His Superman flat out assassinated a bunch of generic middle eastern terrorists within seconds of the start of the movie. Gunn’s was saved by his dog, loses a fight and is repetitively crushed by large objects. Plus shows sympathy to a robot. They are not the same.
they aren't the same, but neither are some squeaky clean figure that sticks to rescuing cats from trees. There's a whole 10 minute sequence that firmly establishes that this Superman is willing to jam a head of state into a cactus to intimidate him, and he's fine with letting others kill
And that isn’t out of character for Superman to do. I mean, there’s a whole interaction he has in the Roger Stern run (underrated btw) of Action Comics where he says killing is bad but there are times when it is the only option. Why it suddenly became a problem in MoS and BvS, I’ll never get.
And again, I hardcore recommend checking out Roger Stern’s Superman. It’s honestly pretty good. The whole Triangle Era is but his work alongside Jurgens’ are really, really hard and I envy every Superman fan that got to grow up with it as it happened
Roger Stern is one of the GOATs off his Spider-Man run alone. So much of what gets re-tread in later years is the tone from his era but with characters from the 60s
Snyder tried to tell a story of superheroes as something more like Greek gods -- figures that have morals, but operate on a scale above the rest of humanity -- while Gunn is going with average people scaling their service with their abilities. Both are valid approaches to this kind of material
The crucial bit about the Snyder stuff is that he was developing an arc that brought superheroes back down to earth, and humanized them again. That's obvious in his version of Justice League, where Batman rediscovering his humanity is basically the thesis of the movie
It was a smart thing to do with DC characters, given their reputation for being more like remote gods than relatable people at the time, but... it must be said, starting that theme with a Superman origin story was a bit off. It should've just started with a middle aged Batman
I don’t necessarily disagree but I guess the argument was that we hadn’t had a CINEMATIC Superman origin in a hot minute and Smallville was ending/progressed well past being simply an origin story for Superman.
And overall, the genre was still obsessed with origins. Snyder just followed a decades long norm set by a majority of directors. Gunn, Reeves, and a small handful of others represent a new slate of directors who only recently figured out that one norm can be broken without consequences.
My half-baked take is that if Batman vs. Superman was the first film in the sequence, everybody would've gotten that both of these guys have been around for awhile, they're kind of fucked up from years of doing this shit, and they're primed to fight each other
and that, after that all comes to a head, they're on a path to remembering that all of this is about helping people, above all. Which you can only definitively see play out in the Snyder cut of Justice League
Superman starting off as a more jaded figure, rather than running into that feeling across years of his career, didn't quite make sense. The Snyder detractors are right on that one