>>110178491His journey around the world saving people is fine, there's nothing wrong with that. The issue is that the film's core message is still incoherent. Is the world ready or not ready for Superman? We're given no reason to take either position, and yet that's the driving angst of the character. The moral position he takes at the end of the film - to react to a seemingly unstoppable enemy by killing them - is perfectly in line with what audiences expect, so of course they're ready for "that" Superman. Killing Zod is the audience-friendly choice because it's the response Americans have spent a century learning and praising: Pearl Harbour is attacked, Japan gets nuked. 9/11, invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Not that it's limited to Americans of course, this is some basic reactionary instinct, but it's absolutely the obvious and innate moral response. The challenging thing is to find another way.
Having said that, the whole scenario is artificially set up in a way that calls for murder. A better film would have had a more human Zod who wasn't as ludicrously cartoonishly bloodthirsty about aliens he's never met. Propaganda likes to frame the enemy as people like Zod, but the real world is more complex than that. A better film would have had a Zod who thought he was making a difficult choice to bring back Krypton through Earth, who truly thought he was doing the lesser of two evils, and a moral battle should have ensued instead of an apocalyptic 9/11-porn fistfight. Instead we got a guy gleefully lasering innocents, it has the depth of He-Man fighting Skeletor, it's a joke that you think this cartoon for man-children is a pleb filter. Pa Kent didn't think the world was ready for action figures slamming into each other.
