Monday, February 20, 2017

JLU Scene-by-Scene: Batman v Superman Scenes 65-66

This episode of the Justice League Universe podcast focuses on Doomsday and specifically Superman's initial moments fighting Doomsday.

  • Doomsday character design
  • Trailer 2 revealing Doomsday
  • Doomsday and Superman at the Heroes Park Statue
  • Foreshadowing the death of Superman
  • CNN coverage of Doomsday
  • Diana Prince on the plane
  • The boosh effect (https://vimeo.com/203167783)
  • Alfred's well-placed humor
  • Listener's thoughts on Doomsday
Thanks to Alessandro Maniscalco, Kain702, Trent Osborne, Casper Richter, @_sahyl_

Man of Steel Answers, Suicide Squadcast
@JLUPodcast on Twitter

<Transcript of the episode>



Welcome, fans of the Justice League Universe. My name is Sam. In this podcast, Alessandro Maniscalco and I share our analysis of the DC Films that are part of the Justice League Universe. Right now we are going to be focusing on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as we head into the final half hour of that movie. This episode will cover the initial segments of the fight between Superman and Doomsday, starting with Superman catching the fist of the abomination and continuing through until Superman flies Doomsday up into space. We will also get a glimpse into the Pentagon and see Diana Prince on the airplane before she decides to come back to the city to help. And at the end of this episode, we are going to share a few listeners’ thoughts about Doomsday as a character in this movie.

Before we get into that analysis of what we’re calling Scenes 65 and 66, we want to mention something that we forgot from a previous scene. We tend to forget or overlook things quite regularly, but it’s not our fault -- there’s just too much depth and detail in this movie. Anyway, we have mentioned several times that Zack Snyder drew inspiration from the mythologist Joseph Campbell for both Man of Steel and BvS. And for BvS he had a Campbell quote etched into the S-shield in Kryptonian. Well, there is one quote from Joseph Campbell’s writing on heroes that we should have mentioned in our analysis of Martha, but it slipped through our notes. The quote is the following: "And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves." This quote seems to directly apply to Batman’s character arc and him coming right up to the verge of killing Superman. And our analysis of that moment perfectly corresponds with this sentiment that Snyder took from Campbell, that if Batman had actually killed Superman, he wouldn’t have been slaying an enemy, he would’ve been losing his own soul. Thanks to @ImperiousLex for the reminder about that point.

Alright, so Superman just saved Lex’s life right after Lex said that he had created Doomsday specifically to kill Superman. This continues a consistent pattern going all the way back to Man of Steel where Superman instinctively wants to help people in danger. He saves the kids on the bus, even the bully, Pete Ross, he saves the workers on the oil rig, he also saves the helicopter, he helps the waitress who was getting harassed, he saves Lois a few times, he saves multiple fighter pilots, Colonel Hardy, Martha Kent, Dr. Hamilton, the family in the train station, and of course the entire world population, and even when he didn’t save people, like Jonathan in the tornado, we actually see that his instinct was to try to help even at an unknown risk to himself, but he ended up staying back because his father asked him to. This instinct to save people continues in BvS, even though the world makes it increasingly difficult for Superman to operate because there is division over what his role should be in the world and there is misinformation and prejudgment spreading through the media. Nevertheless, we see an entire montage of Superman saving people and we see him disturbed by Batman’s brutal tactics, which shows that Superman’s compassion extends even to criminals, and now we see him even saving Lex Luthor who kidnapped his mom and tried to kill his partner. And let’s remember that Superman did this even though he was just recently exposed to Kryptonite and he doesn’t know the full extent of Doomsday’s powers, so for all Superman knew, he could have been sacrificing his own life in a failed attempt to save Lex.

Looking now to Doomsday, after hatching, he stood up and took some deep breaths and let out a roar. He also stretched out his arms and maybe shed some stuff off of his shoulders before throwing the punch. I liked these little touches, rather than having him just go straight into the punch, because for a reanimated corpse / rebirth of an ancient deformity, it makes sense that he needs at least a little bit of a warm-up.

So now that we are seeing him in action for the first time, let’s talk about this movie’s design for Doomsday. There was definitely a mixed response to it from the audience, with a lot of people saying that it reminded them of a cave troll or of something out of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Others made some comparisons to the Abomination from The Incredible Hulk back in 2008. The thing that I noticed is that many of these people seemed to assume to drawing the comparisons was a criticism of the Doomsday design in BvS, but simply pointing out a similarity is not by itself a criticism. You would have to add to that some sort of reasoning about why it is a negative thing, like it is unoriginal because we’ve seen it before or cave trolls have an unrealistic body structure so it is likewise unrealistic for Doomsday. You have to provide something beyond just pointing out the similarity. For me, I can see certain aspects that are similar but it is a totally separate conversation from whether this is a good character design or not.

The other angle that people often took when they were talking about Doomsday was to compare it to the comic book versions of the character. Notice that we said “versions” and not “version” from the comic books, because there have been several different character designs even in the mainline DC universe of comics. You might say that the original version is the canonical version, introduced for the Death of Superman storyline in the 1990s and designed by Dan Jurgens, with early issues drawn by Jon Bogdanove, but I for one am glad that they didn’t put that exact version into BvS. I’m afraid that the long white hair would not have translated well to the screen, and the green shorts and boots I don’t think would’ve worked as well as just the naked monster like we got in the movie. And even if I’m wrong and maybe those things would’ve worked visually, I still don’t know how you would explain them given how they wrote Doomsday as being created in the genesis chamber from Zod’s naked corpse.

Others have said that they liked the white bones from the original comic design and that they wished Doomsday in the movie had had more bones sticking out or ones that looked more like bones rather than just bonelike protrusions. But I think it was a good idea how they did it -- starting out with much more subtle nobs and then later having his evolution where you get more bones as the fight goes on. And besides, we get the ragged Doomsday teeth right from the start.

But with regard to the bones increasing over time, this is a connection to the Hunter/Prey comics that detailed the character’s origins. In the comic version of Doomsday, he died over and over again but become stronger and more resilient each time. And each time Doomsday developed a more bony exterior. His fall from space in the movie represents a death and rebirth of sorts and so that’s where we see a big progression of bones. It’s even possible that this capability to protect his body was built into his DNA and the nuclear blast set it off.

One thing that is quite a bit different from the original comic version is Doomsday’s size relative to Superman. In The Death of Superman, Doomsday was just slightly larger than Superman. But in BvS, and in the comic books more recently, he has been scaled up to be quite a bit larger than Superman, like more than 10 feet tall. So is the bigger size a good thing or a bad thing? Well, for me personally, I think I’d would’ve been fine with it either way. If they had made Doomsday just a bit bigger than Superman, that would’ve been a bit more realistic given that he was made from Zod’s corpse, but it also would’ve introduced a logistical problem because in this case, he should probably look very much like Michael Shannon still. By making him immensely larger, they can get away from Michael Shannon’s exact likeness, while still keeping some small touches like the scar on Zod’s face. Other benefits of going larger are to separate this fight visually from Man of Steel and to show more clearly that the Trinity is required, not just Superman by himself.

Now, just in terms of pure opinion, I really like the design of Doomsday. I thought they rendered his skin and muscles very realistically and they got a really great physical design for his movements. They gave him just enough character in his face without personalizing him too much, because we still need to see him as purely a monster. And I thought the sounds they used for him matched really well with how he looked and how I imagine his vocal chords to work, and we should also give credit to the motion capture performer, Robin Atkin Downes. Alessandro also thought that the overall conceptualization they had of Doomsday was genius, because Man of Steel showed Superman’s struggle against Kryptonians, Batman v Superman showed Superman’s struggle against humans, and now Doomsday is a crossbreed between the two.

Before going into the first bits of action between Superman and Doomsday, we also wanted to quickly comment on another minor controversy related to Doomsday. Some people said it was a mistake that Trailer 2 revealed Doomsday. But there are several reasons that I don’t think it was a mistake. First, people said it spoiled the villain but villains are essential characters in movies and it is not a spoiler to know who the main characters of a movie are going to be. And from a marketing perspective, you are severely handicapping yourself if you refuse to show a villain because there are people who might be curious to come and see the villain go up against the heroes. Also, scientific studies have shown that spoilers don’t actually detract from a viewer’s enjoyment, even if the person thinks that spoilers ruin the experience. Second, if you don’t believe the science and really want to be a stickler about spoilers then I think you can say that it would be a mistake to put in a movie trailer anything that is supposed to be surprising or unexpected within the viewing experience of the movie. For example, if the movie is a whodunnit, then yes, you probably shouldn’t reveal the killer in a trailer. Or if the movie has a twist, then don’t give away the twist in a trailer. But this does not apply to Doomsday at all because his appearance is not a surprise or a twist. It’s not like he jumps down and completely surprises Batman, Superman, and the audience. Rather, we’ve been shown a slow build up with Lex putting everything in place to create Doomsday and then him developing in his egg sac thing. So within the viewing experience of the movie, we know Doomsday is coming throughout the movie itself -- it is not a surprise when he arrives. So there is no actual moment in the movie that is spoiled by his having been included already in the trailer.

Third, I think there is strong box office evidence that it was not a marketing mistake to include Doomsday in Trailer 2. As you know, marketing is primarily responsible for the opening weekend numbers, and then public reception and word-of-mouth take over from there. Well, BvS had the fourth biggest opening weekend in history, and that is despite getting critically blasted the week leading up to release. So that is strong evidence that the marketing department did a really good job, Trailer 2 included.

Now, Trailer 2 was also the first one to feature the Trinity. And so there’s a separate question of whether that was a spoiler or a bad decision to show that Batman and Superman eventually teamed up, and neither was maimed or killed in their Batman-Superman showdown. We’re not going to go through that whole issue now, but we can again point to the opening weekend numbers to say that there was probably a benefit for showing the Trinity team-up, and I think even without the trailer, people basically knew that neither Superman nor Batman were going to kill each other in their fight and that eventually they would join together. So it didn’t show anything that we didn’t already know.

Okay, let’s actually get into some of the action of this scene. So Superman catches Doomsday’s fist and then punches him against the wall in the scout ship, giving us an initial sense of how Doomsday’s size and powers match up to Superman’s. Superman is able to land blows against him, but Doomsday gets right back up and actually catches Superman in his hands. So we can see right away that if a freshly hatched Doomsday is already this fast and strong, it is definitely going to be a physical challenge for Supes.

Doomsday then jumps straight up out of the scout ship and the ship’s containment area and we get a great shot of the two figures against the Metropolis skyline. The lighting from the helicopter gives us a cool visual outline of Doomsday’s body, which we are now seeing in full. He punches Superman into heroes park, so this is where the geography that they established earlier is paying off. We have seen how the scout ship and the monument are laid out in relation to one another, and so we have a good sense of place as we go to the next sequence of the fight.

After crashing through the concrete, Superman recovers from the blow and stands up, with helicopters circling around, shining spotlights on them. Doomsday has landed from his jump -- notice that he is jumping rather than flying -- and Doomsday looks up at the statue of Superman. The statue is slightly larger than Doomsday, but then Doomsday turns toward the real Superman, who looks very diminutive by comparison, and it’s hard to tell but Doomsday may even give a cocky smirk at the smaller Superman. This leads us to a great shot with Superman in the foreground to the right, Doomsday in center screen, and the Superman statue in the background on the left. It is a great visual line going diagonally from smallest to largest and it is accentuated really well by the backdrop of the arc of stone sections that are centered nicely in frame.

This shot is not only composed well visually, but it also carries a lot of meaning. On twitter, @_sahyl_ started a nice thread asking what this particular shot means to people. We wanted to share a few of the perspectives people shared in that thread. @Meezus_christ said that the shot was like a mirror being held up to Superman, with Doomsday standing in the way of the statue and Doomsday is representing that way that Superman thinks the world sees him, as a monster. Or this is at least how Lex and, until recently Bruce, was seeing him.
@icantfindmybird thought that maybe Doomsday had some thoughts to go along with this shot, like Doomsday was thinking, “I lost my world, Krypton, and yet they build you, Superman, a statue.”
@Real_Clark said the shot represents that Superman is facing the monster that exists in all of us, as we all have to struggle and make choices each day to be good.
@GreatChoman keyed in on the size, which is definitely emphasized in the shot, and Choman said that Superman must feel small in the face of such a large threat, and yet by the end of the movie we will see that Superman represents something much bigger than the Doomsday threat, and that monumental hope and inspiration will come through by the end.
@jollybrah had an interpretation that is pretty close to our own interpretation of this shot, which is that Doomsday in front of the statue represents the negativity and the corrupted version of Superman that people have started to see because of Lex’s manipulations and because people often look for the dark side of their heroes. So what started as the noble statue of Superman at the beginning of BvS has turned into the evil and dangerous Doomsday, that is, Superman perceived as a monster. Going beyond @jollybrah, we would then bring Superman himself into the picture to say that really Superman is just Superman, trying to always do the right thing and help out to the best of his ability, even though it doesn’t always go perfectly. So there was the exalted version of Superman, then there was the corrupted monstrous version that was literally created by Lex Luthor, and then there was the real version of Superman, standing there fairly small by comparison but about to do what he can to save the world again.

So thanks @_sahyl_ for that nice twitter thread, and we also wanted to mention that our podcasting friend Rebecca Johnson, @derbykid, also chimed in, mentioning a shot that is about to come in a few seconds when Doomsday throws Superman through the statue. She noted that this is Doomsday metaphorically slaying Superman and a foreshadowing of the fact that he will physically kill Superman later.

We also wanted to stop here to consider what might be going on in Doomsday’s head. Overall in the movie he’s pretty monstrous and acts basically like a beast or something just operating on instinct. But there are moments of possibly something going on behind the eyes, like the possible smirk that we mentioned earlier. And when he’s looking at the statue, maybe there’s a little bit of recognition there, which raises the possibility that maybe some of Zod’s thoughts are contained inside Doomsday’s brain. Because he is dead by the end of the movie, we never really get to find out or see any explicit Zod connections play out, but this does address a small little nitpick that I had about Doomsday. When I was first watching the movie, I wondered how Doomsday had Kryptonian level strength and powers right from the start when he never had a chance to absorb the yellow sun’s solar radiation. But the solution to this nitpick could be related to Zod -- maybe Doomsday has a little bit of residual power that was still stored in Zod’s corpse. As Zack Snyder said and as will be important for Justice League later this year, Kryptonian cells don’t really decompose in the way that we’d expect. So he could have inherited a bit of a super charge from Zod’s corpse. Or, as Alessandro has pointed out, we don’t know his full biology and since he has mixed DNA, human and Kryptonian, that could have different implications for his powers. Maybe he just got some initial powers from his regeneration matrix as in the Death and Return of Superman storyline in the comics.

So anyway, going on in the scene, Superman does his flying double-punch move and Doomsday grabs Superman and throws him through the obelisks with the names of the BZE victims. This is sort of a poetic echo because Zod was the one primarily responsible for those deaths, and they pained Superman a great deal, and now Zod in the form of Doomsday is yet again throwing Superman through it and he next grabs the names of the dead and bashes Superman with them. So even into this fight sequence, we still have the motif of Superman’s actions bearing down on him, he is constantly carrying the weight of the world and the consequences of his actions, even when things aren’t directly his fault, like those deaths in Metropolis. They clearly weren’t his fault, and the people didn’t think they were because they made him a statue right there together with the memorial, but he has the weight of responsibility for not being able to save everyone and Superman is always open to being criticized for the dead just like he was with Bruce and Wallace and now Doomsday his hitting him with them, as well.

Doomsday then grabs Superman’s leg and throws him straight through the statue, so this shows that Superman’s stature and standing in society is what is under threat here. Lex’s plotting largely involved trying to drag down Superman’s reputation in the public because Lex couldn’t stand Superman being adored above all else as a benevolent godlike figure. And ultimately, Lex created Doomsday to not only kill Superman physically but also to destroy that good public idea of Superman -- to show that power isn’t innocent. By throwing the real Superman through the statue, we are seeing both of Lex’s motives coming together in one single action. Doomsday has the upper-hand right now in the physical battle and he has also just destroyed the statue that was erected to honor a publicly adored Superman.

After Superman crashes into a building that looks like it may be under construction on the upper floors, we get yet another great and symbolic shot with the Superman statue head laying on the ground and the camera moving slowly over it toward Doomsday. This is a direct visual foreshadowing of the death of Superman when there will be another shot later that moves slowly over a lifeless Superman’s head. We are only a few moments into the big Doomsday battle that people called mindless CGI action, and we’ve already had Doomsday standing between Superman and his besieged public representation, Superman bashed with the names of the dead, Superman thrown through his erected public image as a manifestation of Lex’s entire plan, and a clear visual foreshadowing of the death of Superman. All of this has taken place between the scout ship and heroes park, two very meaningful settings in the story thus far. Mindless CGI my CG-ass.

With Superman temporarily out of commission, Doomsday’s attention turns immediately to the helicopters that are flying around and shining lights at him. He leaps up and in the theatrical version he just misses the first helicopter and then he crashes at the top of a Lex Corp tower.

This is when we cut into the Pentagon with Major Farris saying that the POTUS is joining. So military and defense leaders had already been actively monitoring the situation with the scout ship, but now that Doomsday has burst forth and seems to be a serious threat to Superman, the President is calling in directly. They are watching Anderson Cooper and the live CNN feeds of Doomsday at the top of Lex Corp tower, but I do want to stress that there is a big difference between presidents and military leaders getting information from news helicopters during an emergency event, as happens in BvS and which is very reasonable to do. That’s different from a president using cable news interviews to get his information about international affairs rather than using intelligence briefings or direct contacts. Using cable news like that, and say repeating something erroneous just because you heard it once on cable news, would be very unrealistic.

But Swanwick and the others are watching CNN, which continues Zack Snyder’s idea of the media being like the third main character throughout the movie. We also see CNN inside the Turkish airlines plane where Diana Prince is stowing her luggage and taking her seat. I love how effortlessly she throws her bag up with just one hand, subtly revealing her great strength. Turkish airlines, by the way, was the advertising partner that ran BvS ads during the Superbowl in 2016. And we hear Anderson Cooper reporting that the workday is over and the downtown quarter is nearly empty. So this is yet another time where the filmmakers are trying to preempt audience concerns about civilian casualties. Cooper also mentions that Doomsday came from the Kryptonian ship, so some people might start to again connect this tragedy to Superman or even jump to conclusions and blame Superman for Doomsday, just like some people jumped to conclusions about the Capitol bombing. And this blame based on the scout ship may have been part of Lex’s plans.

Anyway, Diana starts to get concerned about what she’s seeing. And just before this, we also got a cool shot from behind a suite of Apache helicopters headed toward Lex Corp tower. That shot, plus them firing on Doomsday and Doomsday roaring from the top of the skyscraper seem like an homage to King Kong. So we had some Frankenstein references earlier and now we’re getting King Kong, and as Carl Denham said about Kong, that he was “neither beast nor man,” so too is Doomsday neither fully Kryptonian nor human. This particular moment on the top of Lex Corp tower is also cool just because it brings us back up to the helipad scene where Lex kicked off this whole particular sequence of events.

The helicopters continue to fire on Doomsday and he starts to get a glowing core of energy in his chest from the attacks. This eventually builds up and we get our first big Doomsday blast, with a really wide shot from above and then a wide shot from below as we see a dome of energy rip outward from the tower. This blast is kind of like the solar flare from the comics, which is a relatively new super power that Superman has, created by Geoff Johns in Superman issue 38 -- and a version of the solar flare was also adapted into the Supergirl TV series, such as in the episode Red-Faced. Normally Superman can release his solar energy from his eyes via heat vision, but with a solar flare or super flare, Superman actually goes so far as to release solar energy from all of his cells simultaneously. Afterward, he is left powerless temporarily. So Doomsday’s big blast is different because he is getting the energy from being attacked rather than from the sun, and he is not powerless afterward but instead seems to enter into a next stage of evolution or at least a change in development. But even with those differences in mind, they are kind of reminiscent of one another. If you’re curious about which one came first, it’s a bit tough to tell. Superman 38 came out in February 2015 so it was probably written in late 2014. That is also about the time that BvS wrapped filming. So BvS was written earlier and Geoff Johns would’ve had access to the script before he wrote his issue of Superman, although the details of the Doomsday blast, which the Visual Effects team called the “boosh effect,” would’ve actually been finalized during post production in 2015, after Superman 38 came out. So it’s possible that they both influenced each other. Anyway the boosh effect consisted of over 50 CGI layers, including the expanding bubble of energy, the lightning strikes, the light that hits the buildings from the energy burst, the dust and wreckage, and more. You can see some cool details about how they made it in the visual effects clip that Cruel Films posted on Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/203167783

After Doomsday’s first boosh, the CNN feed cuts out and Anderson Cooper reports that they’ve lost connection but that “It’s not clear what just happened.” That is good journalism, by the way, not jumping to conclusions and not starting a panic. But Diana knows that this is serious and she resolves in that moment to leave the flight and return, after a hundred years, to again help mankind. This is also the first time she’s referred to on screen as “Ms. Prince,” so Bruce was never able to actually figure out her identity but now we know. Of course we already knew who she was from information outside the movie itself, but this is a nice little setup for the next time we will see her when it will be really obvious that she is Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman.

We also get a quick shot of Batman still in his batwing, trying to figure out what that big energy blast was. Just as Anderson Cooper had said it wasn’t clear what just happened, Batman asks Alfred, “What’s happening there?” And Alfred delivers a great line in response, pausing for a beat and then asking, “How best to describe it?” To me, this humor worked really well because it was from Alfred, who we have come to expect as a source of dry wit, but it is a joke in advance of a fight, not during a fight. And the joke works because the news reports had confirmed there were no people in the vicinity of Doomsday’s blast. If Doomsday had actually just fried hundreds of people, this would be an inappropriate time for a joke. But since it’s just destruction, not death, and because we are kind of tense in the face of Doomsday’s impressive powers, this line from Alfred slices through the tension nicely and allows us to gear up for a very entertaining battle between our heroes and Doomsday.

As Diana strides up the jet bridge, we go back to Doomsday who is clearly unhurt even from his own huge blast and we get a cool helicopter shop that is slowly rotating behind Doomsday as he roars from the top of the tower, with flames all around him. Then suddenly Superman bursts in from underneath and lifts Doomsday straight into the air. Superman, perhaps learning from his fight with Zod in Man of Steel, or simply given the opportunity not afforded him against Zod, thrusts Doomsday up into space to get him away from Earth and its residents who could be harmed by the creature and from the collateral of their battle. The music that comes in as Superman flies Doomsday upward is the same arpeggiating strings that were playing when Bruce was lifted up by the bats. But this time, instead of having Batman’s theme underneath the arpeggios, we get Superman’s perfect fifth and perfect fourth intervals underneath.

This decision by Superman to try to take Doomsday into space will lead to a key decision point for the president, and that’s where will pick up with the next episode.


End of Episode:

So that’s our analysis of the first few beats in the Doomsday battle. To close out this episode, we want to share some thoughts from a few of our listeners about the character of Doomsday in BvS. Kain702 from YouTube, who also writes as capeVmasks on Reddit, said the following things about Doomsday. (To quote him with some light editing) “Some people have argued that DD was just shoehorned into the final battle as a mindless beast for the trinity to fight. I'd like to suggest that Doomsday represents the psychological scars that each hero suffered during the Battle of Metropolis in Man of Steel. First, the heat vision is very important in tying the Doomsday attack to the Battle of Metropolis. The first time Bruce sees the super-powered might of the kryptonians, it's Zods heat vision burning through Wayne financial and killing Jack. When Batman sees Doomsday, how does he realize it’s kryptonian? When Doomsday fires off his heat vision. Also the fact that Doomsday is literally a revived Zod and smashes the park monument over superman's head, makes it somewhat obvious that this monster at least partially represents Superman's failure during his first day on the job. Notice how the use of force and violence impacts Doomsday. He only gets stronger, he's hit with missiles and emits a huge explosion, he's hit with a nuke and gains heat vision and bone protrusions, he gets his armed dismembered and gains a blade-like weapon. Now contrast Zod’s defeat with Doomsday’s defeat. Zod was defeated by a final use of extreme force. But Doomsday grows stronger through force and violence, so Doomsday has to be defeated by an act of sacrifice rather than overwhelming force. Lastly, notice how the ending and beginning of the film mirror each other: the film opens and ends with a funeral and the next scene adjacent from those funerals are the battle of metropolis and the Doomsday conflict. With the end of the Battle of Metropolis, Batman sees Superman as a threat and Superman survives at the expense of many lives, while with the end of the Doomsday battle, Batman sees superman as a hero and Superman dies saving many lives in the process.” (end quote) Thanks, Kain702. That definitely seems to us like some great connective tissue between Man of Steel and BvS and some great meaning drawn from Doomsday, who was certainly more than just a big bad to fight at the end. https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/comments/4zpt0x/relevance_of_doomsday_in_the_story/?st=iyi5cjqh&sh=7cebfa6e

Another listener, Trent Osborne from YouTube, also had some thoughts about how Doomsday helps connect BvS back to Man of Steel: (quote, again lightly edited) “Doomsday continues Zod's story. Jor-el said Zod became a monster, then in BVS he actually is transformed into a monster. This is where krypton and Zod's ways lead -- the policy of artificial birth leads to Doomsday. It's why Krypton couldn't be reborn as it was, it was a failed society that rejected life itself. The battle against Doomsday is actually the final battle between Zod and Jor-el's philosophy, it concludes their story. Long ago Jor-el sent Kal-El to Earth to act as a beacon of Earth to inspire humanity and build a better world than krypton. Zod came to Earth seeking to rebuild the old krypton. Jor-el tried to reason with Zod on krypton that their society needed to evolve but Zod refused and decided to destroy Earth to remake krypton. Each choice Zod made led him more into destruction until his krypton turned him into a monster of destruction. That Zod's his legacy, Superman is Jor-el's legacy. The battle with Doomsday finally concludes Jor-el and Zod's war and Kal-El achieves Jor-el's goal of becoming a beacon of hope for humanity, it resolves the narrative of both MOS and BVS.” (end quote) Thanks so much for those thoughts, Trent.

Let’s go now to another of our loyal listeners, Casper Richter from YouTube. He had a lot of great thoughts about Doomsday and we will share a few of them here. (quote) “Just the fact that Doomsday is created by Zod's body is an amazing new angle to connect BvS to Man of Steel. Not only is it a crime against life itself that Luther creates Doomsday, but it is also a crime against Zod. He was in many ways a monster but also a warrior who tried to save his lost people. Zod was a man who had never had a choice in his life, which is a tragedy, but now with this new angle Zod has a chance through Doomsday to avenge his own death and fulfill his promise to destroy humanity.” Continuing with some of Casper’s thoughts, he also noticed the foreshadowing and statue themes that we mentioned earlier, and Casper definitely thought of that moment at the statue as being filled with recognition between Zod and Superman both. Casper also noted that the stone falling on Superman was kind of like the lid of a coffin. So thanks for your thoughts, Casper.

And we have one final listener whose thoughts we want to share, but unfortunately I have to apologize because I don’t actually know which listener this is. If you recognize your ideas, please let us know in the comments because we want to give you credit. But one of our brilliant listeners wrote about the fan debate about Doomsday, saying that many people (qoute) “hated this version of Doomsday, but I must say that I find him even more sinister than ever. 1. Zod was a monster, but also a man who tried to save his people. Even in death he does not deserve to be utilized as Lex did, which casts an even greater tragedy of Zod. It is grotesque and perverse for Zod to be exploited in this way after his death. 2. Zod becomes Doomsday, while also providing Zod a chance to carry out his promised revenge on Superman from his grave. We can even see that Superman also recognizes Zod as they both stand facing each other in front of the ruined monument of Superman's statue. 3. It is also clear that Doomsday recognized Superman and wanted to continue Zod’s mission of destroying humanity. That explains why he did not just kill Superman immediately, but goes on to attack the rest of humanity from the highest point he could find: LexCorp Tower. 4. Doomsday is also an important lesson for Batman because Batman is forced to watch a monster attack Earth, a monster even bigger than Superman ever could be, and Doomsday provides an opportunity for Batman to see Superman's self-sacrifice, courage and humanity because he gives his life and thus will not save only Metropolis and Gotham, but the rest of the world that denied him. Superman also saves Batman and Wonder Woman's lives that night, because only he was strong enough to use the spear against the monster. And most importantly: doomsday was created by a human (Lex) which underlines the truth Bruce had denied; That evil not only comes from god-like people, but still also from people.” (end quote) Thanks, mystery listener.

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