Man of Steal (MASSIVE SPOILERS)

At the outset, I'd like to declare one simple fact: Superman is the FIRST superhero ever. Without Superman, whether as a comic-book character or a big-screen hero, there would be no Spider-Man, no X-Men, no Iron Man, and none of the colorful characters whose adventures I have enjoyed reading or watching on the big screen since my childhood days.

It amused me quite a bit, therefore, that when I watched the latest Superman movie, Man of Steel, I recognized a number of plot devices/scenarios that had already been used in other superhero or superhero-inspired movies.

1) The death of a father figure following a cruel statement by the hero, from Spider-Man -This one was the most glaring for me.  In the 1978 Superman film, Jonathan Kent died of a heart attack, and the poignancy of that death stemmed from the fact that for all of his powers, there was nothing Superman could have done. That was retooled a bit for MoS, with the elder Kent basically allowing himself to get sucked up into a tornado so that Clark's superpowers could stay a secret, with Clark looking on helplessly. Now, scant minutes BEFORE that happened, there was an exchange of words between Clark and Jonathan in a car wherein Clark, knowing his extraterrestrial origin, haughtily asserted to Jonathan (and Martha, who was in the back seat), that they weren't really his parents. Wow. Powerful stuff. At least that's what I thought when I first saw this scene in 2002's Spider-Man in which Uncle Ben tried to engage in a heart-to-heart with the now super-powered Peter Parker, also in a car, and said "I know I'm not your father" whereupon Peter shouted "then stop pretending to be!" When I saw it in MoS, for all of its tweaks to differentiate it, all I could think was "hey, that was a lot like Uncle Ben's death!" This wasn't the first similarity I noticed between MoS and other superhero movies, but for me it was hands-down the most striking because this was clearly meant to be a pivotal character moment, and the fact that it felt altogether lifted from another script was more than a little distracting.

2) The small town battle from Thor - In the 1981 sequel Superman II, General Zod, then played by Terence Stamp, and his two flunkies wreak havoc in a small town, though Superman isn't around to battle them. In Man of Steel, though Superman and two of Zod's minions actually throw down in a small town in Kansas this time, basically leveling the whole place with their punches, flying bodies and the resulting explosions (although to be fair, the United States military helps the mayhem along quite a bit). One of the minions, a computer-generated Kyptonian, looks like he's about nine to ten feet tall.  That kind of calls to mind the slugfest in 2011's Thor in which the roughly-ten-foot-tall Asgardian robot called the Destroyer is sent to kill Thor and ends up wrecking a small town in New Mexico while duking it out with Thor and his comrades-in-arms, the Warriors Three. Again, even with tweaks (and superior visual effects for MoS), the similarity was pretty striking.

3)  The babies grown on trees from The Matrix - the idea of genetically-engineered babies, unless I'm mistaken, is a concept that's new to the Superman film franchise, with all Kryptonian babies grown in pods attached to what look like trees, all immersed in what I assume is a gigantic artificial womb known as a "genesis chamber." Now, The Matrix films, while not about a comic-book superhero, were no doubt inspired by Superman's exploits given that the hero, Neo, had fantastical powers, including flight. In fact, in one scene during which Neo was flying around the Matrix, one of the operators said "he's doing his Superman thing." Well, the whole concept of babies being grown in enormous fields on mechanical trees was realized quite vividly in the very first Matrix film, so vividly in fact that the moment I saw the genesis chamber of MoS I remembered it.The fact that two Matrix alumni, Laurence Fishburne and Harry Lennix, were part of the MoS cast only reinforced the connection for me.

4)  The climactic flying fistfight from The Matrix Revolutions - Back when he reviewed this film in 2003, popular (and sometimes infamous) geek guru Harry Knowles gushed over the flying fight scene between the heroic Neo and the villainous Agent Smith, and said something to the effect of "wouldn't it be cool if a future Superman movie had a fight that looked just like this!" Apparently Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, the respective director and screenwriters of MoS, read Harry Knowles' review. Also, considering that the movie never really explained how a man who grew up on a farm in Kansas with no formal fight training managed to hold his own in hand-to-hand combat against people who had been training for combat all their lives, all of whom had the same super powers as he did, I can't help but wonder if, in the beginning, when Jor-El "downloaded" the Codex into Kal-El, he basically downloaded fighting skills as well, like the "plug and play" martial arts learning that took place in the Matrix films.

5) The cataclysmic, city-leveling battle from The Avengers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Of all the story devices which seemed to have been cribbed from other blockbusters this one is perhaps the most understandable, considering that disaster porn is always fashionable, but it is no less glaring considering that in past incarnations of Superman on screen, specifically in Superman II, Supes would have been appalled to have caused as much destruction as he did and would have done everything to move the fight away from a populated area, something he did not seem particularly interested in doing while smashing Zod into buildings. To go back to the small town fight, at least he told people to get out of harm's way and shouted "it's not safe," but when he got to the city, he pretty much had at Zod without apparently sparing a thought for the thousands of innocents inside the buildings they trashed. At least the Avengers worked to get the civilians out of harm's way. If anything, Superman was more like the Transformers, who like him didn't seem to give a shit about civilians either when battling the bad guys. The subtext is disturbing; the Superman of the film was more like an alien robot than an actual hero. Ironically enough, it was when he finally killed the bad guy that he actually started showing some concern for life again.

For all of this, and for all the flaws I perceived in the script, I still enjoyed Man of Steel, but I cannot help but chuckle thinking about how liberally the filmmakers borrowed from movies based on characters whose existence was basically inspired by Superman, especially the Marvel characters.  Part of me wonders if the makers of the Marvel movies recognize this, and if they feel like Pepsi did when "New Coke" came out over twenty years ago.