The upcoming Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder‘s third comic book adaptation (after 300 and Watchmen), is set to reintroduce Krypton’s decorated war leader General Zod as the villain, played by Michael Shannon alongside Henry Cavill‘s Superman. In some ways, Zod is the natural choice. As a Kryptonian on Earth, he will be one of the few beings capable of testing Superman physically. He also, importantly, provides a link to Superman’s alien past: Kal-El may have no memory of his home planet, but Zod was exiled from Krypton in his adulthood, and feels strongly about his race and his dead planet.
The choice of Zod also means, however, that in the six Superman movies to date, only two Supervillains from the comics have been used: Zod and Lex Luthor, the evil genius and the most iconic of Superman’s foes. To put this in context; four Spider-Man movies have used five of Spidey’s villains (with at least two more to appear in the next film), and seven Batman films have used eleven of his. There is a wealth of material for Superman filmmakers to work with, and it’s my feeling that retreading old ground is not necessary to create a great Superman film. The character and theme are strong enough to go a little further afield.
With this in mind, here are the five of Superman’s opponents I’d rather see on the big screen than Luthor and Zod.
5. Doomsday
In 1992, DC comics introduced a villain who was more than a physical match for the Last Son of Krypton: Doomsday, a biologically-engineered creature of Kryptonian descent himself. When he first appeared, a lot was left unexplained: where he came from, what drove him to his rampage, why he had been bound beneath the earth. All that was clear was that this creature was a match for the entirety of the Justice League, and Superman’s strength would not make this a one-sided fight. Doomsday is a villain that cannot be defeated for good; when recovering from defeat, his body adapts, granting him immunities to whatever brought him down. Because of this, he presents not only a near-impossible physical challenge for Superman, but an inescapable catch-22, as well.
Doomsday is not clever. In most portrayals, he can barely talk, if at all; he is mostly a creature of rage and boundless strength. He could not act as the sole villain in a Superman film and keep that film interesting, as he could not offer dialogue or intrigue. That said, he offers a director the chance to have Superman explore the creature’s roots as a bio-weapon on Krypton, perhaps provoking a crisis of conscience and identity: was Kryptonian society not as idyllic as a younger, more naive Kal-El believed? This is all interesting material to explore with the Man of Steel, but as I’ve said, a film featuring Doomsday would likely need another antagonist to be a little more scheming. Be it one of Supes’ human foes seeking to use the bio-weapon for their own purposes, or something else, this possibility has a lot of mileage.
When Doomsday faced Superman and the JLA first in 1992, he left Superman temporarily dead. He was the first villain to properly defeat the Kryptonian, and his impact earned him a place among Superman’s most resilient enemies.
4. The Parasite
The Parasite is a bizarre creature, a man mutated by radiation to develop life-draining powers and the ability to leech the powers of whoever he lays his hands on- crucially, he offers a writer the chance to depower Superman without resorting to the overused Kryptonite. There are a great number of scenarios that could be very interesting to see played out between the Man of Steel and the Parasite: imagine a powerless Clark Kent coming to terms with his own vulnerability, forced to use his wits alone to bring down a creature with all the powers he used to have.
Though the character has stood the test of time, he has also been chronically underused, and will be far less recognisable to an audience than even Doomsday. Fans of the DCAU may recall his appearance in Superman: The Animated Series, but his personality was never well-developed. In addition, a version of the character appeared on Smallville, but aside from stealing Clark’s powers he bore little resemblance to his comic counterpart. A reinvention is in order, as with so many overshadowed comic-book villains, and I believe a film could do the job brilliantly: the Parasite is dangerous and unnerving, and his concept seems to cry out for a film writer to make good use of him.
3. General Sam Lane
The greatest strength of Lex Luthor as a character is that he is human. He is everything Superman is not, forced to rely on his wits and his scheming to bring him down, and he is a constant reminder that not everybody in Superman’s adopted world want him here. General Sam Lane, the father of Superman’s perennial love interest Lois Lane, is also all of the above. A military man and initially presumed dead, the General is a villain who pulls the strings from behind the scenes to undo the Man of Steel, believing the alien superhero represents a threat to the human race. Where Luthor often operates outside the law (putting aside his stint as US President), Sam Lane acts with the support of the military establishment and shrouded in secrecy. The law is not his enemy, as it is Luthor’s; it is his tool.
He is, in many ways, DC’s equivalent to General “Thunderbolt” Ross, the military enemy of the Hulk in Marvel comics, recently portrayed in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk by William Hurt. Many of the most insightful superhero works have messed around with the traditional understanding of the “Superhero Vs Supervillain” recipe, and Superman’s opponent need not necessarily be a traditional “supervillain”. Case in point…
2. Batman
Wipe your coffee from your keyboard, and hear me out on this one. Batman is not a supervillain by any stretch of the imagination. In most portrayals, he and Superman are both members of the Justice League of America, implacable allies in the face of evil. They’ve fought Ra’s al Ghul, Nekron, Darkseid and countless other threats together. That said, different interpretations are the bread-and-butter of the superhero world, and have spawned some of the greatest and most imaginative examples of the genre.
Most importantly, however, Superman and Batman as enemies of one another has quite a lot of precedent. The most classic example would be Frank Miller‘s The Dark Knight Returns, which saw Superman directed by the US government to take down the vigilante, culminating in the iconic battle scene against an aged Batman. Miller‘s The Dark Knight Strikes Again elaborated on this theme, with Superman and Captain Marvel having little choice but to target the Dark Knight again, with their loved ones held hostage. Miller‘s works tend to depict Batman as the gritty hero and Superman as the government’s thrall, but I don’t doubt that a talented writer for the screen could create a different convincing narrative true to the characters, with Superman more of a hero than in Miller‘s depictions. A “Superman vs. Batman” tale would not inevitably become a copy of those two iconic graphic novels, either: many other works have pitted the two heroes against each other, not least of which were Brian Azzarello‘s Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Mark Millar‘s Superman: Red Son, and, most recently, Injustice: Gods Among Us. Many writers have portrayed the heroes at loggerheads, and in my opinion, it’s a dynamic that really, really works. It muddies the definition of what a superhero is, and it challenges the audience to decide which character is the real hero.
It’s not what anybody would expect upon hearing of an upcoming Superman film, but that can be a good thing; it still offers plenty of opportunities for incredible action, cinematography, intrigue, all the things people really turn up to see in a Superhero film. It’s never been done before, but it would offer an incredible pay-off if done right. The two characters have a lot to agree on, but they also have a great deal to fight about, and neither are known to be big on compromise. A film to explore the relationship between the two would have a huge amount of potential.
1. Brainiac
Brainiac. Here I am referring to Brainiac 1.0, the original Brainiac, the “Plague of Worlds” as Miller described him in The Dark Knight Strikes Again.
Brainiac is an artificial intelligence from an alien planet and has become one of the most resilient and powerful entities in the DC universe to date: his purpose is not only to compile information about the universe and its planets and species, but also to prevent this knowledge from spreading. To this end, he shrinks and steals cities as samples, and subsequently destroys the planets from which they came; he held the Kryptonian city of Kandor hostage in a shrunken state until recently, and in Geoff Johns‘ Superman: Brainiac, Johns implied the A.I. may have had a hand in the planet’s destruction as well. In a way, he’s DC’s equivalent of Marvel’s Galactus- like Darkseid, he’s the kind of threat that the heroes must put everything else on hold to deal with.
This is a supervillain who challenges Supes on a truly galactic scale, one with whom the Man of Steel has a personal score to settle. Brainiac has hounded both Superman’s birth planet of Krypton and his adopted home planet of Earth, and he is relentless and dangerous on a level unequaled by anyone else in Superman’s rogues gallery. In a way, he may be better suited to a Justice League movie; I must admit to a certain amount of disappointment at the likely choice of Darkseid for the first of DC’s JLA films, as it strikes me as a little too similar to the choice of Thanos for Joss Whedon‘s sequel to The Avengers.
Brainiac, on the other hand, is unique in the genre: he is artificial, calculating and intelligent to an unrivaled degree. While Luthor must use his wits to have any hope of bringing down the Man of Steel, Brainiac is often portrayed as being on another level entirely (a “level twelve intellect” to Luthor’s level nine, according to Red Son). What he lacks is the human touch, the ability to explore the relationship between Superman and humanity, but he more than makes up for it as one of the most unique and powerful threats in DC’s universe.
So, there’s my list. I’ve left some of Kal-El’s most iconic opponents off, such as Metallo, Bizarro and Darkseid, villains that I personally believe are not well suited to the big screen. Did I make the right calls? Sound off below!