Mongrel wrote:
oh my god
EDIT: Just a reminder!
You know what I just thought of that I can't get out of my head?
How much I would have loved to see Ditko review Man of Steel and tear Snyder a new one for being a bad objectivist.
I'm not sure he would have objected to the neck-snapping*, but he would have
hated all the moping and the uncertainty and the bad "maybe don't save that bus full of kids" advice from Pa Kent. It was a movie with a gray palette and what Ditko liked to call
gray morality. Anti-life, anti-reason, anti-hero.
I also suspect he would have been less than pleased by the B-story about a dogged reporter tracking down the private personal information of a man who just wanted to be left alone. Though he might have liked the ending where she chose not to publish any of that stuff and just let the man's public deeds speak for themselves.
* Ditko made it very clear in his writing that he thought it was morally acceptable for a superhero to kill a villain so long as the villain was the first one to initiate the use of force. Indeed, that's the entire premise of A Right to Kill, which, for my money, is the best Mr. A story. Mr. A shoots the villain and then delivers a monologue about how the
initiation of force is always wrong, but the use of lethal force against someone who initiated force is justified. Ditko wasn't big on subtext.
Ditko preferred to cut away or go abstract with the depiction of violence, so he might have objected to the neck snapping on aesthetic grounds. But I don't think would have criticized the movie for being too violent; he wrote an oft-reprinted essay titled Violence: The Phony Issue, where he argued, once again, that it's the
initiation of force that is wrong, and that focusing on violence rather than the initiation of force that leads to it is a distraction.