Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t seen ‘Man of Steel’, then you may want to head to the next story as this piece does contain spoilers!
Screenwriter David S. Goyer penned not only ‘Man of Steel‘ but Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the ‘Blade’ trilogy, so the man knows his way around a comic book movie. But it’s no secret that ‘Man of Steel’ has divided audiences with the culmination where Superman kills his enemy General Zod. Goyer brushes off any such complaints:
“This is one area, and I’ve written comic books as well and this is where I disagree with some of my fellow comic book writers – ‘Superman doesn’t kill’. It’s a rule that exists outside of the narrative and I just don’t believe in rules like that. I believe when you’re writing film or television, you can’t rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film.”
So just because the comic book Superman doesn’t kill (although he does and he actually killed Zod in the comics, whether you chose to accept that or not), that’s a different interpretation of the character than this one.
Goyer admits that he knew this decision wasn’t easily made:
“We were pretty sure that was going to be controversial. It’s not like we were deluding ourselves, and we weren’t just doing it to be cool. We felt, in the case of Zod, we wanted to put the character in an impossible situation and make an impossible choice.
So the situation was, Zod says ‘I’m not going to stop until you kill me or I kill you.’ The reality is no prison on the planet could hold him and in our film Superman can’t fly to the moon, and we didn’t want to come up with that crutch.” Also our movie was in a way ‘Superman Begins’, he’s not really Superman until the end of the film. We wanted him to have had that experience of having taken a life and carry that through onto the next films. Because he’s Superman and because people idolize him he will have to hold himself to a higher standard.”
So do you buy Goyer’s defense of Superman killing Zod? Was it simply the act of a fledgling hero? Would a more experienced Man of Steel have handled things differently?
Regardless, ‘Man of Steel’ wound up being one of the most controversial comic book movies in history. It seems no two people shared the same opinion on it. But even so, it made enough money that Warner Brothers is basing its entire DC cinematic universe on it. Will things change going forward? Will Superman never kill again? That remains to be seen.
What do you think? Was Superman’s killing of Zod justified? Or was it sloppy writing? Feel free to comment below!
Source: Digital Spy
