8. How Come Superman Can Breathe In Space?
It was pretty clever of Goyer to write an explanation of how Superman could breath Earth's atmosphere despite being an alien, and to continue it to allow Zod and his team of henchmen to wear extremely cool helmets that were in no way ripped off from the Fall Out game series. That little reference to baby Clark Kent struggling to adapt to the atmosphere (because that's how infant lungs work, of course) and then the repeated event when he boards Zod's ship with its alien atmosphere is the narrative pinprick behind Zod's devilish plan to terraform Earth. It's the rather blatant means to explain how bad changing the atmosphere would be, as well as how necessary it is for the revival of the Kryptonian population, and it serves its purpose, even if it glosses over other key questions, like why Zod couldn't just be happy with Mars, or something? But there's a giant logical flaw in that second sequence when Superman fails to initially adapt to the replicated Kryptonian atmosphere. The film establishes that Superman has adapted to Earth's atmosphere, and cannot really operate in Kryptonian conditions, so clearly he is subject to the fundamental laws of atmospherics. That much is patently obvious. So how come he can breathe perfectly well in space, when he escapes Zod's ship? If he needs Earth's atmosphere to be all-powerful, and the "less nourishing" Kryptonian atmosphere weakens him, why doesn't space, which has NO ATMOSPHERE AT ALL, render him completely inert. Or like, dead?