Monday 3 December 2012

Superman in Trouble

I really like the idea behind the newest "Man of Steel" poster, which depicts Superman being led away in handcuffs by soldiers - a scene already glimpsed in the Comic-Con footage shown earlier this year - in as much as it feels like a modern version of Silver Age DC cover, which typically presented an out-of-context "WTF?" scenario (aka the stuff 'Superdickery' has been archiving, basically) that begged you to read it just to find out what was going on. Obviously, everyone knows Superman can't be handcuffed and shouldn't be the "enemy" of the army, so what's going on?

Less encouraging is the presentation, which looks like someone ran a screencap through Instagram and added the appropriate ad copy. I've seen (blurry, secondhand) snaps of the SDCC footage, and this scene (and the film in general) looked a lot more high-contrast and bold than this does. This looks calculated to "rhyme" with the Dark Knight movies, which is fine for an ad campaign but I'm still hoping does not effect the movie itself...



As for the context; one imagines Superman is voluntarily surrendering to engender trust from humans. Supposedly, the big "new" angle the Goyer/Nolan developed script for this brings to the backstory is that Clark Kent is reticent about revealing his powers - and thus his alien-ness - at first  (the official trailer shows him working on a crab boat in Alaska, perfect job for an invulnerable man living off the grid) and that even after he reveals himself (as Superman) the human world's citizenry and authorities don't take as merrily to the idea of a god walking among them as they traditionally do in Superman stories; so this would seem to go along with that idea. It would especially make sense if the world encounters the evil Kryptonians first (it's pretty-much widely known by now that versions of General Zod and Faora are the heavies, and this would be as good an imperative for Superman to start being Superman as any) and are thus suspicious of him.

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