Okay, so I might have gotten a little distracted yesterday by the unbelievably crappy little town that the Kryptonians are demolishing, and I didn’t focus on evaluating this sequence for what it is: a tutorial level.

Obviously, the town doesn’t matter; it’s literally just a set of false fronts, populated with faceless army men and wide-eyed NPCs. The three villains are the player characters, and they’ve just leveled up, so they have a bunch of upgrades to test out.

One of their new abilities is a telekinetic finger laser, so a guy with a rifle pops up and threatens to shoot, giving the player an opportunity to pick him up off the ground and shake him around a bit, with his little arms and legs kicking helplessly in the air. I can think of a half dozen PlayStation games where I’ve had exactly this power. It’s really satisfying, actually. I had no idea that Superman II invented it.

So for this moment, at least, the audience is aligned with the villains. We want to see what they can do with these powers, so the movie’s giving them a little sandbox to play in. That’s why this town is a hayseed junkyard, populated with toothless date rapists and gutter orphans. We’re playing Grand Theft Auto, and those are the dummies who drive around town, begging to get carjacked.

The three fancy space people are kind of messing around at the beginning of this sequence, and a lot of the material reads as comedy — Ursa arm-wrestling a male chauvinist to the ground, Non’s childlike struggle to activate his heat vision, Zod picking up the squirming guy with his finger laser.

But this is the moment when they have to start presenting as an actual threat to the human race, so they’ve got to transition out of comedy and into something that resembles menace.

When the army men show up, Non’s the first one to take them on, using his heat vision to blow out some tires on the approaching Jeeps. It’s a good trick, but it leads to that Herbie Goes Bananas style stunt that I mentioned yesterday, with a Jeep crashing through a second-story wall and flipping over.

And after that, there’s a disappointing, lengthy shot of one of the Jeep drivers stumbling away from the scene, with an unnecessary hayseed on hand to say, “Are you all right, buddy?” We have no real stake in whether he’s all right. The clock on the wall says that this only lasts for six seconds, but in our hearts, it is much longer.

It’s the next trick that finally breaks the comedy vibe: the army men shoot flames at Zod, who uses his superbreath to blow the sheet of flame into the Tinderbox Saloon.

This is the first act of violence that actually lands, because this time, there aren’t any jokes. The camera just lingers on the inferno, and after a few seconds, a guy tumbles out of the window and scurries away.

Then there’s a little scene with the President of the United States watching the carnage on television. I think this happens too early in the sequence, because he makes a big deal about how these people are unstoppable, when at that point really they’ve just blown some fire away.

But the scene finally accomplishes its goal when the army guys start firing rockets at the trio, which they simply ignore. They don’t flinch, or move away; they just look around, as if they’re puzzled why anybody would want to make such a racket.

And then there’s the key moment that unlocks the whole storyline for me: Ursa stepping across the lot, with clumps of dirt and debris raining down all around her, and her enormous false eyelashes are going flickety-flickety-flickety-flick. Sarah Douglas is actually walking forward through a hail of grime that is testing the tensile strength of her face furniture, and she is unbothered.

This is the thing that makes them dangerous: they honestly do not care. They have stopped processing human behavior as a phenomenon that has anything to do with them.

Ursa struts up to Zod like a middle school mean girl, and delivers what I think is the line that pushes this sequence into the realm of the uncanny: “Look. They need machines to fly!”

It’s a surprising line, probably the most surprising thing that happens in this scene. So far, we’ve seen army men target the super creeps, who brush the attack away, or turn it back on their opponents. But this is a moment when they express amusement and delight about something that isn’t delightful.

This line has the shape of a joke, but it isn’t funny, as far as we’re concerned; it’s just funny to the aliens. They’ve stopped trying to entertain us, and now it’s up to us to entertain them.

This is when the villains start to seem like a real threat. Anybody could start a fire, or shoot down a helicopter; a lot of the action is just turning the army’s tools back on their own troops. The menacing thing is the attitude. These people can walk through the world unscathed, and there are no limits on their behavior. It doesn’t matter whether the Jeep survivor is all right. Nobody is all right, not anymore.

Tomorrow:
Lois visits the Fortress in
2.29: Home, and Other Dangerous Places

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Footnotes:

We saw John Ratzenberger earlier in the film as one of the NASA controllers, and he’s got another, uncredited role in this scene. When Non approaches the camera crew, we hear several perplexed voices coming from the newsroom, and one of them is clearly Ratzenberger, saying, “Who’s the big guy?” He’s got four lines in the scene: “Okay, yeah, we’ve got [unintelligible]…”, “Yeah, we got a slight crack in that diode,” and “Try to wiggle it.” It’s hard to say what most of those lines actually mean; it’s like a haiku with a Boston accent.

Tomorrow:
Lois visits the Fortress in
2.29: Home, and Other Dangerous Places

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— Danny Horn