Proof Superman Did Not Destroy the City in Man of Steel

[brettc1]

Taking out the ship was necessary.

Same thing with Thor sending that giant flying worm crashing into the train station. That's Thor's fault. But it would have been worse if didn't do it.

Also, calling it genocide is wrongfully equating it with the taking of innocent lives, not to mention that Clark, a kryptonian, is still alive, so if he really wants to, he can have a kid.

Because it's a very different movie, nobody dies in Grand Central Station.

Also, kind of hilarious. "I've killed every other Krpytonian in the universe. But it's only genocide if somebody now kills me."

[ImprobableQuestion]

I always took it as more a matter of tonal dissonance than actual culpability. By the time the Metropolis fight is over there's a 100-yard diameter chunk of the city that's been razed to the bedrock, and everything is coated in a fine layer of grey dust (exacerbated by the already muted colors of the movie). It looked like a nuclear bomb went off, and everyone's like "Yay, Superman saved us!"

Contrast to the Avengers where, despite the film making no bones about the fact that hundreds of people died, the way everything is shot and the way the battle ends (with a shawarma joke as compared to a group of shell-shocked journalists wandering through the streets) make the whole situation less bleak looking.

On the complete opposite end, we have Godzilla (2014) , where downtown San Francisco is utterly pulverized by Big G and the MUTOs, and in the end the news runs the story: "King of Monsters: Savior of Our City?" That question mark is something I think Man of Steel really needed, instead of the immediate trust the Metropolis citizens (but not the military) seemed to put into Superman.