The filmmakers chose to go a different way.

I had high hopes for this movie. But the inspiring example of the original superhero is apparently naive. This was a movie about superhumans, not superheroes - and the horror and dread that former should instill in you. [Link]

Hope gets a mention. We're told the symbol on Superman's chest represents "hope," but I can't think of any moment in the movie that shows us that ideal. The characters standing in the wreckage at the end of the movie seem to represent grim endurance rather than hope. We do see a glimpse at the end of the movie of young Clark Kent playing outside with a cape around his neck. That seems hopeful. But as it's a moment from his past, before everything went to hell, it also suggests that hope is naive.

I think it's fair to ask what young Clark Kent was pretending to be when he put that cape around his neck. That's a game you play if you're pretending to be a superhero, but Superman is the first superhero. Is he being Aragorn? Hercules? The Phantom of the Opera? Do Marvel comics exist in this world, and he's playing at being Thor?

I raise the point not to be glib, but because I think the moment speaks to the filmmakers' incomplete conception of Superman as an inspirational figure. This Superman is not something to aspire to. At our screening, at the point at which Superman killed Zod, I heard a girl who was too young to be there say, "Why did the man's eyes stop? Why did he stop?"

It was a painful moment of instant, awkward context: this little girl is not going to put on a cape and pretend to be this version of Superman. Nor would I want any child to want to be this version of Superman. Snyder and Goyer don't appear to understand what inspires someone to put on a cape and run around the garden. In this universe, a person puts on a cape because someone gives them a cape.

Superman is not a hero in this movie; he's a liability. This is a movie where everyone would have been better off -- and thousands more people would be alive -- if Superman had never come to our planet. It's hard to see that as a message of hope. If the filmmakers had written it so that Zod had always meant to target Earth, and Jor-El sent his son to stop him, that would place an act of heroism at the story's core, rather than acts of desperation and revenge. It would make Superman a solution, not a problem. The rest of the story would play out largely the same way, but events would have moral weight. The filmmakers chose to go a different way.

One of the great pillars of Superman's moral universe is his adoptive father, Jonathan Kent. This movie removes him from that role. In most tellings, Clark Kent learns his values from his decent and upstanding parents. In this movie his father teaches him to lie. He teaches him to put self-preservation ahead of the lives of others. There is no truth and justice here. There is a sacrifice, but it's not heroic; Pa Kent dies because he's too stubborn to see that he's wrong. We know that he's wrong, because the premise of Superman depends on it. Pa Kent could have been a moral guide; the filmmakers chose to go a different way.

Because the Kents don't tell Clark to be a hero, it's not instilled in him as a value, and he has to take the counsel of his birth father, ghostly Microsoft Word paperclip Jor-El. In choosing to root Superman's virtue in Krypton and not Earth, the filmmakers stole Superman's formative reason for holding humanity up as worthy of salvation. This origin story does not at any point present the idea that mankind is fundamentally good. The filmmakers chose to go a different way.

And still, there were other opportunities to show Superman's innate moral core. At one point Clark walks out of the sea and needs to dress himself. He could have asked for clothes, or he could have taken them and left a note and a promise. That scene would then have serv ed to show us that he is a morally upstanding person, someone who goes out of his way to do the right thing. Instead he steals the clothes and sneaks away. The filmmakers chose to go a different way.

Every chance the filmmakers had to illustrate Clark Kent's fundamental goodness, they went the other way. They made him scheming and vengeful after he gets beer tipped over him. They made him petulant and harmful when he burns a concerned teacher's hand. They made him reject his own family during an argument, and reject his own humanity during a make-out session. "I hear it's all downhill from the first kiss." "I think that only applies to humans." (It's a joke, but the fact that it's a joke told while sucking face with a relative stranger on top of a smoldering charnel pit lends some weight to the idea that he's not one of us.)

You might say these are minor beats, small moments that shouldn't add up to much -- but what do we have in the other column, the "illustrations of virtue" column? You could argue that this is the sort of behavior we're all guilty of, and everyone has to start from somewhere and learn. That's true. Although Superman is as clear a paragon of virtue as any character in fiction, Clark is allowed a few missteps, a few flaws, especially before he dons the cape.

Yet at some point we need to see what his moral values are. We need to see a dramatic illustration of what he believes, what he chooses. This movie avoids that at every opportunity. Even when he walks away from a confrontation in a bar, it's not because he wants to avoid violence or revenge, but because he wants to avoid exposure. He follows through on the violence and revenge when he vandalizes the bully's property.

This Superman is never virtuous. He is never compassionate or conscientious. He never tries to steer the devastation of his fights away from populated areas; nor does he seem to connect with humanity at all. Rather than travel the world looking for people to save, he is a withdrawn recluse who saves people only when they're about to burn to death in front of him. He literally does the least one might expect from a person with his extraordinary advantages. He can't be a hero, because he's bound to the self-preservation code of Jonathan Kent, his other father in the sky, forever whirling overhead somewhere between Kansas and Oz

The writers should have watched Superman: The Animated Series. It seems quite obvious that they didn't like the character or what he stands for.