The Breakup

Dear Blogspot,

We’re done.

Don’t get me wrong. You’re a nice website, and you host nice blogs. I hope someday you might, I don’t know, revive or something. Make some nice blogger really happy.

But I’m tired of the way you treat me. I’ve spent hours pouring into this relationship, touching up themes, tweaking font sizes and colors, and revising copy with all I had in me. And what did you give me? Silence. When I laid my career on the line, you gave me the cold shoulder. Over and over and over.

We’ve been at this for years, Blogspot. I can’t take it anymore.

The bottom line is, Blogspot, I’m leaving you. And we’re done for good this time.

Is there someone else? Yes. His name’s WordPress, and he’s alive and active and he works to benefit me, too. And thanks to his efforts multitudes of readers and writers come look at my work, and I look at their work, and we all benefit each other. Basically, things work the way a relationship like this is supposed to work. And we’re very, very happy.

So we’re done, Blogspot. Don’t come back for me. We’re never ever ever ever getting back together. Et cetera and so forth and so on.

Sincerely,

Randi

Check out the happily ever after here: http://randilynnpedia.wordpress.com ...I’m joking about the bitterness but not about the breakup. I’m a WordPresser now. New posts forthcoming there.

Graves on Howard

There didn’t use to be graves on Howard.

Howard Road, it’s the only connection between my house out on the lake and anything close to civilization. A ribbon of black asphalt underneath cobalt Texas sky, it used to snake through the hills without care.

Then one night, when I was driving home on Howard, I was stopped.

Twilight was falling just then, I remember. It had been a long day of friends and wakeboards and surfboards and Arizona iced tea. The salt of the lake was still in my hair and the taste of the sun on my lips as the sunset sank dying into the lake’s purple lap like a picture straight out of The Lion King.

But I had to come to a stop on the road. Lights were glittering in my eyes in the dusk, red and white and blue. The kind nobody wants to see. Ambulance lights. Police car lights. Fire truck lights. And flares lay flickering across the road. Must’ve been one heck of a crash.

There’d be no taking Howard home tonight.

Had to take Old Italy ’round instead.

A day or so later, the crosses showed up. Simple white wooden crosses nailed up to a chain-link fence by the roadside—a little white scar on Howard’s shoulder. I barely noticed. Wondered for a half a second why I’d never seen them before, then forgot about them.

I drove by them every day. I should have known there was a reason there were fresh pink flowers always carefully placed underneath.

I just never stopped to think.

Weeks passed, and the silent crosses faded into the rest of the landscape cradling Howard. I ceased to notice them at all, though I passed them every day. I passed them to go to work, to church, to the bank, to the movies, but I didn’t see them anymore.

Then one afternoon, there was a man standing on the side of Howard.

A cowboy if ever I’d seen one, he stood with his bare head low, the back of his neck deep red and beaten hard with a lifetime of honest outdoor work. His arms were strong, his hands thick and hard where they hung at his sides. Square-toed boots poked out from beneath his sun-faded Wranglers.

I saw him as I drove by, saw him standing there with the gangling sturdy stance of a true Texas man, and I wondered. What was he doing, this strong man in his prime, standing by the side of Howard with his head bowed?

He should have been playing an old acoustic guitar or barbecuing brisket or drinking sweet tea on a back porch somewhere. Maybe horseback riding with a pretty Texas girl with cobalt eyes just like the sky, or making plans to go to the Rangers game tonight.

So what was he doing standing there looking down at those white wooden crosses?

Then all at once, I knew. I knew what he was doing.

The crosses were grave-markers, I realized with a tightening throat. Grave markers that had shown up since that night I’d had to take Old Italy around. I remembered that night, remember how it felt to be driving home, and it hurt to remember, because I realized that I had been slightly inconvenienced while this man had had his heart gutted out.

Whom had he lost? Mother? Sister? Daughter? The pretty Texas girl with the cobalt eyes?

And here he was, coming back to say goodbye again, bringing new pink flowers, standing over the graves to protect them because he could no longer protect those who’d been laid in them. He was grieving.

For one sacred broken moment, I was the only guest at a mute funeral for people I didn’t know. For an instant, as I drove by without stopping or slowing down, that stranger and I, we grieved together.

Because there didn’t use to be graves on Howard Road. But now there are.

The Sandwich Problem

            “I don’t mean to rob you of your free will, Randi,” a friend said to me recently. “You can pick whatever type of bread you want to make me a sandwich. White, wheat, rye, sourdough—even ciabatta. I’m open to anything.”

Needless to say, he didn’t get a sandwich from me.

Ah, the perennial Sandwich Problem. Little did I know back in the olden days when I was a little girl that one of the complex issues I would come to face as I reached adulthood would be the web of half-joking confusion and prejudice surrounding one of the First World’s simplest and most unassuming menu items: the sandwich.

In theory, a sandwich is only (and I quote from what Abraham Lincoln once said was the most reliable resource available: the internet) “a food item commonly consisting of two or more slices of bread with one or more fillings between them.” In practice, however, through no seeming fault of its own, the sandwich has become a cause of strife, at times frustrating and offending both men and women depending on the stance taken. With all the tension surrounding the sandwich, it’s only a matter of time before somebody writes an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice—Sandwich Edition.

Common jokes on the issue vary from Why should women be paid to work at Subway? Isn’t that their civic duty?—on the male side, to  Anytime I see a hot guy I think, “Man, I’d love to make his sandwiches.”—on the female side. But sometimes the situation is a bit more serious.

Let us examine the conditions.

For the most part, men who wish for female-made sandwiches tend to channel their attentions one of three ways:

1.     “Woman, make me a sandwich.”

2.     “Would you like to make my sandwiches?”[i]

3.     “If I bought you ingredients, would you make me a sandwich?”[ii]

In turn, most women tend to react one of three ways:

1.     “OH MY GOSH HOW DARE YOU INSULT ME THIS WAY. Go make your own sandwich, you misogynist beast.”

2.     “Psh, sure, I’ll make my man a sandwich. But why would I make you a sandwich? You’re not my man.”[iii]

3.     “Oh, absolutely. I will gladly make any man a sandwich. I believe it’s a woman’s place to respect men and make them sandwiches.”

This post does not presume to advocate which approach or response to the problem may be correct. There are enough angry and offensive written opinions online already, from both sides of the situation. (Because everybody knows that shouting and cursing at the other side is always the most logical way to win a rational argument.)

However, it is my concern that we are greatly, terribly, overwhelmingly missing the point.

Think about the sandwich in its innocent simplicity. Think about how incredibly disproportionate its seeming unimportance is with the magnitude of the conflict, the tension, the division surrounding it.

That, my friends, cannot be a coincidence.

As famously stated by Abraham Lincoln, “A house divided cannot stand.”[iv] Could it be that the simple sandwich is actually a tool in the hands of a powerful enemy who is even now plotting our destruction? Could there be a force hoping to divide us by sandwich just as Lincoln hoped to divide the Confederacy by capture of the Mississippi River in the early days of the Civil War?

A brief examination of the murky history of the sandwich adds unnerving validity to the question.

Legend has it that the sandwich was created in 1762 when the 4^th Earl of Sandwich demanded in the middle of the night that a piece of roast beef be put between two pieces of bread so that he could eat it while continuing to play a gambling card game without getting his fingers greasy.[v]

Let that sink in.

The Earl needed the brand new sandwich—which some say his cook invented to appease his vague demand for a snack he could eat while playing—to give him the strength to keep playing so that he could win and assert his dominance over the other gentlemen against whom he was pitted in gambling battle.

Winning.

Dominance.

Power.

Division.

The very existence of the sandwich is rooted in a spirit of warfare. Small wonder, then, that the sandwich has continued cutting its rift in unity through history to the present day, where it continues to be one of today’s most divisive and tense topics of debate. The only difference is that now the sandwich conflict is between men and women at large instead of between gamblers.

Here’s the scary part. Who was the cook who presented the Earl of Sandwich with the first sandwich in history? Nobody knows. The name is shrouded in secrecy, lost forever in accidental obscurity.

Or was it accidental? Could there have been something sinister happening in the kitchen that midnight over 250 years ago, that somebody would prefer to keep hidden? Somebody who cleverly planted the sandwich in our midst as a deliberate tool toward our division and subsequent ruin? Somebody who is even now waiting and watching as the sandwich festers among us?

With the facts in mind, I am forced to conclude that the sandwich is, and has only ever been, a deadly instrument of war. The implications of this conclusion are frightening.

I’m not the biggest proponent of conspiracy theories, but there’s nothing like a good sandwich to make me wonder about the Illuminati. Or the aliens. Or even the vampires. But I’m not implying the sandwich is a gamepiece of a deadly and possibly otherwordly conspiracy.

It’s just that the facts are implying that.

---

[i] This is basically a proposal. Proceed with caution.

[ii] This is the most complex approach, involving multiple considerations regarding friend zones, attraction levels, and social obligations. Proceed with caution.

[iii] This is commonly known as a rejection. Proceed with caution.

[iv] This Abraham Lincoln really did say in 1858.

[v] Though sources vary slightly, this also is the real history of the sandwich.

An Open Letter to Collateral Damage Characters

Dear collateral damage characters,

You know who you are.

I’m not talking about “characters from Collateral Damage.” Sorry, Arnold.

Collateral damage characters, you span all genres, touch almost every audience. You’re blue collar and white collar. Old and young. Manufacturers. Journalists. Architects. Politicians. Students. You’re everywhere.

While we watch the drama of a story’s central characters with bated breath, you get murdered by the bad guy or smashed under falling buildings or stricken with the plague of the zombie apocalypse. You’re collateral damage.

And we don’t really care.

Oh, we mourn for some characters who die, all right. The hero’s dad, say, or the best friend or the girlfriend or whoever else we’ve been led to care about.

But we’re not supposed to mourn for you, collateral damage characters. We don’t even know you.

We watch you be flung from bridges or crushed by crumbling architecture or exploded into flame—only to see the vastness of the story’s conflict. Only to come to respect, if we can, the awesome power of the villain, whether he’s a character himself or a faceless force set to overwhelm the protagonist.

And I can’t apologize for that.

We can’t mourn for you, collateral damage characters. Not really. Those of us on the sensitive side may be saddened to watch you go; or if your demise is particularly gory or cruel or disturbing, you may impress some of us with the intensity of it. But we can’t actually grieve for all of you. We’d go insane if we did.

So I’m not apologizing.

But the fact is, collateral damage characters, the stories that employ you wouldn’t be anything without you. A serial killer isn’t a serial killer unless he kills serially. A zombie apocalypse isn’t a zombie apocalypse unless it zombifies multitudes of unfortunate humans. An invading alien force is laughable unless it can use its freakish alien technology to wipe out heavy percentages of the human population.

You’re the nameless characters who fall to the serial killer, the zombie apocalypse, the alien invasion. And that killer, that apocalypse, that invasion is the force that drives the story. It’s the conflict, the story’s most vital element.

Collateral damage characters, you hold up stories’ conflicts.

So then, however unmourned or little noted, you are crucial to the stories in which you suffer. You’re the reason we fear the conflict and wonder if the hero will make it to the end. In essence, you’re the reason we keep watching or reading or listening. You make the story matter.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is thanks.

Thanks for, you know, dying and stuff.

Sincerely,

A Fangirl

on curling irons and sexually exploited children, among other things

Warning: this is a very serious post in the midst of a generally lighthearted blog. Sorry for the rather sharp discrepancy. Since I believe very deeply in the power of Story, especially with all its happy and funny moments as much as its sad and dark ones, I’m sure with following posts the temperature of this blog will rise again. I guess sometimes happy blogs just need reality checks, as overall happy lives need them too.

Her silky brown hair slid through my fingers. She asked me a question, but in the commotion of the moment I didn’t hear it.

“What?” I asked, leaning in closer, the curling iron still in my hand.

She was looking straight into my eyes as she repeated herself. This time, her small voice reached my ears.

“Can you get into heaven—can you get past the gates of heaven—if you have cuts?”

And standing there in an old college dorm room, surrounded by women helping pamper little girls from abusive homes in preparation for an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed ball, my heart fell apart in two pieces.

I don’t remember the name of the little girl whose hair I was curling for the ball, but I will never be able to forget her question.

And I will never be able to forget the trouble in her eyes.

A heavy trouble, a dark trouble, the trouble of a spirit in turmoil, churning up inside her and spilling out through those wide brown eyes. It was the trouble of trauma and violence, of memories darker than anyone should have to bear.

She was only six. About to be seven, she told me. And she was in agony over the question of whether or not a person with a history of cutting could get past the gates of heaven.

She wasn’t the only sad story who sat patiently in our chairs, getting her hair done for the evening. There were others, drastic ones. Girls who shied away from makeup as if the thought of it were a waking nightmare. Girls with burns from causes that make my skin crawl to think of them. Girls whose hair was loaded with weeks’ worth of grime and food and grease. One girl was terrified to even lift her chin.

There’s something about the thought of that little girl being raped that makes me angrier than I can decently express here.

I didn’t cry then, in front of them. We couldn’t. Tonight was a special ball at Royal Family Kids Camp in Waxahachie, Texas, and we handful of volunteers were preparing the girls for the festivities. We just smiled and curled their hair and sprinkled them with glitter and painted their nails and told them they looked stunningly beautiful.

But what was breaking my heart was that before the girl in my chair sat there, before my hands were working with her still baby-soft hair at her request for Princess Aurora curls, there were other hands on her. With different intentions. She has no defender. She has no safety. She has no idea what a good man looks like. She has been violated in every way.

And here I am, getting ready to graduate college, meandering through my life focusing on that elusive thing we Americans are all supposed to look for at this stage: What Interests Me. And I think I have a lot of troubles, but heck, I don’t.

I’m so ashamed of myself.

This wasn’t the first time I’d come across child abuse, and I know this cause isn’t the only war zone in the midst of our broken society. And yet it was a brutal reality check.

Because as long as there is one more precious little innocent girl in danger of sexual exploitation, there is absolutely no reason why I should live in only the pursuit of my own happiness. As long as one more child has a chance of having burning cigarettes pressed into his skin for the sadistic pleasure of his parent or whoever else, I have zero excuse to coast along in the current of my own profit.

These children have no hope.

God help us. Let’s give them some. 

Man of Steel in review, part two: the cons

And now, a few things that don’t quite work so well in Man of Steel. I do have to say that the issues below mostly aren’t bad things about the film—they’re good things about the film that just aren’t allowed to reach their full potential, or aren’t accomplished the best possible way.

Purposefully romantic moments. I said in part one of this post that I like how Clark falls in love with Lois because she’s smart and believes in him. And I do. But the best moments between the two of them are character development/discovery moments. Not the Okay Now It Is Time For a Romantic Encounter moments. Those feel sort of announced, forced.

My little brother called it when he said that really the most romantic moment in the movie is the moment when Clark cauterizes Lois’s wound on board the ice-buried Kryptonian ship. Talk about Lois meeting Clark! That’s a solid character-collision moment, and it works.

Another fantastic moment (although it doesn’t make sense in the scope of the story, but we’ll deal with that later) between the two leads is the private interview Lois gets to have with Clark when he “surrenders” himself to the military. They sit across a table. He’s in handcuffs. She asks him questions. It’s beautiful.

But then there are these other scenes between the two of them that just don’t rest easy with me. And they haven’t worked for anybody I’ve talked to, either.

Take the moment Clark and Lois finally kiss, after he saves her from plummeting to her death from the Kryptonian ship. The problem is that most of Metropolis is lying in ruins around them and thousands of people have been brutally murdered, and traumatized survivors who still badly need help are standing right there watching. Like basically they should have kissed during the classic kiss op they passed up earlier, when Clark was about to surrender himself to Zod’s summons.

I mean, I understand. You escape certain death by finding yourself suddenly in the arms of a tall dark handsome otherworldy man instead of splattered dead on concrete—you’re gonna want to kiss him. I’ve been there; I get that. Nope. That is definitely not true. I have definitely not been in that situation. But still, How to Behave During a Superhero Rescue from Certain Death 101: please, both of you, remember the suffering of the mortals around you, even standing very close to you and watching, and also do show some respect for the dead. But IF YOU MUST KISS, by NO MEANS allow yourselves to have an awkward quasi-comedic exchange about how it’s all downhill after the first kiss but that’s probably only true if you’re kissing a human. People. There will be times for that. Now is not one of them.

Fantastic story concepts, faulty story flow/execution. This is the biggest problem I have here. The thing is, the amazing story moments—and there truly are amazing story moments—are not tied together with enough story throughout to hold them together, and therefore they feel disjointed. The formula tends to be GREAT STORY MOMENT --> break for fifteen minutes of action --> ANOTHER GREAT STORY MOMENT --> another break for fifteen minutes of explosions and crumbling buildings --> and so on. Great story moments don’t make a great story.

And then some of the story elements are brilliant in concept but then don’t feel executed to the fullest of their potential. Take Jonathan Kent’s death. He dies because he stops his son Clark from superheroically saving his life, because he believes the world is not ready to know who his son really is. That. Is. Fantastic. But why is Jonathan caught by the cyclone that kills him? He gets caught saving a dog. Even my pet-fanatic friend who watched the film with me my second time was less than thrilled about that. “I’m not for animal cruelty or anything,” she said, “but if it’s the dog or the father…ummm…” And when this happens, Jonathan has just saved a little girl—why couldn’t that have been his demise? Why the dog?

Then, there’s the way Lois’s character is used. It’s genius in theory, but I’m not sure I’m convinced about all of it in practice.

For instance, Lois gets a private interview with Superman during which he reveals his identity, which he refuses to reveal to anyone else. Perfect. But why? Why did Clark demand to see her, and only agree to surrender on condition that he could talk to her? I mean, Lois’s boss has dropped hints about her being accused of treason. Maybe Clark wants to make sure she’s safe from the government, but that’s a big stretch for us to make. I’m all for thinking, but if during your film you force your audience to think too hard, you interrupt their suspension of disbelief and remove them from your story.

Also why, then, do Zod’s forces insist on taking Lois on board with Clark in the first place? She mentions that she didn’t want to tell them about Clark, but that they read her mind without her will. Why. First of all, why do they need to extract information from her about Superman when they have Superman? And when he reassures Lois that they did the exact same mindreading thing to him anyway? And how did Zod even know about Lois? She certainly seems to magically pop up in the right places an astounding number of times. Ah, man, it’s such a beautiful thing, but it’s not justified in the scope of the story.

Then, Lois involved in the salvation of earth: fantastic. Especially since Superman is still the hero—Lois is simply his link to understanding from Jor-El. But hold up now. If Jor-El goes to the trouble of explaining both to Lois and to us his plan of teaching her how to send General Zod and his minions back to the Phantom Zone, so that she can then teach Superman, you’d better believe we moviegoers deserve to see what exactly is going on. What Jor-El teaches her to save the day. That’s just common storytelling courtesy. Lois is our human link into this alien amazingness. But instead, the critical information is left ambiguous. We know Jor-El teaches Lois the key to defeating the bad guys, and then Lois shows up on Clark’s doorstep saying, “I know how to stop them!” And after that, we hear Clark outline the plan in general, indicating Lois has taught him whatever she needed to teach him. But we never find out exactly what all that was.

That’s not fair. 

One person with us on opening night surmised the answers to that whole deal must have been cut from the film for time purposes. If that’s the case, some of the fighting should have been cut instead of this vital story element, because…

So. Much. Fighting. …there’s just so much fighting! One friend said this film should have been called Superman and the Death of Metropolis because of all the destruction. After seeing it a second time, I told another friend that I had started zoning out during the extended fight scenes to start planning what I’d write in this review. Her response: “ME TOO!”

But seriously. A lethal host from Krypton invading earth—of course there’s going to be mass destruction. I get that. And yet, Zod and Kal, what are we accomplishing by smashing each other personally through buildings over and over? As my friend said, “When is he going to die?”

It’s not the scope of the destruction I have a problem with. It’s the sheer time. After a certain point, all smashed buildings start to look more or less the same.

But don’t worry, Zod doesn’t win. The earth is saved from becoming Krypton 2.0. We’re safe, at least until the next superhero blockbuster threatens the existence of the human race.

Anyway, what’s the verdict—was this a movie of steel about the Man of Steel?

Yes. Just maybe not stainless.

Yeah, sorry. I couldn’t resist.

Man of Steel in review, part one: the pros

With a creepy Kryptonian you are not alone ringing in my ears, I sat down to write a nice little blog review of the world’s latest salvation-by-superhero, Man of Steel. But then my nice little review turned into a monstrously long one and demanded to be broken into two pieces, one about the film’s pros and the other about the film’s cons. So here’s part one: what worked about Man of Steel. 

Disclaimer: following are some mild spoilers, especially depending on your knowledge of the DC universe (although these posts will look at the movie as a story-whole on its own and not within the scope of all its DC implications). But I won’t give away that Superman does indeed succeed in saving the world. Whoops. Just gave it away. But you already knew that.

Now, what worked. Because enough worked in this film to get it an initial IMDb 8.0/10 and a grade A with almost everyone I’ve talked to about it. And the following list is by no means comprehensive.

Russell Crowe/Jor-El. <--First off, this guy. There’s a basic undeniable principle here that when Russell Crowe is in a film, he automatically increases the coolness of said film. In this case, with his classic deep-voiced, sad-eyed dignity and grace he helps bring a level of added legitimacy to our grasp on the dying Kryptonian culture. He helps cement the seriousness of it all in our minds.

As the person sitting next to me whispered repeatedly, both during and after the film, “Best part of the movie: Russell Crowe in tights.” Though I don’t agree with that statement per se, the fact remains that in all seriousness, Jor-El is one of the coolest elements of the movie, both when he’s alive and otherwise.

Amy Adams/Lois Lane. “She’s too old and I don’t mean to be a jerk but she’s not hot enough,” one of my friends said to me about Amy Adams before Man of Steel came out. I heard a lot of that kind of sentiment before the film premiered, both in person and online. There’s some legitimacy to the argument—you cast a redhead eight years older than your hero as Lois, you’re going to have some controversy. For the most part, we’ve all come to picture this fated reporter as a brunette. And on the sultry side, at that. It’s understandable that Adams feels a jarring choice.

But interestingly, those arguments about how she was too old and not hot enough seemed to decrease dramatically after the film came out. Sure, some people still were displeased, and opinions varied drastically. But with all of us opinionated fans waiting to devour her performance no matter how it turned out, that was inevitable. What fascinated me was that of the group with which I first saw the film, the young men were most pleased with her (one of them, a twenty-something, actually said afterwards, “What, she’s thirty-eight? She looked twenty-four!”), and the person least pleased with her performance was my best friend’s mother. I just think that has to say something about the attractive-enough argument.

I do have some issues with her character role through the movie, specifically the way her character is written, but I’ll talk about that in the next part of this post. The point here is that Adams makes a lovely Lois, though she doesn’t play the part as we were expecting it to be played. But she wasn’t aiming at playing the Lois we were expecting; she wanted to be a brand new take on the classic character. And with that goal in mind, at least to a respectable extent she succeeded.

Plus, she is a beautiful woman, but Clark falls in love with her because she’s smart and believes in him. To me that seems pretty full of win.

Henry Cavill/Kal-El/Clark Kent. Christian Bale. Chris Hemsworth. Robert Downey, Jr. Chris Evans. Etc., etc. Now here’s Henry Cavill jumping into the superhero party—and he quickly makes it clear he belongs.

Yes, he looks the part. One of my friends said after the credits—and I quote—“Oh my gosh, he’s so gorgeous—what was the movie even about? I can’t get my mind off how gorgeous he is. EVERY FEMALE ON EARTH SHOULD WATCH THIS MOVIE.” And of course that’s a conservative response compared to some of the ones floating about the internet.

But it goes beyond that. Let’s be real here. It takes some serious testosterone to rock a red cape in the year 2013 and not look like a joke. And that’s what I think is so cool: Cavill doesn’t just look like Clark Kent. He succeeds in pulling off Superman. Which is a pretty tall order, considering some of the Supermans (Supermen?) we’ve seen in the past. I think Cavill’s biggest triumph is asserting Superman’s legitimacy as a serious superhero in our competitive superhero-saturated society.

Side note: I cannot give enough applause to whoever’s idea it was to lose the red underwear outside the suit. Yes. Yes and amen. Although I can’t be the only person who thought of the old Pixar film The Incredibles when I saw Zod get a hold of the edge of Superman’s cape and swing him around in circles. Looks like Edna Mode knew what she was talking about after all.

Michael Shannon/General Zod. I love General Zod. Actually I hate General Zod. Actually I think he’s one of the best-written characters in the movie, and that’s why I love-hate him, which is a good thing. It’s refreshing to experience a villain who is not primarily:

(a)   trying to prove himself to a father who favors another son over him, especially if said other son happens to be a good guy,

(b)  on a power trip to turn all the peoples of earth into his slaves to fuel his prospective evil empire, or

(c)   hoping to blast the earth out of existence because humans are stupid.

There is a level of option (c) about him, but that’s not his main drive. No, his primary motive is:

(d) ensuring the survival of his people at any cost.

The twisting of a noble impulse into evil is one of the most beautiful makings of a villain. All Zod wants is to save his people. That’s a good thing. But he ends up blowing his goal out of proportion and turning to the coldblooded murder of countless innocents in order to achieve it. And that’s a bad thing.

But it makes a crazy-good villain. Because when Superman crushes the chances of Krypton’s survival, Zod reacts out of an almost moral vengeance, not just personal revenge. He delivers a bloodchilling line, too, nearly frothing at the mouth, about how Superman stole his soul by destroying the only reason Zod is alive: the protection of the future of Krypton.

And that dim shadow of sympathy for the villain is delicious.

The soundtrack. Let’s just all give a standing ovation to Hans Zimmer for his soundtrack behind this movie. Like seriously, right now, wherever you’re reading this, just stand up for him. Scratch that. Let’s not randomly stand up because we’ll probably look like idiots. The point stands, though; the soundtrack is exquisite.

Not that that’s a surprise, considering this is the mastermind behind the soundtracks for films like The Lion King, Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, and a hundred others. Like, literally, he’s done over a hundred film scores. The guy’s a genius.

“You can save them; you can save all of them,” Jor-El tells his son in an especially climactic moment. I’m not sure if he isn’t counting on the multitudes who die at the hands of Zod before Superman prevails, or if he just means Superman can save the future of humanity and therefore ultimately save us all as a race. Either way, Clark/Kal/Superman does save the world, and he manages to do so through 143 minutes of superhero-movie exhilaration.

That’s no small feat.