While the purpose of showing Krypton as a magical, enthralling place back in the old days was to present Superman as having come from a world that’s simply bigger and better than ours, however, in Man Of Steel the planet is shown as being – despite all its technological marvel – a crippled and backwards society. Gone is the colourful sheen of those comics, replaced with a largely grey and orange colour palette that owes more of a debt to recent large-scale blockbusters – Lord Of The Rings if you’re feeling charitable, John Carter if you’re less so. In execution, however, the look of the planet is far removed from that cooked up by classic artists like Wayne Boring.

In conception, the style of Snyder and Goyer’s alien world owes more than anything to the Silver Age Superman stories – in which Krypton was frequently portrayed as an immense, technologically advanced world filled with wonders both mechanical and monstrous. Man Of Steel has a greater preoccupation with the doomed planet than any Superman film before it – but at the same time, it’s a very different Krypton from any we’ve seen before. I didn’t need to know what stories he might base the film’s story on – simply that he knew what it took to craft a good Superman story. I just wanted him to maybe namecheck some of the great Superman comics of recent history, like All-Star Superman, Superman: Birthright or The Man of Steel – in much the same way as Christopher Nolan would repeatedly mention things like The Long Halloween or Year One in connection with Batman. He thought I was fishing for plot information, but I really wasn’t – I simply wanted a sense that a director who, and let’s be frank, is largely known for flashy but superficial takes on his source material, had a strong sense of the world he was taking on. I was one of the audience members who asked a question that night, and was met with a dismissal of sorts by Snyder when I asked if there were any particular storylines, graphic novels or runs on the character that would be informing his vision for the film.

As such it meant that the Man Of Steel was heavily on the agenda. Despite the protestations of the PR people and the fact that nobody was able to ask questions about a film they hadn’t yet seen, Snyder had only days earlier been announced as the director of a rebooted Superman film. WARNING: This feature contains lots of spoilers for Man Of Steel.Ī little over two years ago, I was at a screening of Zack Snyder’s film Sucker Punch, which also featured a Q&A with the director himself beforehand.

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