Ben Affleck Is Batman for Man of Steel Sequel (dir. Zack Snyder)

Yes.
It's one thing to tell everyone you're smart and another to demonstrate it.
My reading of Luthor has been he is not exceptionally skilled in anything.

 

If all you have seen is the live-action movies, that is a fair assessment.

 

How much better would MoS have been with a well-written Luthor, instead of Zod?

 

Not as much destruction because the neck snapping would have been far easier.

 

That's the thing.
The destruction in the film reaches a comical, outlandish level.
You quickly lose interest in what Zod is even all about.
And Fart is a Superman freak.
My very existence on this site is a loving homage to Stamp's Zod.
Of all the superheroes Superman most represents sweet and light, and walks a righteous path.
He is everything I want to be.
But that movie became unwatchable.

 

Still haven't seen "Man of Steel," but if DC was following the Marvel model then Luthor is a character that should've been set up as the Big Bad for either a third Superman movie or a Justice League movie. He should've been introduced as a background character in the first one, either through strategic placement of LexCorp products and staff, or via news reports that show him as a strong and powerful figure. The next movie, he challenges the concept of Superman -- why do we need him, when LexCorp can protect you? -- and then in the third he's the Big Bad challenging Superman directly (or indirectly, by wielding influence or through another villain created by LexCorp like Brainiac or a reimagined Bizarro).
Not sure if elements of that are still part of the plan, but Luthor is a villain that needs to simmer. He's a schemer that would be better portrayed as the one behind a multitude of threats, not the immediate threat itself.

 

Man of Steel has some Lexcorp Easter Eggs planted in the movie.

A Lexcorp building in Metropolis, a tanker truck with the Lexcorp logo. It was also the movie that had the Wayne Enterprises satellite in it.

My best guess is that given the level of destruction caused by the Superman-Zod fight, Lexcorp will be the company that will rebuild the city and Lex Luther will emerge as this champion of the people who has the smarts and the money to develop a plan to fight off the aliens, including Superman, the next time they rise up.

Luther will be portrayed with an alternating mix of sympathy and evil as he will really believe what he's doing is right. Just like Zod really believed what he was doing was right.

And that something of Luther's will become Project Cadmus and it will be the big bad for the Justice League movie.

 

MoS could have been essentially fixed if two characters had been written substantially better: Jonathan Kent and Zod.

Jonathan Kent was morphed into a paranoid neurotic who wanted Clark to run home and hide under the bed rather than use his powers to help people.

And Zod was given TOO MUCH complexity, following the bullshit Marvel example of making the villains partly sympathetic -- which has become a cliche by now. Let the villains be the goddamn villains.

The destructorama at the end of the movie was excessive not so much in scope but in sheer screen time. They spent almost half an hour having Zod (with unwitting help from Superman) demolish Metropolis.

The same message -- Zod is an obsessive madman who will destroy the planet if he gets the chance -- could have been delivered in probably 10-12 minutes tops.

 

The destruction was pornographic.
This is trodden ground.
We've seen it before.
Sometimes less is more.

 

Mainly, it was a knee-jerk reaction to the revisionist carping against "Superman Returns," which had almost NO destructive action.



This weekend I watched "Returns" again, for the first time in something like two years, and it struck me: "Returns" and "Man of Steel" could probably be edited together into one fairly decent movie (if you disregarded that Superman and Lois were played by different actors).

 

These are the kinds of movies Snyder makes.
Gratuitous action and CGI.
At the end of the day - Superman does not kill.
DOES NOT KILL!
And the movie violated that tenet.

 

Under the circumstances of the movie Superman would have been an idiot not to kill Zod.

Zod had expressed his intention -- in fact, more like a genetically-imposed imperative -- to kill most if not all of the inhabitants of Earth. It appeared unlikely Kal-El would be physically able to stop him before he killed many thousands if not millions more humans.

The physical battle they had already fought in Metropolis had resulted in hundreds of thousands of casaulties. Zod obviously had no interest or intention in allowing Kal-El to move the fight to a less-inhabited area. Returning him to the Phantom Zone was apparently not an option.

With all that in mind killing Zod was not just an acceptable option, it was the ONLY acceptable option.

I was shocked when I heard the spoiler and when I saw it on screen, because "Superman. Does. Not. Kill.," but having re-watched it over a few more times I have swung completely over to the opinion:

Some people just need killin.'