will ultimately cause Superman to lose his super powers. And everyone knows about his weakness to Kryptonite. Nevertheless, he has shown a determination to fight for what is right no matter what state he is in. He willingly sacrificed his life in order to destroy Doomsday because he knew he was the only one who could.

I'd say he is brave sometimes.

Take a couple of examples from Superman Returns (which is a great Superman movie, SO much better than Man of Steel).

This :



...is not an act of bravery. You might as well claim that Dwayne Johnson is brave for getting into a fight with a toddler carrying a water pistol.

But when he does knowingly face danger - and he does - then that's as brave as anybody else doing the same. Later in the same movie, Supes is taken down by the Kryptonite island. He nevertheless returns to that island and lifts the whole thing into space, an action that came extremely close to killing him. That's bravery in its noblest form. 

Sorry, but when I read these two sentences together, I can’t help but chuckle.

Really? Because I would cite the saving the airplane scene as being one of the highlights of SR, and one of the things about it that is far and away better than anything in MoS.

I mean, we actually get to see Superman, you know, saving people. Which is basically what the character is for. Something largely absent from MoS, which seems far more concerned with having Superman going around throwing punches in those utterly unengaging action scenes you mentioned.

Of course it was. The fight on Krypton was just too ridiculously silly to take seriously. And the Smallville fight suffered from being too ridiculously over the top.

It also suffered the same issue that every fight in the movie has - at no point is it ever established how vulnerable these people are to one another.

How strong is Superman? Super strong compared to a Human, can lift hundreds of tons of metal. Fair enough. But as a woman with a smaller physique, is Faora weaker than Superman is? Is the unnamed giant guy stronger than Superman is, as a huge Human would be stronger than a small one? Or as Kryptonians under a yellow sun, are they all the same "super strong"?

And are they invulnerable to physical damage? When Faora punches Superman, he goes flying through buildings and whatnot. But does it hurt him? Is Superman even capable of feeling pain? Can she hit him hard enough to actually injure him? The movie never once makes any of this clear.

So the Smallville fight consists of super strong people punching one another, with the audience having no idea whatsoever whether any of them are accomplishing a damn thing. As such, it is an utterly pointless waste of screen time.

The fight in Metropolis was stupid as it could have occurred anywhere but they literally decided to bring the fight back to the city with millions of people in it.

It suffered the same exact issue as the Smallville fight - we have no idea what the stakes are, because we have no idea if these people attacking one another accomplishes anything. 

In fact, I remember my reaction to Superman breaking Zod's neck. I went "Oh... so finally we find out that they actually can hurt one another. That would have been good to know 40 minutes ago."

The island lift was not cool.

It was awesome! He's already been to the island, and been incapacitated by it. So there are stakes - unlike the MoS fights, we know that what he's about to do has serious and potentially deadly consequences for him. We also know that Kryptonite saps his strength, so he's attempting something difficult, perhaps even impossible. Which is why he goes to the sun to "charge up" first, the movie having carefully established that he gets his power from the sun earlier on.

So we know the stakes and care about them, we have a reason to root for him, and a reason to worry about him.

MoS never even attempts any of this. Because it's a story written by writers using the classic corporate formula of "Here are six action sequences that our market research indicates will appeal to the audience demographic we are after. Now write something to connect them together." 

Here's the thing - "action" is unimportant and uninteresting in and of itself, no matter how amazing it is. The thing that makes any action, be it fighting an enemy or attempting to achieve a near-impossible feat of strength, interesting to an audience is not how amazing the graphics are but how important winning is for the characters, and how much we care about the character achieving that goal.

Die Hard isn't a great action movie because it has superbly well staged action sequences (which it does). It's a great action movie because we care about McClane saving his wife, and because we see that this task is achievable but extremely difficult and damaging for him. The Matrix wasn't a huge success because of bullet time, it was a huge success because the audience wanted Neo to defeat the Agents and become "the One", even though that seemed impossible.

I'll bet you anything the MoS fights were written by somebody giving some guys an hour to come up with the most spectacular things they could think of to be in a fight. "Oh, she punches him and he flies into a safe door! He punches him and he flies into a huge gas tank that explodes! She punches him into the ground, and it smashes the concrete up and makes a crater!"

Unfortunately nobody thought to try and make any of it actually mean anything. But they did in Superman Returns.

Of course, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Superman movie besides this one.

Never seen it.

Superman can, cause he mixes it with love to make the world taste good.

Not that I saw, it didn't.


This means he has a power they lack. It says nothing about anyones ability to inflict or withstand damage.


Same as above; the fact that he has more experience in these things is fine, but none of them prove anything about the issue in question.

Superman has heat vision, they don't (until the end). Okay. If Zod fires his laser eyes at Superman, at full strength... what happens? Does Superman get burned? Does he get cut in half and killed? Does he get thrown backwards through a building, only to get up completely unscathed?

Nothing in the film makes this clear. And without it, the laser eyes are nothing but a flashy CGI effect with no meaning. 


Exactly! And because of this, the fight she has with him is absolutely pointless. It's nothing but a total waste of screen time.

To work this in properly, Faora and Superman would trade blows a few times, then they'd both go "Well, this is useless. We can't hurt one another." And then they would resort to other tactics, like trying to outwit one another. But instead the lot of them just punch one another in the face like 500 more times. We're supposed to be excited by this, but there's no reason to be excited by it. It probably cost 100 million dollars, and it's boring.


It wasn't a stinger. Looked like a Maverick actually. Anyway, this itself is pretty senseless. Superman can punch her and it does nothing, but a missile blows up and she's knocked out? So... a missile is more powerful than Superman? If they used a 2000 lb JDAM bomb, would that have killed her?


Certainly he's superior in his use of his powers. But my point is that the movie never once bothers to establish what those powers can actually do in terms of injuring or killing another Kryptonian. And that's an essential element in making a fight interesting.

Okay, let me illustrate this with Iron Man. In the final fight the baddie is beating the hell out of Iron Man, because he has the more powerful reactor to power his suit, which is a lot bigger and stronger. At one point Iron Man and the baddie go shooting up into the sky. The baddie is boasting about how strong his suit is compared to Tony's. Then Tony says "Ha, but you still have the icing problem!" The baddie suit then freezes over as they gain altitude, and he falls to Earth.

Why does this work? Because the movie has set these points up earlier on :

-Tony built a relatively low power reactor, then a much more powerful one, which the baddie steals.
-The baddies suit is bigger and stronger. "It's not as... conservative... as your design."
-The suit technology has a problem with icing at extreme altitude.
-Tony's suit overcame this issue.

So going into the fight we know everything we need to know to understand what is going on. When Tony turns the tables we think "Oh yeah, the ice thing! Tony beat that but this guy never did! Clever!"

Imagine if the whole icing thing had never been set up. Tony turns the tables with it, saying something like "Aha, well your suit iced up, and mine didn't because I used titanium joints!" completely out of nowhere. You'd be left thinking "What... the suits ice up? Okay... I guess..."

That's what Man of Steel does. It constantly throws fights at us when we have no way to understand what's happening or what the possible consequences of it are.

In fact, in some ways it even contradicts itself. You yourself claim that Superman learns that he can't hurt Faora physically. Agreed! But then how the hell can he snap Zod's neck?! If the movie has established that these people are too indestructible to physically hurt one another, it should be impossible for Superman to kill Zod. But he does.

Also, as a character moment Superman being upset about killing Zod makes no sense. I gather it's a thing in the comics and whatnot that Superman absolutely refuses to kill anybody under any circumstances. I had no idea that this was so, and the movie never once sets up the idea that Superman is reluctant to kill. And then we have a fight in which god knows how many people die - ten thousand? Fifty thousand? A million would be easily believable. And Superman appears emotionally indifferent to it all. But he kills Zod, and suddenly he's screaming with grief? WTF?

The people who wrote Man of Steel made absolutely no attempt to make it a good movie. They paid little to no attention to the things that would make the audience care one bit about what was happening. Instead they tried to wow us with effects. But guess what? Audiences are not really impressed by effects any more.

This is, incidentally, why Marvel kicks DC's ass up and down. Marvel movies certainly aren't perfect, but they put a good deal of work into making sure that you know who the characters are, what motivates them, what they're trying to achieve, and what they need to do to achieve it.

It's really not about the effects or the action. It's about paying attention to basic storytelling technique.


And they are weaknesses of those movies. I remember even as a kid, when Lex said "even you, with your great speed, can't stop them both." And my immediate response was "Huh? Why not?" It's a flaw in the film. But the film is good enough to carry us past it. (FWIW, I think the original Superman movie is very possibly the best superhero movie ever made. Certainly in the top five.)


I can and I do. The fact that other movies have a flaw does not mean that it is not also a flaw in this movie.

Superman returns does not establish this. We see that exposure to it will weaken him and possibly kill him, but that it is something he can overcome with enough willpower and a supercharge from the sun - and that even then it is dangerous to the point of death. I'll agree that it borders on being a flaw, but not because it broke its rules (as Zod's neck snap did) - rather because the rules are not as clearly established as they could be and should be.