Batman V Superman: 10 Reasons Man Of Steel Is Better

2. It Has A Proper Handle On Supporting Characters

One of the most common areas of praise for Man of Steel is its supporting cast, and how it massages them into the bigger picture. Everyone from Lois Lane to Perry White, the Kents, Jor-El and so on get at least one discernible "moment", and Clark's connection to all of these people had some relevance and intrigue to it. More than anything, these characters actually felt like their existence mattered in the scope of the story: they each had sure narrative drive.

Batman v Superman makes most of the peripheral characters feel pretty perfunctory, in honesty. Most offensive, of course, is Lois, whose breadcrumb-gathering mission is tedious busy-work that leads to the inevitable damsel-in-distress shenanigans.

Perry White meanwhile says a few witty lines and disappears out of the movie, Jonathan Kent appears in a pointless hallucination, Martha is part of a crucial but rote kidnapping plot, Jeremy Irons' Alfred is fun but under-utilised, Lex's iconic assistant Mercy Graves gets killed off out of nowhere, and so on and so forth.

This really feels like a movie that begrudgingly included so many side characters out of a misplaced sense of obligation, when a story that kept things simple and clung to the key players could have been more effective. That said, Man of Steel boasted a sprawling canvas and put paid to its "lesser" characters just fine.