mnkykungfu, I like a lot of what you have to say. I also would like to reboot supes on the big screen, and make Smallville a bigger part of a first movie than either the original film or the Snyder version did. Specifically, I want to understand the contradiction by which a humble, decent guy decides to put on such a flamboyant suit and adopt such a highfalutin moniker. That's a decision both the movies essentially gloss over by presenting the suit as an inheritance from the Jor-El hologram, which I feel is a cop out.
I also want a real-world, psychologically realistic and political Clark Kent. I want a Clark that wrestles with whether he
should enlist in the US military, and smash up terrorists, drug cartels, and maybe even authoritarian regimes. (Credit to
Smallville S1/S2 for giving young Clark a personal connection to the military in Whitney Fordman, even if the Middle East wars weren't mentioned, and the battle he died in looked like Vietnam.) I want a Clark that opposes vicious and violent international drug gangs, but also demands that Americans reckon with the fact that the War on Drugs is largely a repeat of Prohibition, but with the terror and misery of drug production exported to foreign countries, and how that consistently creates refugees that many Americans in turn view with suspicion and hostility. I want a Clark that points out that the overwhelming majority of scientists believe climate change is a huge threat to the global society, which, as the sole survivor of a dead world, he probably has some feelings about. And I want him to use Kryptonian tech to disguise his face and voice in Superman mode, because the whole invisibility-via-glasses shtick is beyond lame at this point. Either ditch the secret civilian entirely, or use tech to hide.
Or, if the filmmakers/studio just want to give us a classic, old-school, and boringly apolitical Supes, then go all the way with that and make a full-on 1930s period piece; that could be great, too. I'm just sick of the recurring approach, from later-season
Smallville to
Superman Returns to even the DCEU, for all its grimdark trappings, of splitting the difference between a modern setting and the quaintness of the Daily Planet world. If Clark
must still work at a newspaper, then
at the very least show us he gets there, by toiling away in academia, lame internships, and then facing the realities of corporate-owned media timidity.
Don't just cheat and give some nobody with a nothing resume a reporting job out of nowhere, like
Man of Steel did.
In conclusion: I've seen a lot of online commentary that says that Superman can be a successful character if he's just portrayed as a simply and classically good dude, a la
Justice League, but I don't buy it, especially on the big screen. Yes, that approach worked for Cap, but that's because Cap grew up in the 30s and 40s; there's narrative justification for old-school candor. So unless they want to have a 1930s Superman fall into a wormhole and emerge in the present day, "because Heartland values persist to the present day" is
not a sufficient explanation for him to act the way he does in
JL and
Supergirl. IMHO.