Pun Salad

So a long Friday night stretched ahead of me with a cheap Domino's pizza working its way through my alimentary canal… Hey, why not watch this year's Superman movie?

So I did, and it wasn't bad. It does some violence to the Supercanon I grew up with, but I can live with that.

It begins not with the usual origin story, but the aftermath of Superman getting badly defeated by the "Hammer of Boravia", an enemy motivated by Superman's previous intervention in Boravia's invasion of the poor, defenseless country of Jarhanpur. Luckily, super-dog Krypto saves Superman, dragging him (literally) to the Fortress of Solitude, where a small team of robots brings him back to health.

It's quickly revealed that villainous Lex Luthor is behind the scenes, and all this is merely a small element in his overall scheme to discredit and destroy the Man of Steel. And (as usual) gain enormous wealth and power.

It's fun. Just a few notes.

(1) One of the plot points involves Superman's DNA. Which made me wonder biologically: he's an alien from the doomed planet of Krypton, and he's got DNA?

(2) Pa Kent has a small but pivotal role, and he is played as an extraordinarily decent sort by Pruitt Taylor Vince. Ironically, Vince played one of the more evil bad guys in an episode of Justified, Glen Fogle. (Whose fate was memorably kind of amusing.)

(3) Nathan Filion plays Green Lantern, amusingly, as kind of a jerk. Hey, I've liked him since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, a fun TV series that also launched the career of a guy named Ryan Reynolds.