Man of SteelSave

Krypton. A dying planet. The Krypton civilization has been mining the planet's core for thousands of years for power and stability, and the core is about to collapse. Jor-El (Russell Crowe, gray-bearded, in the planet's senior scientist robes) addresses the Krypton High Council in their floating chamber and tells them the planet has weeks to live. They've already drained the planet's gravity-binding energy. He proposes a planet-wide evacuation. The Council refuses. They lock him out of the chamber. General Zod (Michael Shannon, vein-popping intensity), commander of Krypton's military, breaks into the chamber simultaneously and stages a coup, killing the Council to install himself as planetary dictator. Jor-El's wife Lara is in labor in their family residence, giving birth — for the first time in Krypton's biotechnological history — to a NATURAL-born baby, Kal-El, instead of a genetically-engineered citizen from the Genesis Chamber. Krypton's society has been entirely engineered for centuries; Kal-El is the first non-engineered child in a thousand years.

Jor-El steals the Krypton Codex — a crystalline data-skull that contains the genetic information of every Krypton-engineered citizen, the master DNA blueprint for the entire species — and infuses it into Kal-El's bloodstream. He loads the infant Kal-El into a hand-built scout-class spacecraft. He launches the pod into space. Zod's forces arrive at the Jor-El residence. Zod and Jor-El fight in the family chamber. Jor-El dies fending Zod off while Lara remotely activates the pod's launch. The pod escapes the planet. Zod's coup is then crushed by Krypton's remaining military; Zod, his lieutenant Faora-Ul, and his sub-commander Nam-Ek are sentenced to a Phantom Zone detention dimension. Their detention ship is launched into deep space. Hours later, Krypton implodes. Lara dies as the planet disintegrates. Kal-El's pod is the last survivor.

Earth, Kansas, 1980. A scout-class Krypton pod lands in a wheat field outside Smallville, Kansas, at sunset. A childless farming couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent, find the toddler inside the pod and decide to raise him as their son. They name him Clark. Clark spends his childhood in Smallville hiding from his abilities. His Kryptonian DNA gives him superhuman strength, near-invulnerability, X-ray vision, freezing breath, and flight (eventually). Earth's yellow sun supercharges his Kryptonian metabolism in ways the red Krypton sun never could. Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) has been instructing Clark his whole life to hide his abilities — humanity is not ready to know about an alien on Earth. The world will try to use him or destroy him, Jonathan warns. "You're not just anyone. One day you're going to have to make a choice. You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be. Because whoever that man is — good character or bad — he's going to change the world."

Smallville flashbacks. Clark, age twelve, saves a school bus full of children from drowning after a bridge collapse — using superhuman lung capacity and strength to lift the entire bus from the river bed. His mother sees the rescue. Jonathan, when Clark gets home, is angry — not because Clark saved lives but because Clark broke his cover. "You should have let them die. The world isn't ready." Clark, ages thirteen through twenty-three, suffers from his Kryptonian senses — every sound at once, every conversation in a five-mile radius, every smell of the cafeteria amplified to nausea levels. He hides in the school janitor's closet during recess. Jonathan teaches him to focus, to filter, to ignore. Clark grows up bullied because he refuses to fight back (he could obliterate his bullies in a single punch).

Then a tornado. Smallville, the late 1990s, a Class F4 twister bears down on a Kansas highway exit ramp. Cars pile up. Jonathan, Martha, and Clark are stranded in the family truck. Jonathan walks back into the storm to retrieve his dog. The tornado catches him on the ramp. Clark, who could run at superspeed across the highway and pluck his father out of the storm in two seconds, is held back by Jonathan's hand-signal: don't reveal yourself. "Pa! I can save you!" Jonathan shakes his head no. He's taken by the tornado. He dies. Clark, age twenty-five, has watched his adoptive father die rather than break the secret. The act haunts him for the next ten years.

Years later. Adult Clark (Henry Cavill, twenty-nine, bearded) wanders North America — Alaska, Newfoundland, the Pacific Northwest — doing manual labor under aliases. He's been a fisherman, a wildfire firefighter, an oil-rig worker. He uses his powers only to save lives anonymously when no one's looking, and never enough to be caught. On an Arctic oil rig he intervenes in a crew fire by pulling a derrick off three trapped workers. The crew sees him. He walks off the rig at sunrise. He hitchhikes north. Meanwhile, Lois Lane (Amy Adams, dark-eyed, the Pulitzer-winning Daily Planet investigative reporter) is on assignment investigating an anomaly — a U.S. military discovery in the Arctic of what looks like a massive buried alien spacecraft frozen in 20,000 years of ice. Clark, drawn by the same radio signal the U.S. military is reading, hitchhikes the same direction.

Arctic discovery. Clark, in cold-weather gear, infiltrates the Arctic camp and finds the Kryptonian scout ship buried under the ice. The vessel is a 20,000-year-old Kryptonian probe sent during Krypton's expansion era, abandoned in Earth's polar ice. Clark steps inside. He activates the ship using a small data-key he's been carrying his whole life (a sealed Kryptonian module that came with him in his original landing pod). Inside, an artificial-intelligence projection of Jor-El materializes — a holographic version of his father stored as memory engrams in the ship's computer. Jor-El explains Clark's origin in full. He shows Clark Krypton's history, the genetic codex, the meaning of his S-shield (the Kryptonian House of El family crest), and the destiny he was meant to inherit. Then he hands Clark the Superman suit — the family-crest red-blue-yellow tactical suit, made of self-repairing Kryptonian metallurgical fibers. Clark puts it on. He learns to fly. He blasts off through the Arctic sky in slow-motion.

Lois finds the ship's entrance and the Kryptonian AI Jor-El walks her through Clark's history. She returns to Metropolis with the story but Perry White, the Daily Planet editor, refuses to publish it. Lois publishes it on a friend's blog instead. The story goes viral. Clark, in Smallville helping his mother, sees Lois's blog post quoting his real name and origin. He confronts her at his father's gravesite. They have a quiet conversation about identity and journalism. Lois decides not to expose Clark publicly. She becomes the only person on Earth (outside Martha Kent) who knows Superman exists.

Zod arrives. Months later, Zod's Phantom Zone detention ship — drifting in space for thirty-three years — is shattered by Krypton's explosion shockwave, freeing Zod, Faora, and Nam-Ek. They commandeer abandoned Kryptonian outposts across the galaxy and rebuild their forces. They detect the Kryptonian-signal Clark accidentally activated when entering the Arctic scout ship. They warp into Earth's orbit in a massive black-and-silver flagship called the Black Zero. Zod broadcasts a planet-wide threat to Earth on every radio and TV channel simultaneously: "You are not alone. We are Kryptonian. Hand over the alien named Kal-El within twenty-four hours, or this world will suffer the consequences." Earth's governments panic. The U.S. military prepares for first contact.

Surrender. Clark, in costume, walks into a Kansas military base and surrenders to General Swanwick. He's interrogated. He's then transferred to Zod's command ship along with Lois Lane (who was investigating him at the same time). On the Black Zero, Zod explains his actual plan to Clark. Earth's atmosphere can be terraformed back into a Krypton-like environment using a World Engine — a Kryptonian terraforming construct that bends gravity to reshape a planet's atmosphere and ecosystem within hours. Once terraformed, Earth will support Krypton-style life. Zod will then revive the genetic codex (which Clark is carrying in his DNA), engineer a new Kryptonian population, and humanity will be extinguished as collateral. Clark refuses to cooperate. Lois, in the holding cell, taps into the Black Zero's computer using the same data-key from Clark's pod and accidentally summons the AI Jor-El consciousness through the Black Zero's systems. Jor-El's AI helps Lois escape with Clark.

The Battle of Smallville. Faora and Nam-Ek attack the Kent farm in Smallville looking for Clark and the genetic codex. Martha Kent is in the house. Clark arrives just in time to engage them. Then Smallville's town center becomes the site of a fifteen-minute battle between Clark, Faora, and Nam-Ek — three Kryptonians fighting in low orbit and through main street, Smallville's IHOP getting demolished in a sequence that becomes a viral meme for the rest of the decade. The U.S. military (commanded by Christopher Meloni's Colonel Hardy) joins the fight on Clark's side. Faora is downed. Nam-Ek is downed. Their atmospheric mask-helmets are knocked off, exposing them to Earth's atmosphere for the first time — their Krypton-acclimated lungs cannot handle Earth's air saturation and they collapse. Clark spares them.

World Engine deployment. Zod's Black Zero ship launches two parts of the World Engine. One half lands in the Indian Ocean to channel Earth's southern hemisphere mass into terraforming energy. The other half lands in central Metropolis to channel Earth's northern hemisphere. The Engine activates and starts bending gravity on a planetary scale — Metropolis's downtown skyscrapers begin pancaking together as the gravity-shaping waves pulse through the city. Superman flies to the Indian Ocean Engine half and destroys it by ramming through its core at supersonic speed, taking the southern Engine offline. The Metropolis half — the more difficult target — still operates. The military, working with Lois and the Jor-El AI, prepares the Phantom Zone escape pod Clark arrived in as a singularity bomb. The pod's negative-gravity Phantom Zone projection can be used to open a singularity portal that pulls every Krypton vessel and Kryptonian crewmember back into the Phantom Zone dimension.

Metropolis destruction. The military flies the pod into the Black Zero ship and detonates the singularity. The Black Zero implodes into a swirling Phantom Zone portal in midair over Metropolis, pulling Faora, Nam-Ek, and the bulk of Zod's forces back into the Zone. The Metropolis World Engine collapses simultaneously, and the impact-debris from both events levels approximately one-third of Metropolis's downtown core. Half a million civilians die in the destruction. Superman, in the chaos, has saved a small percentage of the population but lost most of central Metropolis. The film's most controversial production decision — Snyder's choice to depict massive civilian casualties — is the moment that ends both Superman's idealized cinema arc and the optimistic-superhero genre's dominance for a decade.

Zod's last stand. Zod survives the Phantom Zone collapse. Enraged at the loss of his army, his world, and his species, Zod attacks Superman one-on-one across what remains of central Metropolis. They smash through skyscrapers, crash through Union Station, fight at Mach 4 across the city skyline. The fight ends in a Metropolis train station where Zod, pinned by Superman in a chokehold, targets a family of four (mother, father, two children) huddled in the corner with his heat vision. He aims his red beams at the children. Superman tries to physically twist Zod's head away from the family. Zod resists. Superman, with no other option, snaps Zod's neck. Zod dies. Superman screams over the corpse of his species' last remaining adult. Cut to black. The film's audience-divisive ending arrives.

Aftermath. Two weeks later. The U.S. military's Colonel Hardy meets with Clark in a now-rubble Metropolis. Clark negotiates terms with the U.S. government: he'll operate as an independent agent, will not be conscripted, will not be tracked. He'll act in defense of the planet when needed. The military reluctantly agrees because Clark has the only power on Earth that can defend it from a Kryptonian threat. Clark, with Lois Lane's help, gets hired at the Daily Planet as a junior reporter — "Welcome to the Planet," Lois greets him on his first day, in glasses and a tie, his hair gelled, the secret identity now in place. The film ends on a panoramic shot of Metropolis being rebuilt and Superman taking off into the morning sun.