Headscratchers / Superman II

Lois motivations?

• Why didn't Lois help Clark get back to the Fortress? They had a car and could certainly have driven much of the way, considering Clark was trying to hitchhike.

WHY did Superman have to give up his powers at all?

• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex
  • Except, except that scene happened before he gave up his powers. The real reason given seems to be that he wanted to live a normal life, and not have to have his attention divided between his love of Lois and having to jet off at a moment's notice to save the world. It also set up the "Prodigal Son" scene where Kal-El, having given up his birthright, goes back to beg forgiveness of his father, and is allowed to be Superman again.
  • The scene where they're in the tinfoil hammock in the Fortress of Solitude? No it didn't.
  • Relating to this, there's something I've wondered. Didn't Jor-El tell him in the first movie that if he helped out too much, then humanity becomes too dependent on him? That being the case, it would seem to me that having a relationship in his civilian life wouldn't hurt.
• We're supposed to believe that it's because Superman isn't supposed to "put one above the rest," except that Jor-El and Lara had to assume Superman would be adopted by SOMEONE to whom he would hold some sort of loyalty. Besides, would they rather he have a girlfriend and have his powers, or just give them up and be with her?
• For what it's worth, Superman and Lois married in the comics in 1996 'til reboot did them part in 2011.
  • Until 2016, when they got re-rebooted, bringing them back together; with a son!

Upon arriving on Earth, Ursa is bitten by a snake, which she then fries with her heat vision to prove their Superman-like powers. Must've been a Kryptonian snake to be able to bite her at all...

• Going by the comics, the longer a Kryptonian spends under a yellow sun, the tougher they become and the stronger their other abilities are. Of course, immediately emerging from the Phantom Zone, the three of them are able to breathe and tear apart a Moon Lander, so.. *shrugs*
  • The snake didn't hurt her; her reaction was purely reflex. When she hits it with her heat vision, she was giving it a literal Death Glare and had no idea she had the heat vision power. Hence why she was so surprised after.

After he lost his powers at the fortress, how did Superman and Lois get back to America?

• They didn't. The diner they stopped at on their way back was in Canada. <ducking and running>
• Perhaps Clark had a teleporter or an escape pod or something standing ready. It's not as if he and the Fortress both can't pull whatever they need out of their respective holes at any time, in these movies.

Superman was told that if he gave up his powers, he'd have to do so permanently. So why does he get his powers back?

• The Richard Donner cut answers this to some degree. Jor-El foresaw the possibility that Kal-El would want to give up his powers to be with an Earth woman. He also foresaw the possibility that Kal-El would change his mind. Since Jor-El was about to die on Krypton anyway, he imbued the green crystal with all his Kryptonian life essence, which Kal-El could use to regain any of his powers he'd given up ... once. "The son becomes the father, and the father the son."
• The original theatrical cut alluded to the idea that Clark used the green crystal to restore his powers. The crystal glows, he picks it up, there's a close up and the next time we see Clark he's Superman again.

Why does everyone treat Superman's throwing chest symbol weapon as a power?

• Because it's not specified to be a gadget, and because these movies have a bad habit of giving Superman completely ridiculous powers at seemingly random, so it fits with what else we've seen.
• The same scene has Kryptonians suddenly teleporting/generating illusions and shooting lasers from their fingers, things they've never done before or since in any continuity, so "wacky new power" is more consistent explanation than anything else (though that's not saying much).

Why do many fans ignore that, in the film as released, Superman nonchalantly KILLED Zod?

• A very common complaint about Man of Steel is that its Superman is a "darker, remorseless killer," contrasting it to the "brighter, more heroic" Superman of the Donner films, even though he kills Zod in BOTH films. A comparison of the two films will show that:
  • In one film, Superman depowers Zod, rendering him no threat. He reveals this by sadistically crushing Zod's hand, then throws him twenty feet or more into a wall where he falls at least five stories into an icy crevasse, never to be seen again. Superman does this all while smiling and quipping afterwards.
  • In the other film, Zod commits Suicide by Cop by forcing Superman to kill him to protect a family of civilians. Superman is desperate not to, and when he does kill Zod he gives a scream of anguish and collapses to his knees, unmoving until Lois hugs him.
  • The first Superman is the one fans keep calling "brighter, more heroic," and the second the Superman they complain about being a "darker, remorseless killer." What's the deal here? Is it the Nostalgia Filter coloring their perception of the older film from having seen it as children? Is it that because they didn't SEE Zod die in Superman II, it "doesn't count?" The Superman of Superman II is only "brighter" in that he is cheerful and triumphant while he cripples and executes a helpless foe, while the "darker" Superman of Man Of Steel is forced into it by a Death Seeker and is greatly traumatized by the experience.
    • (The scene deleted from Superman II of the "Arctic Patrol" arrest is just that, a DELETED scene. The film has to stand as it was released, not as it might have been released. And the released film clearly shows the Kryptonians suffering the recognized Disney Villain Death of falling to their deaths off-screeen. See Death of the Author.)
    • The "Artic Patrol" sequence isn't just a deleted scene. It appears in the Expanded International Cut, released in 1983.
    • "Arctic Patrol" is nowhere to be found in the Richard Donner Cut. And even in the cuts where it does exist... really? Not only do Zod and the gang survive plummeting to the bottom of that pit, but there just happens to be a law enforcement agency there to arrest them?
    • Superman does not kill Zod and the others. He pushes them into a crevice inside the fortress of solitude, and their fate is unrevealed. Nothing more can be determined because the movie does not choose to show us what happens. Maybe they were put into suspended animation. Maybe they fell a few feet to the snow and were picked up later. Maybe the pit is full of foam rubber. Who knows? I never interpreted this as Superman and Lois killed them, but rather the movie conveniently forgetting about them. This is different from Man of Steel, which explicitly makes a big point about Superman killing Zod (although I'd hardly say it makes him out to be a remorseless killer, just a pragmatist).
    • They aren't even dead in the Richard Donner cut either. Remember, in the end, Superman turns back time basically resetting everything (i.e, repairing the Fortress of Solitude, bringing Jor-El's essence back to life,repairing Metropolis, and it shows the prisoners being returned to the Phantom Zone. So while he temporarily "killed" them, in the end they survived, unlike in Man of Steel.
    • But in the original theatrical cut they fall to their death. There is no possibility they survived such a fall. They had no powers left. No human would survive that. Also if they survived they would have teamed up with Luthor again.
    • "Such a fall." All we see of the fall is them falling about five feet into mist. For all we know, the floor of the crevice is only a few feet lower than the mist.
  • Considering the three of them undoubtedly killed numerous civilians in their rampage (which was pretty much done just For the Evulz), it's pretty hard to argue they didn't deserve to die.
  • I still don't understand why everyone has so much trouble with this. The Fortress wasn't built over a chasm; it was built on solid ground, at ground level. There's no bottomless pit for anyone to fall into. The crystal cliffs have some peaks and valleys, but it's perfectly reasonable to assume they only fell five, six feet. Enough to bang them up and maybe even break a bone or two, but certainly not enough to kill them.
  • Zod and his gang being powerless didn't stop them from doing whatever it was on Krypton that got them banished to the Phantom Zone in the first place. Powers or not, they're still unrepentant, murderous thugs who probably would have exploited any clemency that Superman showed them; best to take them out of the picture while he still had the chance, lethally or not.
  • Does Superman ever articulate a no-kill rule like Batman? Sure, he generally avoids killing and aims instead to get criminals sent to prison. But I don't think it's some absolute with him.

Why does Clark go back to the diner in the Richard Donner Cut?

• The Lester cut of Superman 2 has Clark kiss Lois so that she forgets his identity, in the Donner cut he turns back time all the way back to before Zod, Ursa, and Non escape from the Phantom Zone. Basically all of the things leading up to depowered Clark getting beaten up at the diner never happened and Clark going back to the diner so he can humiliate a man that never met Clark in that timeline seems very petty.
  • Superdickery.
  • In-universe answer: it was apparent, from the reactions to the trucker's arrival in the earlier scene, that the trucker was obviously a local petty tyrant bullying the customers for some time prior to Lois and Clark's arrival - and he quite possibly exhibited similar behavior in other diners that he frequented along his route. Remembering that, Clark returned after regaining his powers to (admittedly in a slight out-of-character moment) help the people in the diner by putting the trucker in his place. In the end, he was doing what he usually does: saving people.
  • Out-of-universe answer: Richard Donner (if he directed the "return to diner" scene instead of Lester) probably had an explanation in his original script for Superman's return, but, due to the fact the Richard Donner cut was cobbled together as well as they could with existing footage, he couldn't film an appropriate reason for Clark's return, but wanted to put it in there to show the trucker ended up getting punished for his attitude. If Lester directed the footage, then Donner probably just put it in there for the same reason as I stated plus just trying to pad out the run time of the movie.
  • So what if that guy didn't recall beating up Clark? If I commit a crime, then develop amnesia and forget that I did, does that absolve me? No, it doesn't. He was still the same dick as in the original timeline, and would still have beaten up Clark if given the opportunity again. Would you complain if in the first movie, Superman had gone back in time to before Luthor set his plans in motion and had him arrested?
  • Clark was (to the people of the diner) a newcomer at the diner. He saw a trucker rudely demanding food and insulting their cuisine. Clark, in the staff's defence, throws a cannibalism insult at the trucker. The trucker, though never seeing this supposed wimp with glasses before, doesn't take the insult lightly, and, thinking Clark as easy prey, eggs him on. As for the owner's protests, he was probably talking about an earlier unseen fight the trucker got into; Clark would be far from the first person the trucker had attacked.

Why don't the owners of the diner bar help Rocky?

• Obviously, Rocky is a regular customer, but he is also abusive and aggressive. The owners don't like him much. So why don't they just bar him.
  • Simple capatalistic pragmatism, maybe. I once worked in a retail facility which had customers behaving badly, and I tried to throw them out only for my supervisor to tell me I couldn't really do that. Presumably because whatever their very real and evident faults, they're still paying customers.
• Whoever asked this question has never lived in New York. When some shit is going down, you mind your own business and hope they don't notice you.

Why does that depowering machine permanently remove a Kryptonian's powers?

• From what we saw, all it does is bathe Kryptonians in red light. Going by the comic canon, this should merely remove their powers temporarily; all they would have to do to get them back is absorb yellow light again. Even in this universe, it doesn't make sense. The Kryptonians should already have been exposed to red light when they were in Krypton, yet it didn't take away their ability to gain super powers from yellow sunlight.
  • Since Zod and his partners-in-crime have the same powers as Superman, wouldn't that mean that they would also be subject to the same Kryptonite weakness as Superman?
  • If you go with the commonly (but by no means universally) held stance that Superman did not in fact execute Zod and his cohorts when he flung them into those pits at the climax of the movie, it is not too much of a stretch to presume he made sure they landed (safely) in an area in the Fortress that would not only contain them, but either continuously bathe them in red sun radiation, or at the very least, cut them off from direct yellow sunlight. Superman had plenty of time to prepare traps and containment before Zod and co. arrived. Perhaps he even re-shunted them to the Phantom Zone.
    • What about Superman's depowering via the same method earlier in the film? That took his powers away permanently, and it took a sacrifice from Jor-El/Lara to restore them.
  • Just because the light was red doesn't mean its red sunlight. It is referred to as a molecular chamber in the film, which does not sound like something that just shines a red light at something.

Faora/Ursa

• What was the point of renaming Faora to Ursa in this continuity?

Why didn't the supervillains feel weak?

• When Superman was depowered earlier, you could see the pain on his face as the powers left him. Later, when he switched the depowering mechanism, why didn't Zod, Ursa and Non not feel any depowering?

• On a side note, exactly how were Lois and Clark planning to get back from the Fortress of Solitude? It's in the freaking arctic!!

  • The Fortress/Jor-El.
  • Similarly, how did de-powered Clark Kent manage to make it back there, on foot, with no specialist equipment, arctic clothing, or even food supplies?
  • By being in a movie based off of the Silver Age where no one thought particularly hard about the logic of what they were writing. Think of Spider-Man and consider that Stan Lee seriously thought his powers, including danger sense, were powers spiders had. That sort of thinking was basically across the board among comic writers at the time.

• Did General Zod actually have a plan? He busts into the White House and demands that the President kneel before him, which he does. Later on, we see him and his goons lounging around in the Oval Office, bored out of their minds. Governing takes work, and Zod was just sitting around. Did the governments of the rest of the world submit? If so, would anybody actually obey them?
  • If I recall correctly, the President announced that he was submitting on behalf of all governments, after conference with all heads of state.
  • Zod a bad leader? This surprises you why, exactly?
  • Well, the Kryptonians judged him and his henchmen to be so dangerous that only exile to the Phantom Zone would be suitable punishment. These are the idiots that posed a danger to the very fabric of Kryptonian society? Come on.
    • Same group of super-advanced aliens that died because of an easily predicted earthquake on one planet.
    • Their planet exploded. Earthquakes were a mere sideeffect.
    • More to the point, Zod and his cronies caused the explosion. That is why they were sentenced to the Phantom Zone.
    • Nowhere does it say Zod and co had anything to do with Krypton exploding. It's implied they attempted some sort of hostile coup d'etat.
    • It's a lot easier to wreck a society than to run one. Zod & Co. could have easily had the capacity to do the former on Krypton and lacked the ability (or inclination) to do the latter on Earth.
  • When you have yourself and two more evil Kryptonians vs. a normal planet Earth and one depowered Superman, do you really need clever plans?
    • No, but you do need them when you have yourself and two non-powered Kryptonians against a whole bunch of other non-powered Kryptonians. As above, how exactly did they threaten Krypton again? Or plan to run it afterward?
    • So far as we know, Zod might've been a brilliant leader and military tactician. He just never needed to use any of those skills on Earth, since he could wipe out any threat apart from Superman by just scowling at it.
  • I would have loved to see what would really happen with Zod after he "takes over" Earth. Next scene: "Supreme Leader, what do you want to do about the price of gasoline? Or our health care system? Or the roads? Or inflation? Or the fact that riots have broken out in every major city as people refuse to recognize your leadership? The newspapers are calling you a tyrant, and the military is refusing to submit to you. What do we do?"
    • Ignore the complaints and single-handedly put down any insurrections? The idea of people's voice in government relies on the supreme leader not being able to personally beat up all of his subjects combined.
    • Of course, he can only beat up a few people at a time. Nobody, not even a superhuman can single-handedly bully six billion people into compliance. At least, not for long. It just can't happen.
    • And, as soon as he realizes that, he'll just reduce the human population to something more manageable.
    • "Kill all those who oppose Zod" would probably work sufficiently well. He might not be able to kill everyone, but he can make examples of enough people at a time to make people think twice about organising that protest march or writing that snide article about his lack of effective economic policy. Totalitarian dictators without solid ideas for social management have been able to quell resistance and opposing voices without be able to reduce entire protest marches to ash with a single look or knock down entire armies single-handedly. And he also has Ursa and Non right next to him, and between them they could probably destroy an entire city, possibly more.
    • You're forgetting heat-vision. He could just burn everyone who protests against him into ashes.
    • Zod seemed so uninterested in humans that, so long as everyone's paying tribute to him, he most likely wouldn't even bother with ruling the world himself. Lex was already lined up for Australia, so Zod probably would've just set up similarly loyal autocrats all around the world and just let them handle things while he sits around eating grapes and getting fanned.
    • Of course, if Kryptonite was nearly as common in the movie universe as it was in the comic-book universe of the day, all it would take was an underground military working in secret making a few hundred Green-K-radiation bombs to bring Zod's reign to an end.
  • This issue doesn't strike me as particularly problematic. 1) Power-hungry egotistical villains land on a planet and discover they now have super powers that render them invulnerable and able to curb stomp any and all military forces sent against them. 2) Having demonstrated their power and threatened to exterminate any cities belonging to anyone who resists them, they whole world capitulates. 3) They then discover that ruling the world is actualy rather boring, especially conquering it (and putting down any potential rebellion) isn't actually a challenge, and when you don't actually care about the world enough to want to do anything with it.
  • Exactly right. Zod's Informed Ability is that he's a military genius, right? Once he's on Earth, he wins any fight merely by showing up. Ruling the world can't possibly be interesting for him, which is why he's screaming for Superman to fight him. Without Superman, there's no threat to him. Even if there's a lot of Krptonite on the planet, no one except Lex and his minions seem to know that it could harm Zod - and it's apparently hard to find even for Lex Luthor, since he knew about it but didn't try to get it in Superman II as trump card to contain Zod. The one sample known to exist was probably confiscated from L's lair by the FBI after Luthor's arrest in the first movie, and neither Luthor nor Superman would be eager to explain exactly what was going on with the big green necklace. Long story short: Without Superman, Zod can do anything he wants on earth. No rebellion could succeed, since those 3 had all the same powers, meaning that they could hurl continents into space and travel back in time. Only Superman (or similarly powerful hero) could stop them.
  • Who says Zod even had any intention of staying on Earth, in the first place? Zod grew up on Krypton. So far as he's concerned, Earth is like some primitive tribal village in the middle of the jungle. He only bothers bullying the natives long enough to play out his petty revenge fantasies with Jor-El's kid; most likely, if they'd defeated Clark, he'd have let his thugs trash the planet for kicks, then headed back into space to conquer a more-civilized planet or ten.

• So Superman renders Zod and his minions powerless in the Fortress of Solitude. Then he and Lois throw the powerless enemies into bottomless pits. I can't remember if they survive or not, but either way, Supes tried to kill them and then everyone laughed about it. Helpless enemies much? What happened to Thou Shalt Not Kill?
  • I believe there is a deleted scene of Zod and the others being led away in handcuffs by police, so they just fell down some shafts and were defeated but alive.
  • And that's not even counting his going back and humiliating the diner bully. The end of Superman II was a bit of a wall banger for many viewers.
    • People complain about him humiliating the same diner bully who completely beat the crap out of Clark? The guy who was a complete jerk and had it coming?
    • Yes the bully was a jerk, and yes he deserved it, but that's beside the point. This is a case of the Man of Steel taking petty personal revenge on somebody weaker, i.e. being a bully.
    • Not really; there's a bit of a difference between 'taking revenge' (petty and personal or otherwise) and 'being a bully'. If Clark routinely went to the diner to pick on the same guy, or if he routinely went around picking on people who were weaker than him just to enjoy being able to beat them up (and oh, guess who that description actually fits better? Hint: between Clark and the guy in the diner, it's not Clark), you'd have a point about him being a bully. It's fairly clear he's not doing this, however, but is taking the opportunity to settle a score — which, considering the guy very seriously beat the crap out of Clark on very-flimsy-to-no-pretext-at-all the first time they met, isn't that petty — and maybe teach him a lesson or two, which he certainly had coming. Teaching a bully a lesson they won't soon forget is a valid reason to do what Clark did, and despite having superstrength Clark still leaves the other man in a much better condition than the guy left Clark in the first time they met.
    • And it's not just petty personal revenge, either; if that diner bully is willing to pick on and severely beat up Clark Kent just because the guy happens to cross his path and looks like a bit of an easy target, then he's willing to do the same to any innocent bystander who happens to cross his path and who he thinks he'll get away with picking on, and he'll keep on doing it. Unless, of course, someone — say, a prior victim — goes back, stands up to him, hands him his ass in turn and shows him that picking on people and throwing your weight around might backfire unpleasantly on you. Clark's teaching him that no, you really won't get away with pulling that kind of shit on innocent people while he's around. Who would expect anything less of Superman?
    • The very idea that some people seem to think Clark is the bully in that situation is the real headscratcher here.
    • If memory serves, didn't the diner bully also make some very off-color remarks to and about Lois? It was sanitized for a "kids" film, but still, the guy was easily a sexual assault charge waiting happen.
  • And something of a wasted opportunity. Though the writers probably just didn't want to deal with the We Will Meet Again potential of leaving them alive, how much more humiliating a defeat would it have been for Zod and his gang to be brought to justice by Superman, to face a trial and find themselves powerless and now at the mercy of the puny humans they'd brushed aside like gnats? And how much more appropriate would it have been for Superman to reaffirm that nobody, not even his fellow Kryptonians, is above truth, justice and all that stuff the American way?
    • Not to mention that he could have, using the crystals containing Kryptonian knowledge, re-create the Phantom Zone and re-imprison Zod & Co. for eternity. It would have been a great conclusion to the "father and son" theme of the movie.
    • The Directors Cut had a slightly better ending. Superman saw the scars of his battle and decided to undo the whole thing with Time Travel, effective putting the Zod and Gang back in the Phantom Zone and making sure the bomb from the beginning didn't detonate in its vicinity. Granted, its the Reset Button and thus a copout but at least he doesn't kill (of course, he goes back far enough to undo his encounter with Lois, so it doesn't mesh with Superman Returns but decanonizing that movie would be good for the franchise.)

• We find Lex Luthor in prison making license plates after the crime he attempted in Superman I. All well and good except for one little problem: HE THREATENED THE STATES OF CALIFORNIA AND NEW JERSEY WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!!! At the risk of understating the matter, being threatened with nuclear annihilation isn't something people will easily forgive or forget, so I'm rather baffled that no one in either state was screaming at the feds to sit Lex down in Old Sparky and give him the juice.
  • It's not clear how long it's been since I, but II could still have Luthor in the midst of his criminal trial. This makes particularly good sense after Superman Returns, where we learn that Luthor is free because, without Superman's testimony, he was acquitted of his crimes. So in II, Lex is probably just in prison while the government tackles the insanely difficult problem of building a case against a guy whose crime was at least partially undone by time travel.
  • Forget the state criminal courts: if Returns was supposed to have retooled the storyline to take place in recent times, why wasn't his ass tossed into Guantanamo as a freakin' nuclear terrorist? Even if Superman erased the damage, he still stole those nukes and set up the means to launch them.
    • Because you can't send a US citizen to Guantanamo, even if he is a terrorist. Even Jose Padilla never actually made it there, the court system put in an injunction to keep him in custody within the continental US while his case spent all those years being argued back and forth. Of course, there's still several plot holes in this sequence - a prisoner who committed nuclear terrorism on the scale that Lex did would be in the single worst cell in the entire US prioson system even if he had the IQ of a carrot. Given the escape risk posed by someone as brilliant as Lex Luthor, they should have had him in isolation 24-7, in a "supermax" facility like Marion or Leavenworth, and quite possibly surrounded by half a battalion of Marines.
    • Lex isn't really all that brilliant in these movies though. He's neither the mad scientist of the Golden Age nor the supremely powerful businessman of later stories - he's an arrogant and vain guy who's worst crime up till the events of the first movie was pulling a couple of real estate scams. Regardless, he definitely wouldn't be in general population making license plates, but I'm not sure he'd be in an inescapable supermax cell since Loki or Hannibal Lector either.
    • Also, the retcon of 'without Superman's testimony, he walks' makes no sense. If the events of Superman 1 are still canon, then there's at least half a dozen US soldiers who can pick Lex out of a police line-up as the guy who helped steal their nuclear missile truck; Lex wasn't wearing any kind of facial disguise during that one scene, just a silly truck driver's hat. Also, Lex Luthor is on record as the guy who bought all that 'useless desert' property, so even his motive is traceable. And lastly, Miss Tessmacher face turned to help Superman — what, she wouldn't turn state's evidence too?

• When other Kryptonians show up on Earth why are they instantly a threat to Superman in physical combat? Here's the thing they get equal strength, sure I get that. But they don't get equal experience and skills, or rather they shouldn't. Zod's a good example of someone who should have gotten curb stomped because of his military experience. The vast majority of martial arts in the real world and presumably on Krypton where they were more or less ordinary humans is based on the idea of gravity and "solid" opponents. Learning a punching combination loses a lot of it's usefulness when your second punch launches the guy three hundred feet and you gotta catch up. Likewise a wrist lock doesn't work if you can fly. Superman (and other similarly powerful characters) should be destroying these guys in curb stomp battles until they at least acclimate to the difference for the same reason why a martial artist is more than capable of beating opponents physically on par or even superior to them. I suspect that boxing would be a vastly different sport if everybody could shoot lasers from their eyes, move close to the speed of light, and use buses as weapons. So different in fact that any experience you had going in would work against you for all the reasons just listed.
  • Dude, there's three of them, all super powered up to the eyeballs. One of them is a military genius, one is a sadistic harpy and the other is built like Sasquatch. Plus, they don't give a shit who gets hurt in the battle. Superman on the other hand is one guy, has Pa Kent in his ear reminding him not just go "fuck it" and blow up the entire city block with a superfart or something *and* also has to make sure no civilians get wiped out while Zod and co. throw buses into pre-schools and shit.
  • The fact that he's trying to avoid collateral damage and civilian casualties likely limits what he can do. In a fair fight, he probably could wipe the floor with other Kryptonians but in a typical, mid-Metropolis super-fight, they can distract him by flinging a bus full of orphans at a puppy dog factory or lasering away the support cables on a nearby bridge. Also, they're usually trying to kill him, using the full extent of their powers to do so, whereas Clark will have to pull some punches.
  • Plus, he's just plain outnumbered. Three against one is bad odds. And while he's had more experience using his powers himself, confronting those same powers in other people is just as new of an experience to Clark as it is to the villains. If anything, they might have a major edge in experience at super-vs-super combat, if the trio'd spent part of their off-camera time tussling each other to test what they can do.
  • While it's true that the talented amateur who doesn't know what he's doing can be the greatest threat to someone skilled in specific style, the point remains that, in a fight, knowing how to fight is better than not knowing how to fight. Superman's just never needed to bother to learn how to fight, since if he threw even a starter boxing punch properly, he'd turn someone's head into red mist. Superman definitely gets a leg up in the massive fight in Metropolis because he knows the limits and uses of his powers better than Zod and company, but Zod and Co. know how to fight and are used to working together as a unit. The real deciding factor in that battle is that none of them can actually hurt each other, and meanwhile they're wrecking the city, so Superman decides to move the fight elsewhere. Superman's greater facility with his powers couldn't mop the floor with Zod, and Zod's superior military experience couldn't mop the floor with Superman, because they're all completely invulnerable.

• In the Richard Donner cut, Superman does the whole spin the Earth backwards thing —- BUT! He goes back to that diner to beat the bully up! If he reset history, then the diner fight doesn't happen in the first place! So how does the bully (and the diner owner) remember Clark from a fight that never happened? And by that point, Zod, Ursa and Non had done Monumental Damage, including knocking down the Washington Monument and knocking down most of the White House — so did Superman only undo the stuff that happened to Metropolis? But then, Lois no longer remembers that Clark is Superrman, so he would have had to undo EVERYTHING. So, again, how does the diner bully remember Clark?
  • What must have happened in the "final" timeline is that first Clark did everything he did originally, and towards the end of his "original" actions his time-travelling self shows up elsewhere and saves Lois. Then the first Clark leaves to go back in time, leaving only time-traveller Clark.

• Lois tricks Supes into dropping the mask by firing a blank at him. Wouldn't he at least have felt a bullet tap him?
  • Might have been too shocked by Lois' outrageous act to try to notice.
  • But shouldn't he have been able to see through the gun and know it's a blank?
    • He has to consciously use X-Ray vision, it's not always on.
    • Except she's using a revolver and blanks don't look like normal bullets. He should easily be able to see the difference by looking at the chambers, hell, you can see for yourself the damn thing isn't loaded if you watch carefully.
    • So a crazy woman pulls a gun on you and you'd have the presence of mind to be like "gee whizz, better peer down into the chambers and make sure it's got real bullets in it and not blanks because I totally know the difference?" Suuuure.
• So when Luthor and Ms. Teschmacher get to the Fortress of Solitude, they look around the place and realize it has everything but a bathroom. He gripes that she should have gone before the left, and she says, "That was two days ago." Which...raises a lot more questions...

How did Lex know about Lois? He's never met her.

• Presumably the name Lois Lane is fairly well-known to anyone who follows the Daily Planet or Metropolis media in general.

Superman's apology to the President for "letting him down" in the Richard Donner version?

• In Richard Donner's version, Superman turns back time thus sending Zod and his goons back into the Phantom Zone as if none of this ever happened. When Superman plants a new flag on the White House that is under repair, he apologizes that he's been away so long. In fact, why is the White House still damaged if time was turned back?

Why didn't Jor-El or Lara's hologram inform Superman that Lex Luthor was snooping around in the Fortress of Solitude?

• This seems like a serious security breach adding to the fact that Lex Luthor was able to even find it at all.
  • The holograms weren't smart enough to know that Luthor wasn't Superman. In the Donner cut (and in Superman Returns) Jor-El talks to Lex and refers to him as "my son". In the Lester cut Lara refers to Lex as "Kal-El, my son".

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