Spiderman: Brand New Hate

Last month, movie screens all over the world were stocked with yet another Spiderman movie. 

The reception for this film has been spectacular. It quickly became one of the most successful movies ever released; competing with films like Avengers: Endgame and Titanic. 

Many seem to think that Brand New Day is worthy of multiple visits to the local cinema. I think, however, that this movie is painfully overrated.

Brand New Day's main antagonist is none other than Jean Grey, a mutant woman with psionic abilities (namely, telekinesis and telepathy). Jean can brain control anyone within 33 feet from her. She can experience their memories, and she can jump between the brains of multiple people. 

In the comics and other movie adaptations, Jean Grey is a hero; this is not the case in Brand New Day, where Sadie Sink plays an embittered teenager whose sister Sarah was abducted by a government organization named Damage Control. She wants to find a way to infiltrate DC, find her sister, and rescue her.

We can profile her as some sort of school-shooter type enemy: broken, immature and extremely distrustful. Her levels of empathy are also remarkably low, with some people comparing it to the "Dark Phoenix" saga from comics were Jean is corrupted by a cosmic entity. 

Her attempts to save Sarah involve a variety of morally questionable actions, namely: 

+ Mind Controlling people whose role in Sarah's abduction is none. 

+ Mind Controlling a random guy and making him stand in front of traffic - after which he is promptly ran over by a car - just to tease Spiderman. 

+ Mind Controlling Spidey's love interest, MJ. Forcing a kiss with Spiderman just to deceive him and hurt his feelings. Proceed to make MJ jump off a building. 

+ Mind Controlling Bruce Banner, destroying his ability to control The Hulk, and sending him into a rampage. This one to me is particularly disgusting because this is Banner's greatest fear, and this could cause serious repercussions to his life and sanity. 

+ Mind controlling an elderly lady into strapping a bomb to herself and ramming a tank into a government building. 

+ Harming / killing random people. 

+ Mind controlling the guys from a ninja group named "The Hand", forcing them to attack Spidey. She makes one of them stab himself through the stomach just to injure the arachnid.

In short, this film's Jean Grey is an individual who doesn't care about lessening harm to third parties. At the same time, there is no reason to think that her abusive "plan" was the best way of saving Sarah. For example: 

+ If Jean Grey can jump within people's brains, why make an old lady steal a tank when she can just psychically sneak her way into Damage Control headquarters? 

+ What exactly prevents Jean from mind controlling a Damage Control worker to infiltrate the headquarters? 

+ The MCU's New York city is home to a large number of super powered individuals; if Jean Grey can control one of them, she's done. Furthermore, she can find someone's dirty secrets and use them for blackmail. 

I mean, all of this things still involve moral issues, but the damage to third parties is greatly reduced and the plan is more effective. In short, Sadie Sink's Jean Grey is someone whose malice makes her stupid and hinders her own intentions.

Despite all this, Jean Grey is treated by the movie as a poor little misunderstood innocent, not as a broken figure who does evil things. She is elevated to the level of victim™ as if her victims didn't had feelings too. 

After figuring out why she is a terrorist, Spiderman "fixes" her: he allows her into his mind, and she witnesses Aunt May giving a motivational speech. Spidey then takes the role of a social worker who tells Jean that she is loved, that she is not a killer and that she's got a friend in him, friendly neighborhood Spiderman. 

Then, Spiderman takes a bullet for her. This finally convinces Jean that Spidey is a friend and she decides to save him with the help of the Punisher. 

And then she just leaves. She faces no consequences for her actions. The movie wants us to consider her a victim™ as if she didn't hurt lots of innocent people for a plan that didn't even save her sister in the end. 

You see, saving someone who loves you and forgives you for your abuse isn't as brave as admitting that you have been a useless monster. Most characters who redeem themselves in movies proceed to actually virtuous deeds. Some make a big sacrifice of their life or safety. Others try to compensate their great evils with an even greater number of good actions. It would have been nice to have a scene were Jean apologizes to the people she harmed or possessed, but none of this happens. Not even in the post-credits scene. 

And this isn't even the first time Marvel excuses the behavior of a female possessor. 

The last mass possessor in the MCU was Wanda Maximoff, aka Scarlet Witch. After experiencing grief because her robot boyfriend Vision died, she commits the following crimes: 

+ Possessing all the inhabitants of a town named Westview, forcing them to pretend they are living in an Utopic sitcom. 

+ Sending fellow witch Agatha Harkness into a mental loop because she wanted to intervene. 

+ Refusing to free the inhabitants as soon as they revealed they were experiencing torment. 

+ Accessing the evil book Darkhold, after which she is possessed by an entity that convinces her to kill, torture and harm people just to get to take care of someone else's children.*

+ She only expels the entity from her mind when she realizes someone else's children think she is a monster. Then, she kills herself. 

While all of this happens, "heroes" like Dr. Strange and Monica Rambeau react with the maturity of a Lego Marvel© Christmas Special. Once again, zero consequences. 

Will Marvel try to actually try to redeem Jean Grey, like Tony Stark before her? I would like them to do it, but I don't expect them to correct their course. You see, Brand New Day and it's characterization of Jean Grey are being defended by establishment media and commentary figures. They think Jean is a "morally grey" character. Furthermore, she is portrayed as a persecuted minority, which means the writers won't dare to give her some accountability. 

That's pretty sad because a decently written redemption arc for her could be beautiful, motivational and even spiritually useful for some of the hapless viewers. It's also extremely uncomfortable because brain control is a violation of privacy, something that corporate tech bros, politicians and wanna-be antichrists like Trump are obsessed with. 

Perhaps, just like Jean Grey herself, Marvel's evil is making them stupid too. 

I will pray that people will benefit from  whatever is good in this movie (not much) and strongly reject the (multiple) areas with questionable morality. 

Worst Mom Ever

Today is Mother's day, a day I don't care about because my mother never cared about it. You see, we don't really celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day or Valentine's Day in my family.

Other than Christmas and Easter we don't celebrate other festivities. However, the presence of mother's day is ubitiquous, so I might as well talk about it. 

The purpose of mother's day is to glorify and perpetuate the ideal of motherhood: women are encouraged to be the best version of themselves while taking care of their children. Therefore, it is significantly cumbersome to see bad mothers  getting away with being publicly bad mothers. 

The same applies, albeit in a different way, to family movie characters. 

While I am yet to see a film glorifying the evil step mothers of fairy tales, there are other bad mothers whose presence is more insidious since the movie doesn't pay attention to their incompetence. 

Today, in the Pasture of Knowledge, I will rant against the worst Mom ever: Valka from How To Train Your Dragon.  

Valka 

The story of Valka is not for the weak. 

This woman lived with her child Hiccup and her husband Stoik in the viking village of Berk. She never really fitted in. Which means she was really sad. 

One day, the dragons attacked Berk (again) and one of them sneaked into Valka's house. The frightened woman stormed into the room, willing to risk her life to protect her child. 

What she didn't know is that her maternal instincts would die just as she acted upon them. 

The dragon didn't attack Hiccup. It's gruesome features stared with curiosity and admiration at the little 3D animated white baby. It wasn't a monster. It was an intelligent, gentle beast, who acted out of curiosity and not viciousness. 

And so, Valka stared back. What she didn't realize in this moment of tension, is that the dragon unwittingly destroyed something in her. Her motherhood instincts. 

When Stoick and his fellow warriors stormed in the scene, the dragon snatched her for no reason as the desperate vikings looked hopelessly. 

The movie then tells us that Valka and the dragon became friends. She learned to read the character and instincts of the fearsome beasts. She found a massive cave where dragons lived in peace. She named her friend "Cloud-Jumper" which is probably the worst name in the entire franchise. She and the owl-faced Cloud-Jumper would pierce the skies, striking upon those who dared to hunt the winged serpents. 

But Valka never looked back upon her infant child. 

Yes, that's right. Valka abandoned her family to be a hippy dragon-loving environmentalist activist. Despite the dragon's ability to fly significant distances, Valka never returned to Berk to check on her infant child or her husband. Never let a child without a mother get in the way of animal activism! 

What makes it even more infuriating is that when Hiccup reunites with her, he never questions her choice to be a bad mother. They play around with Toothless and Cloud-Jumper but no one ever asks Valka why she never came back. 

At the end of the movie, Valka is still a dragon-loving activist, but she never says sorry even when her husband dies. 

Incompetent At Animal Welfare 

Upon further examination, I noticed that even though Valka did became an animal rights activist, she never did something that could have protected dragon's lives: She never actually *explained* to the Vikings why dragons should be spared from cages and swords. 

The characters in How to Train Your Dragon are remarkably bad at communication, but this woman definitely takes the cake. 

Nothing prevented Valka from returning to Berk and showing herself to the stunned vikings. She could have then presented Cloud-Jumper and explain that dragons were trainable, noble creatures that made  awesome pets. 

I mean, it's almost like if her maternal instincts were so obliterated by the encounter with Cloud-Jumper that she couldn't even pass them on to her new animal welfare enterprise. 

Of course, that would have meant the plot of the first film would never happen in the first place; but then that is why we have writing manuals. Had the movie-makers actually written a competent excuse as to why Valka never came back, they would have preserved the integrity of the entire franchise.

What we got instead is a woman that became both a species-traitor and the dumbest animal activist in the entirety of fiction, only to suddenly spring out of nowhere and pretend that she was a good mother all along. 

Wasted Opportunity: She Could have been Better 

However, why did this happen? Did Dreamworks had the nefarious intention of telling young girls that they should drop their babes and go free geese from Foie-Gras farms?  

Such a scenario is more than possible, however, I think this character was most likely a victim of re-writes and possibly corporate meddling. 

You see, Valka was supposed to be the villain of How to Train Your Dragon. She wasn't supposed to be "friendly". She was supposed to be  harsh and unforgiving, a threatening force of destruction in the name of dragon-hood. 

This in my opinion would have changed the entirety of the movie (both in therms of quality and in therms of messaging) for the better. 

Out plucky vikings would be confronted with someone who loves dragons way too much. It's always interesting when the antagonist is just a corrupted version of our protagonist. It makes the character confront their personal values and realize that they too can become evil. When the character overcomes their tricks and challenges we see how strong their values actually are, and the character has grown as a result of resisting the temptations. 

Instead we got a generic dreadlock-haired guy who wants to conquer the world. And a mother who abandoned her child but that's okay because she loves dragons. 

Fortunately, we got women who aren't like this, and that's why we got Mother's Day - a useless, corny and overtly consumeristic festivity that nevertheless reminds us that unlike Valka, all the good mothers on our planet aren't such a catastrophic wasted opportunity. 

The Zack Snyder Trilogy: Man of Steel

The DC Extended Universe (DCEU) is a collection of movies inspired by the characters of DC Comics. Most of this movies are not very good and the DCEU itself had a very troublesome history. They didn't know how to please audiences and constantly changed from dark, desaturated and depressing movies to corny and funny flicks that attempted to attract children. 

In 2022-23, the DCEU died with the movies Flash and Black Adam. A new version of the DCEU will be rebooted in 2025 with a Superman movie. 

Speaking of which, I will analyze the movie that brought Superman to the 2010's box office. This movie is: 

Man of Steel

This movies give special attention to Superman, as Zack Snyder's adaptation of this character offers quite a lot to discuss. 

Snyder saw Superman as some sort of Jesus Christ figure. (or, should I say, rip-off). A savior from another world, a lover of humanity who uses his power to save everyone.  

Man of steel is a rather dark adaptation for the kryptonian. Instead of the charming boy-scout character most people knew from the comics, movies and television shows, here Superman barely ever smiles and behaves grimly, even suggesting some degree of madness. 

The reason this movie catched my attention is rooted on an article I read on a lefebvrist website long ago. This article was written by a protestant minister and claimed that Man of Steel was a movie in which Superman would be the Antichrist and his enemy, Captain Zod, the God of the Bible, who would be of course portrayed in a negative way. 

So, today, in the corner of madness, I will attempt to answer this questions: Is Man of Steel about Antichrist? Is Captain Zod a parody of God? How far did Zack Snyder go to bring parallels between Jesus and Superman?  

Synopsis

First we have to resume what happens in this movies. Therefore, let me begin: 

Man of Steel begins in the planet Krypton, which is about to explode because the kryptonians used its core to fuel themselves. Superman's father, Jor-el, chastises the kryptonians for their stupidity and warns them of their impending doom. 

Kryptonian society is decaying too. For starters, their children are fabricated; motherhood and fatherhood do not exist. This isn't the case with Kal-El, the future Clark Kent; whose birth is natural. His father infuses within him the genetic codex of his species and prepares to send him off, while his mom suggests he will be treated as an outcast and executed. 

But Jor-El insists he will actually be appreciated "he will be treated as a god" and off he goes. 

General Zod, who is our generic space-nazi villain attempts to take control over the planet and preserve only the best Kryptonians. After killing Jor-El he and his followers are defeated and sent to the phantom zone in capsules. He warns Supie's mom he will find the codex & baby as Kal travels its way through the galaxies and krypton explodes. 

Kal-el is found by Martha and Jonathan Kent. The later doesn't want his adoptive son to save people because he is afraid the government will find him and do things to him. That's reasonable, but he takes this fears to the extreme. He is smothered by a tornado for refusing his son's help, and even suggests he should just let people die before risking being recognized. 

Later on, the young Clark Kent dedicates himself to save people while hiding at the same time, following his desire to save people while honoring Jonathan's desire for anonymity. 

He has an identity crisis until he finds the Fortress of Solitude, where an AI version of his dad - "his consciousness" - tells him the story of Krypton and simultaneously asks him to be a guidance for humanity and chose his own path. 

While this two seem to be contradictory statements, I think that Jor-el wants his son to teach people to chose freedom, and to incite others to chose freedom by his example. 

Pay attention to his words:

"You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders"

Why would they join him in the sun? Does Jor-El worship Apollo?  

Just as Kent and Lois Lane are starting to fall in love, Captain Zod arrives to earth and informs the whole of humanity about his existence. Zod says he knows there is a kryptonian on the planet and wants him to present himself to their spaceship or else he will punish humans. 

Kal-EL starts doubting whether he should trust the American government to capture him and present him before Zod, betraying Jonathan's sacrifice. Clark could fly all the way to the spaceship and present himself; he could also look for advice to NPC Jor-El, but instead he goes to the worst place you could possibly go for advice: a novus ordo church. 

The novus ordo priest gives him generic advice about "trusting your gut". He also says that sometimes you have to give a "leap of faith", which based on the context of a movie he is talking about faith in humanity. Only after "the leap of faith", Superman will be able to see if people are worth trusting. 

After this he offers himself up to be captured by America and extradited to Zod. 

Zod extracts the codex from Superman, and explains to him that he will terraform the earth so he and his fellow space nazis get to inhabit the planet. He is making a "new krypton" and will use the codex to perpetuate the species. 

However, terra forming the planet will kill all humans, so Superman decides to push his limits and defeats the space nazis. While fighting with Zod, he destroys half of Metropolis. Superman also exterminates kryptonian eggs, meaning the species will be extinct once he dies. 

At the end of the movie he promises the American establishment that he doesn't hate them but will work independently. He chooses to hide himself behind a pair of glasses and live as a reporter for the Daily Planet.

Jesus, Superman & The Antichrist

We begin the discussions by pointing out the similarities.

 Someone from the skies is sent and decides to use his power to save people. He hides from them and lives as a misunderstood outsider, eventually to reveal himself. After he is captured and taken from earth, people are saved from something evil. 

The part when he goes to the church is like the prayer in Gethsemane because the evil of humanity overwhelms a doubting Superman. 

Even the over the top destruction of Metropolis we see in Man of Steel - which was criticized by classic superman fans - makes sense from this perspective: let us remember what happened to Jerusalem after rejecting the Messiah.  

In fact, something that Zack Snyder understood about the Messiah is that the Messiah is saving people who reject and ostracize their Savior. In other Superman products this isn't the case because Supie has few doubters. 

On top of this all, there are many scenes where the framing suggests this similarities to the viewer. For example, as Superman returns to earth from the nazi spaceship he positions himself like if he were crucified.

 When he decides to offer himself up he stands in front of an image of Christ. In fact, Clark is 33 during the main events of the movie.

I take retellings of the story of Jesus quite personal, because while there is nothing wrong with writing a character who imitates Jesus, both should be sufficiently distinct to avoid cringe and/or blasphemous comparisons and avoid telling the story of Christ in an irreverent or ridiculous manner. 

I believe Snyder went too far but still retained many important differences. People were waiting for the Messiah, while nobody expected Kal-el. Kal-el had a natural birth instead of a virgin birth, he was not sent by God, but by a creature, and his mission stays within tangible things. 

Kal-el does not come to preach an ancient religion, but convinced himself of generic "chose fweedom" and "trust humanity" messages he stole from Jor-el and a novus ordo priest. 

All of this leads to the next question:

Is the Man of Steel an Antichrist Figure in the Zack Snyder films?

My opinion is that this version of Superman is an imperfect antichrist figure, an imperfect antichrist analogy. Let me defend my position: 

Antchrist is someone who pretends to be Jesus to deceive the masses into accepting a false religion. Antichrist refers to an individual who will do this in the strongest manner, close to the end of times. 

Man of Steel is an antichrist figure in the sense that he is some sort of faith-in-humanity and freedom messiah. This was the intention of Jor-el who sent him, and eventually he agreed to do this. 

I believe Kal-El is sufficiently similar to Jesus to pretend to be Him (at least, in an allegorical manner), but their doctrinal differences are sufficient to set them both apart. In Man of Steel, this doctrines position Superman as a humanist-antichrist. 

There are however 3 reasons why this is imperfect and might not even be a correct interpretation of the movie: 

1: Kal-El isn't specifically similar to the antichrist as described in Scriptures. Had he been, he would have been jewish, would have explicitly claimed to be Jesus and would have asked people to worship him. He would also have more luciferian symbology, like the characters in the book series The Golden Compass. 

2: The movie is riddled with disjointed ideas, and there might be a legitimate way of interpreting this movie in a way contrary to what I believe. 

Is Captain Zod a Demiurg? 

The writer for the lefebvrist article argued that Captain Zod was a figure for the Demiurg, the evil creator from the gnostic religion. The gnostics believed the Demiurg stole power to create a world almost as evil at itself, which is the one in which we live in. 

The reason this is important is that some people interpret the Demiurg to be our God, the God of the Old Testament. This article claimed that Zod was the demiurg, who came from the heavens, and had a confrontation with Supie who would either be satan or antichrist. 

The problem with this article is that Zod is not a good figure for a demiurg. He never claims to be divine, but most importantly, he never participated in creating the world. Unlike accurate demiurg figures in fiction (like The Celestials in The Eternals or The Architect in The Matrix), he is not the creator of the world we live in. He is not even able of achieving omnipotence. 

Unlike the God of the Old Testament, Zod doesn't judge people based on a judgement of their character but on the power of their species. He doesn't come to impose a law and physical limitations, he just comes to destroy because he was programmed to perpetuate Kryptonians since he was conceived. 

A real parody of the God of the Old Testament would be King Magnifico, from the Disney movie Wish. Unlike Zod, he actually pretends to be a good person and look for the interests of his own people. However, his real motivation is power and he seeks to prevent the protagonist from becoming like him. This is similar to God punishing humans for attempting to be like him; the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden being prime examples. Zod is nothing like this. 

He is just a space nazi who hates people and wants a planet for himself and his fellow space nazis. Rather than representing God, Zod represents those racial supremacists who conspire against freedom and refuse to take the "leap of faith" in humanity that we are told Superman did. 

Conclusion 

It is likely that Zack Snyder wanted to tell his own analogy for the history of Jesus. Since Zack Snyder is not a fundamentalist, he reinterpreted and deformed the Messias to his own liking, making an imperfect antichrist figure. On the other hand, Zod is not a parody of God but yet another cinematic Hitler for the protagonist to kill. 

I do not want to do a temerarious judgement of this directors, and this might just be one of many internet theories. However, I consider the evidence is sufficient for this theory to be worth pointing out.

If anyone disagrees with this interpretation on the movie, let him post his arguments and we will listen to him.