Sasha Calle’s Supergirl Comes So Close in The Flash to Fixing the Sins of Man of Steel

It’s at this point, while reflecting on the implicit horrors she saw in Russia and the explicit ones meted out by her own Kryptonian people, that Kara says, “Krypton was a beautiful place.” It’s a line which suggests—10 years after the fact and perhaps 15 movies too late—Warner Bros. Pictures is at last attempting to redeem the original sin of Man of Steel (2013), which fatefully set the DCEU off on the wrong foot and carried it down a dark path from which it’s never recovered.

Andy Muschietti’s The Flash displays some affection for Zack Snyder’s movie, of course. Which is understandable. The aesthetic Snyder achieved with his first DC superhero film is still visually momentous, from his reworked and regal version of the House of El super-suits (with Calle wearing a variation on the costume Henry Cavill first donned a decade ago) to the canny choice of casting a brilliant actor like Shannon as the hawkish and militaristic Zod. Nonetheless, Man of Steel is the film that set the tone for the DCEU over the following years, laying the groundwork for what became the still divisive “Snyderverse.”

Admittedly, there are many qualities to admire about Man of Steel. Not so subtly taking a page from Christopher Nolan’s then-recent The Dark Knight trilogy (with Nolan on board as an executive producer), Man of Steel attempted to imagine how the governments and institutions of the world would seriously react to a Superman. To wit Alan Moore, how would the globe respond to the realization that, for all intents and purposes, God is real and he is American?

At a glance, it’s on par with how Nolan approximated a major American city responding to a preternaturally successful vigilante dressing up as a bat and cleaning up the town’s corruption. However, Zack Snyder is not Chris Nolan. So while the setup to Man of Steel is sound, the execution of its ideas is where the DCEU began to sink in its infancy. As imagined in Snyder’s 2013 film, Krypton is not beautiful. It’s a bleak, decadent dystopia that’s rightfully on its last gasps of relevancy when the movie begins. Here is a society bathed in dreary browns and yellows, gray skies and beasts of flying burden filling them as they engage in ceaseless civil war. It’s essentially a late stage eugenics project where only one brave man named Jor-El (Russell Crowe) had the wherewithal to stand against the excesses of his government and conceive of a son in that old-fashioned, biological way.

As this son all grown up, Cavill’s Kal-El suggests the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Despite being raised by loving earthy parents in Kansas (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) and having their full support, Kal/Clark is wary and even scornful of humanity. At times, Snyder shoots him as truly alien, making his glowing eyes look faintly demonic as they simmer above a bewildered Lois Lane (Amy Adams).

Even when Superman makes the right decision, he does so reluctantly. After being confronted by the same Zod dilemma as Kara Zor-El will be in The Flash, he laments to a priest, “Zod can’t be trusted. The problem is I’m not sure the people of Earth can be either.” With a stained glass window of Christ floating above Cavill’s head, Snyder’s message is unmistakable. Superman is a messiah who will be sacrificed for an ungrateful and unworthy humanity. This would be prologue for much of the rest of the Snyderverse, including when Superman tells Lois that “no one stays good in this world” as he psyches himself up to do Lex Luthor’s bidding and murder the Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016).