Kal, son of Zod

In my haste to politely disembowel Zach Snyder for his sins against Superman, I missed some of the outright clumsiness and confused themes from other parts of the story.  My theory is Mr. Snyder doesn't really understand heroism, or the concept of subtext, and what messages his characters might be sending by their actions.  This is most notable in the way he bungles the central conflict of the movie between Zod and the House of El.

In the beginning of the movie, on Krypton, the central division between Zod and Jor-El comes when they can't agree on what to do with willfully blind leadership who won't take action.  Zod decides to take over, and save only those families he feels are worth saving.  Jor-El objects to Zod playing God and trying to impose his own vision of Kryton using eugenics, and the conflict is born.  This is a fairly decent set-up for a conflict.  Jor-El has a strong moral case, and Zod comes off as a complicated character who's out to save his people, even though his means are questionable.

Which is why it's really strange when Kal-El morphs into Zod's spiritual heir at the end of the movie.  Granted, the Kryptonians on Earth aren't behaving, and Zod, for no apparent reason, now thinks nothing of killing an innocent species, instead of, I don't know, setting up shop on Mars.  I mean, it's not like he has a terraforrming machine and a yellow sun that makes him highly adaptable or any . . oh wait.

In any case, questionable motivations aside on the part of the Kryptonians, it strikes me as odd that Kal-El ends the movie by playing God in exactly the way Zod was trying to, by unilaterally deciding which Kryptonian bloodlines live and which die.  Bombing the Kryptonians into the phantom zone (an act which gives every indication of killing them) and twisting Zod's neck might be forgivable if a) this wasn't a movie about Superman and b) the central conflict wasn't clearly defined from the beginning as "it's evil to murder Kryptonians you don't like."  But the scene where Zod wins over Jor-El, by forcing his son to adopt his values, is the scene where Kal decides, unilaterally, to destroy the last Kryptonian seed ship.  Kal-El contains the entire genetic history of Krypton in his cells, and he's on a ship that can read that and make perfectly innocent and teachable Kryptonian babies.  And then, instead of following his father's advice and "saving all of them," he follows in the footsteps of Zod, and kills any future his species has, erasing all Kryptonian bloodlines but his own with a snarled "Krypton had it's chance," as brutally as Zod would have.  Kal-El decides which Kryptonians live and die.  All hail Kal, son of Zod.

Twisting the concept of heroism is one thing, but it takes real skill to to resolve the central conflict without realizing you've turned the hero into the bad guy with the hollowest of victories.  Nolan's Batman had the famous line, "You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain."  Apparently with Superman, he just decided to start as the hero as villain, and go from there.