Covarr said:
Why is this so dark? I know they are trying their damndest not to just redo the old movies, but a good chunk of what makes Superman work is that he's not another Batman. This should be a bit less serious, a bit more lighthearted.
Do you remember Superman Returns? That's (kind of) why...
The problem is that Superman, for much of his existence, was not a particularly deep character. He could be summed up as " a brave and kind-hearted hero with a strong sense of justice, morality and righteousness" with a particular focus on the ideal American small town personality that originated from a Smallville myth. He was, for the most part, the ultimate 20th century embodiment of simple goodness and justice.
The problem is that Smallville doesn't exist any more. The Rural/Small Town, USA has on the decline for decades and the ugly grey realities of the 21st century don't mesh well with the idealized fake black and white nostalgia of the mid-twentieth century.
When they first announced the Man of Steel movie, I made a point that Superman cannot fight the same way he fought in the past. Brute force can stop a bank robbery, but how do you stop a company who is destroying the economy in a way perfectly within the law? Heat vision can stop a missile, but how can it stop a political system willing to fire it? Superman was the embodiment of a Cold War might-in-the-pursuit-of-Justice mentality that just doesn't make any sense today.
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More interesting, I feel we're going to get something very new in this: an origin story. Fundamentally, we've gotten a lot of stories of where he came from (sent from Krypton, raised in rural Kansas, moved to Metropolis and became a reporter as a mask for his crime-fighting), but never really a true motivation for why he does what he does other than "he's a good man," and that doesn't make much sense when he could have been a lawyer in the tradition of Lincoln, or a doctor in search of impossible cures, or a nuclear physicist searching for a peaceful solution to atomic power? What was the catalyst for him turning to superheroism? It looks like we're going to finally going to get that answered.