Mustache aside, many critics of Zack Snyder's entries into the DC Extended Universe film franchise agree that the director's original sin was his somber, emotionless Superman as portrayed by Henry Cavil. In Man of Steel (2013), we are introduced to Cavil as the iconic caped hero, but this is not your father's Superman. The Superman of the DCEU is brooding, fearsomely godlike, and almost entirely removed from the human condition. This is not the Superman who once said, "I believe in second chances, I believe in redemption, but, mostly, I believe in my friends."

Many critics of Snyder's entries into the DCEU have wondered aloud at the rationale behind presenting audiences with such a drastically out of character Superman. But perhaps to determine the answer, we must widen our scope of inquiry and look to Snyder's work on the DC movie he made just prior to Man of Steel.

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doctor-manhattan

Snyder cut his teeth on the superhero genre (though not the comic movie genre) with Watchmen (2009), a film that played things safe by recreating Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel nearly panel-for-panel with few exceptions, most notably replacing an enormous eldritch squid that appears at the book's climax with man-made bombs. He even kept in the "Tales of The Black Freighter" bits, a comic within a comic from the original work. The reception from diehard Watchmen fans was mixed, but even the worst critic reviews came nowhere close to the scathing responses heaped upon Man of Steel and Batman V Superman.

While the original graphic novel was a polyphonic work, the medium of film necessitated that Snyder's big-screen adaptation follow the few characters who drive the plot most: Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Doctor Manhattan. It is the latter on whom we must focus, as played wonderfully by Billy Crudup.

Doctor Manhattan's defining trait, both in book and film, is his ultimate detachment from humanity as a result of his awesome powers. Able to control matter as easily as most humans breath and able to perceive time in the fourth dimension, he retreats from the world of man over the course of the film as Ozymandias slowly blocks his power of omniscience with tachyon particles. By the end of the film, Doctor Manhattan is willing to reduce Rorschach to a cloud of red mist in order to prevent the story of Ozymandias' plot from getting to the public. He has become entirely utilitarian in his actions, able to kill one man in order to potentially save millions.

"You get a little bit of punishment for assuming that everything is gonna be glossed over and clean and easy to understand," Snyder said in a press junket interview for Watchmen.

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A godlike superhero who, due to his unlimited power feels he cannot relate to humanity? Where have we seen this before?

Snyder reimagines the Superman of the DCEU as an alien in every sense of the word, estranged from the people he saves. In Man of Steel, Clark seethes internally over abuse heaped on him by a trucker in a remote bar until later destroying the man's eighteen-wheeler with giant logs under cover of night. He looks on powerlessly as his father is swallowed by a tornado. Jonathan Kent, throughout the film, believes that were he to to use his powers to save people, Clark would reveal his strength to a world unready to accept so great a being as himself. This philosophy guides many of Clark's decisions until he reveals himself to the world in a climactic final battle with Zod that levels a large portion of Metropolis. He is ultimately willing to kill General Zod in order to save Metropolis (a decision many have pointed out was not a logistic necessity, but as the idea that there was no other way to resolve that conflict appears to be Snyder's intent, let's assume it was the only solution). Few versions of Superman are willing to take him to that point, and once that line was crossed, it was clear that the DCEU version of the character would play by different rules.

This characterization became even stronger with Snyder's follow-up film, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. In his first full scene, Superman kills a man who has taken Lois hostage by slamming him through a building. Later, the world believes he killed many more people on the scene, and why wouldn't they? A man selective with whom he murders is still, you know, murdering.

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As for the Superman we meet in Justice League, since Snyder was not the only director of the film, a project he left to Joss Whedon due to a family tragedy, we cannot truly assess what his vision for Superman's character was in that film until his "Snyder cut" is released in 2021.

Sure enough, though, when we look across Snyder's superhero filmography, we can see clear reflections of Crudup's Doctor Manhattan in Cavil's Superman. The basic strokes are the same, yes. Brooding demigod who is bothered by the world around him. But the parallels are even more striking when we examine the cinematography. Both characters are frequently filmed in long, silent shots, the camera pulled back to a middle distance in an expression of dispassion, or from low angles while the character is illuminated with light to express his godliness. The language of the shots is clear: this man is not of this world.

Even when the camerawork is rote, Cavil's face appears half-shrouded in shadow, suggesting that his true nature is hidden and rendering his interiority impenetrable. He is often seen grimacing, frowning, and clenching his jaw, or just generally not having a very good time.

Doctor Manhattan, classically understood to be a dark parody of Superman, is meant to be seen this way. When Alan Moore looked at the most powerful superheroes of comic book lore, he thought such a powerful character would necessarily be not a smiling savior of Earth, but a grim ubermensch who saw us all as beneath him in some way. So, for Snyder to co-opt the characteristics of Doctor Manhattan for his Superman belies the implication that Snyder sees the two characters not as opposites but as more or less the same. Sure, Superman isn't going to peace out to Mars instead of saving Earth, but he's going to save it with a chip on his shoulder.

Such a characterization is horribly wrong for Superman, and that point has been reiterated in superhero-loving circles ever since Man of Steel debuted. But by glimpsing the process through which Snyder ended up with a grim, inhuman Superman, we can begin to understand the director's true vision.

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Some may believe that a "darker" Superman is a good thing, and it's certainly been done well previously in stories like Red Son in 2003 or elsewhere. We can surely applaud Snyder's attempt to explore what the real-world implications of a being like Superman would entail, but the problem ultimately boils down to character psychology. While everything about Doctor Manhattan's experiences and inner life lead him to abandon humanity, very little of Superman's origins lend a satisfying explanation for his character turns in the first two DCEU films.

Jon (Doctor Manhattan) is the son of a watchmaker who abandons his craft after Einstein's proof that time is relative. He immigrates to America with his father and grows up to be a physicist. After being essentially flayed alive one atom at a time during an experiment, Jon reconstructs himself into the being known as Doctor Manhattan. He is soon recruited by the United States Military, who give him his alias "for the ominous associations it will raise in America's enemies." He notes, "They are shaping me into something gaudy, something lethal." President Nixon then proceeds to send Manhattan into Vietnam to end the war. There, he commits war crimes and atrocities at an unprecedented scale, murdering thousands of enemy combatants. His deeds are so gruesome that the Viet Kong come to see him as a god and will only surrender to him in person.

From the moment he becomes superpowered, Manhattan is made to kill en masse. This is a man for whom human beings have long ceased to mean more than collections of flesh and blood.

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Superman, meanwhile, has very little of the same psychological baggage. Yes, his planet has been destroyed, but he is raised by the Kents, who are idyllic parents to the young alien. The Jonathan Kent who dies in Man of Steel is someone Clark sees as more of a father to him than his true, biological father, Jor-El, and he grows up with humans, relating more to them than to Kryptonians. It is for this reason that when General Zod shows up, driven by his very DNA to commit an act that will resurrect Krypton, Superman feels compelled to fight the General, dooming Krypton to permanent extinction in order to save humanity. It is his connection to that humanity, to our values as human beings, that instills Superman with his own morality. Nothing in his psychology makes him a killer, just as everything in Doctor Manhattan's psychology leads him to kill.

Snyder knows this. In a 2013 Q&A, when questioned about how he grounded a film about explosions and galactic entities, the director's response was, "It's really about the human man inside Superman. He's raised in Kansas. The man that is still wanting to be accepted by this planet—how he struggles with the same things we struggle with."

What makes Superman Superman is that he sees every human as worth saving. What makes Doctor Manhattan Doctor Manhattan is that he sees all humans as nothing more than a collection of atoms (until Laurie convinces him otherwise). In no scenario does it make sense for these two characters to share such similar personalities on screen. Yet when asked about his dark take on Superman in that same Q&A, Snyder said, "As far as the darkness goes, it's just cooler to me that it's a little bit darker. I don't know."

When asked who would win in a fight between Doctor Manhattan and Superman, Snyder replied, "Doctor Manhattan. Are you kidding me?"

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