When Zack Snyder took a chance at storytelling in the DC Films universe, his interpretation needed to be different than the movies that had come before his Man of Steel, specifically the gentle Richard Donner homage that was Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. As Kevin Smith wisely pointed out, Superman (in the movie) makes it through the entire film without hardly ever throwing a punch. That’s a choice, for sure. So Snyder leaned hard in a different direction, embracing a more mature interpretation of the Man of Steel that tells the classic immigrant story of an alien in Kansas, but asking big philosophical questions about how humanity might react if and when they learned that an alien exists amongst them.
Needless to say, it gets dark and violent. And by the end of Man of Steel, Superman (Henry Cavill) and his adversary, General Zod (Michael Shannon), have battled to the death… leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. This led some to conclude that Snyder was trying to make Superman – normally a beacon of hope – into something more angry. But when posed with that theory following a Man of Steel screening in Pasadena, the director pushed back a bit and clarified:
