10 Surprisingly Unethical Movie Moments

Man of Steel – The Destruction of Metropolis

Man of Steel is actually just the starting point for this entry, because what is most important is that Superman is soon to join forces with Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice…..and the two have very different approaches to what is and what is not ok to do. Batman – especially as he has been recently canonized by Christopher Nolan – refuses to directly kill people. Zack Snyder’s Superman, however, trashes an entire city just to get to one person, who he eventually kills with his own bare hands.

The variable reviews of Man of Steel were largely to do with Snyder’s choice to focus on continual repetitive action rather than heart (or plot – or script), but it was also widely criticized for its lack of characterization. Because – for those who missed the incessantly noisy chaos that was the finale – aside from the advice to maybe go for an eye exam, it needs to be pointed out that Kal-El’s rapid destruction of vast amounts of Metropolis must surely have involved the destruction of vast amounts of ordinary civilian human beings. Buildings fall, parking lots are demolished, roads are smashed, all taking acres of moral high ground down along with it (cross reference the fact that over in the Marvel Universe, The Avengers thought to evacuate New York City before they blew fifty shades of rubble out of it). In fact, compared to the reasonable assumption that most people who died during this sequence were either crushed, smashed or suffocated to death, Zod’s having his neck snapped seems like a pretty lucky escape.

It is not as though Kal-El shows no remorse for having killed Zod, and of course the whole point of the battle was to defeat an enemy who would eventually have killed off the entire human race. But this is exactly what brings a serious issue to the upcoming collaboration between Superman and Batman.

An absolute dream for ethics lecturers (of which I am one) who like to keep their students awake by throwing pop culture scenarios at them, on one hand we have someone who will use killing to prevent further killing, and on the other there is a character whose belief that compassion is what sets him apart from his enemies leads to a single firm rule that he will not kill at all. And both routes actually have pretty serious consequences. Whereas Kal-El’s ‘means to an end’ approach involves active killing, Batman’s fixed principle of not killing the villains has arguably led to more deaths than if he had just killed them when he had the chance (and Starksy and Hutch thought they had problems).

Quite how Snyder is going to get them to work together is as yet anyone’s guess, but we do have a couple of clues in the movie’s title: The subtitle Dawn of Justice of course suggests that somehow, Superman and Batman are going to find a way to make things work. But the principle title Batman V Superman does allude to the idea that at least to start with, this is going to be one tense day at the office.