The 4-D Skinner Box

Everybody knows about the Skinner Box and operant conditioning.  Everybody knows our brains have a soft spot for prize boxes that deliver rewards at random intervals.  Most people seem pretty okay with that.  I mean, a box that delivers, say, delicious candy to you ALL the time would seem like some kind of kiss-ass.  A box that delivered no candy ever would just be some dumb, judgmental asshole.  We KNOW it has candy, and yet it never shares!  Like it's so great.  The best boxes deliver candy sometimes, when it seems reasonable, is what we seem to agree on.  The problem for capitalism's aspiring b-list villains has always been how best to dress up the box that delivers candy sometimes and sell it to an eager market, noses pressed up against glass, miming the pressing of an air lever to see if we follow.  Yes, they want candy is what they're trying to say.

Some attempts are less subtle than others.  Gambling has been around far longer than B. F. Skinner and his research, but in the modern era they've made good use of his work.  Have you been to a casino lately?  Slot machines have evolved in the last 20 years or so.  Gone are mechanical reels coupled with the simple, if exciting, plunk plunk plunk of sometimes change with a perky jingle to let you know you'd won.  Now most are touch-screen games, with embedded mini-games, a bevy of exciting sounds and animations to let you know that SOMETHING is happening.  Sometimes, when you hold your mouth just right as you pull the lever, that is.  The end result is still a machine, that sometimes, when the moon is right and you believe hard enough, delivers money to buy candy.  It's just now, instead of more or less being a naked "random rewards machine" it's been given a nice cozy cover of a "game".  It's nothing to be ashamed of, pulling a lever for sometimes candy, it's bonafide entertainment!  It's an arcade where the game periodically spits quarters back at you.  It's a mini-soap starring you and a cartoon frog.  What's not to love?

Of course, somewhere along the line, traditional video game makers reached the obvious question.  What if you could not only put chocolate in peanut butter, but also put peanut butter in chocolate?!  What if what kept a player playing a given game was not intellectual or physical challenge, but a series of increasingly subtle skinner boxes, delivering sweet digital candy?  Let's face it, delivering fresh physical or mental challenges is challenging work, why not work smarter, not harder?  I mean, you can create what you think are clever puzzles and get nothing but critical disdain, but you put someone  in front of a friendly machine that dispenses sometimes candy like a regular joe and they'll thank you for the opportunity!  And on a day that is still lauded in the halls of b-list villainy came the realization that you don't have to actually deliver anything more substantial than the cartoons and fanfares when "rewarding" players!  As it turns out, there is a market for delivering an intangible version of the sometimes candy experience and people will line up and pay you real human dollars for the privilege.  Some will even become connoisseurs of lever pressing, bragging about the random candy dispensed like they did something special to EARN that candy, "I mean yeah it was just a lever but I really PRESSED it you know?  I pressed it a LOT."

Of course, since aspiring b-list villain is not a commodity we ever seem to run out of, it became important to dress the skinner box product in a distinctive, well-branded way to distinguish it from the ridiculous swarm of competitors.  Recently, I've been pleasantly addicted, really just the tiniest modicum of discomfort, to what I call the 4-D Skinner box: Diablo 3 and Destiny.

Diablo 3 is the third skinner box in Blizzard's popular skinner box series where you beat up the devil and candy comes out.  Now, you can't actually eat the candy so it is necessary to invest the players somewhat in order to make the rewards meaningful.  You are given the task of creator in this tiny universe, and given a little man you mold out of pixels to care for.  He's a bit of a schlub to start.  A little shit in the impressive levers and candy department.  You are given a single lever to start, a basic attack, which you aim at a monster who is hiding all the candy from you.  You hit the lever, which attacks the monster, which delivers candy at a reasonable and not shitty interval:  sometimes.  The candy in this case, is clothing and weapons with which to hang upon your tiny creation, to reduce the total number of whacks needed to hit monsters and get candy more or less.  And to prevent monsters from demolishing your little man and ruining what should be a pleasant candy experience.  Of course, to keep it interesting, the monsters get harder to whack as time goes on, requiring you to hit the lever more and get more candy to get better at killing monsters who are, lets face it, only becoming more difficult about coughing up the goods. 

At regular intervals you will get more levers, like a cone of fire, and a meteor strike, with which to crack these pinatas.  Blizzard, god damn and bless them, has made the gathering of candy extremely pleasurable, if you like whacking pinatas with an increasingly insane variety of sticks.  You can burn the with fire, call meteors from heaven, whirl spinning hammers, do super-punches, shoot pointed sticks of all varieties and all this candy will keep coming out, and sometimes really good candy with blue or yellow or orange wrappers that the skinner box only delivers sometimes sometimes, or sometimes sometimes sometimes OR more rarely sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes.  That's the best candy of all:  sometimes^4.  And doesn't it look nice on your little man.  And don't the monsters fall over so nicely now!  And doesn't it look shit 15 minutes later when after a session of persistent whacking nothing better has fallen out.  The game is a gorgeous, engaging, skinner box with so many cartoons and fanfares and flashy things that it's easy to forget it's an incredibly calculated and complex collection of reward ratios tied to a complicated multi-lever system.  This is a deluxe skinner box and it will deliver the candy that you never knew you wanted.

Hot on its heels, is Bungie's new skinner box model Destiny.   Where Blizzard gets you popping out candy like a seasoned lover, Bungie's attempts at skinner boxing seem clumsy and shy.  It's not sure where your buttons are but damn if they aren't trying to get you and your brain off as best they can.  What actually seems to be holding them back is some kind of, how do I say it, dignity?  That seems to want their game to be an actual game of some sort, and maybe some kind of MMO and, oh yes, a consensually addictive skinner box experience for the whole family to enjoy.  You also have a little man to dress in this one, but where D3 plays out like the fun adventures of a cartoon man and the candy-ripe hordes of the apocalypse in a 3rd-person isometric point of view, destiny is much more of a traditional "shooter" with manly shooty men and blocky armor.  For anyone who's been hit in the head recently, a shooter is a first-person experience wherein the player is given a variety of guns with which to caress the world.   In Destiny there is also punching and a couple of superpowers for when the shooting begins to create a sense of ennui about the limitations of self-expression in a violent post-apocalypse.  Make no mistake, the shooting is fun.  The punching is satisfyingly punchy.  The powers are glowy and boomy and very impressive.  These are the smoothly contoured levers of the Destiny experience.

The skinner box itself seems to need a little work.  The first addiction in any skinner box rpg is generally "leveling your mans" which means getting him from a dumb baby with a rags to a big-boy totally grown-up space where the only excuse for not having a nice outfit and a bigger stick is an inexcusable lack of lever pulling, which the growing up process should have instructed the player in adequately.  But once the story, such as it is, has finished and leveling, such as it was, is over, players still need some flimsy excuse to keep pressing the lever.  No one likes to see the man behind the curtain pulling the lever and stuffing candy in his face like any old schlub, they like to see a prince among princes in his finery whacking monsters until candy comes out for the good of all, in what is agreed to be a worthy and compelling exercise.  For a purpose.  If there's one thing you don't want in a skinner box experience it's a moment of existential self-reflection.  

But Destiny does try.  When you successfully shoot a monster the candy, in a perfectly sometimes way, will spill out in a glowy white, green blue or purple orb.  It is really a very sensual, pinata-like experience.  But it doesn't seem to happen as frequently as one might hope, or rather as one's brain might crave.  The reward ratio doesn't seem "sometimes" enough, you know?  After the leveling is done and the story is over, the only thing to really do is re-run all the story missions or randomly roam the world whacking monsters and hoping candy spills out.  D3 has a similar post-story mode, but it somehow seems more satisfying.  Probably because the candy flows so fast you rarely have a moment to ask why you're still doing this.  In destiny you can spend a day and not find better candy, and the candy flows so slowly there is plenty of time to reflect on what you're actually doing with your time, which, as discussed, is death to the skinner box experience.  

Which isn't to say Destiny isn't fun, it is, but for more traditional reasons.  I get very little upgradeable candy when I play, but caressing the world with bullets is still as fun as it was in the first 5 minutes and the environments are very pretty, except for the cubicles.  Which is to say, the core gameplay in Destiny is actually kind of fun, independent of the skinner box addiction mechanics, which is not something I'm sure I could say about D3.  But it also means once you've run out of new enemies to shoot, or get tired of the environments or juveniles tea-bagging your corpse in pvp, the skinner box ratios may not be enough to keep people pulling the levers in numbers large enough to satisfy the b-list villains who funded it.  I assume.  I am strictly the rube and never the mastermind in these scenarios.

The interesting thing about these games is some players are purely in it for the uncluttered skinner box experience and will focus all their efforts on reducing the extraneous "game" crap and try to arrange an experience that is more or less just pressing the lever without any distractions.  In Destiny this was accomplished by identifying a cave that spawned enemies frequently, and then standing in front of it, shooting more or less continuously, watching the cave fill up with brightly colored candy cubes.  People loved it.  Bungie, with a tinge of mild embarrassment removed the cave, because while they want people addicted, they don't want people ADDICTED, if you know what I mean.  Standing in front of a cave shooting mindlessly for hours is a tad too reminiscent of dead-eyed retirees plunking pensions into slots all night, every night hoping for some kind of transcendence, which in the religious parlance of the area is called "the jackpot" I believe.  But here in lies the problem, where Bungie wants to be in bed with the devil, but doesn't want to smell like hell.  It's like creating a funpark for heroine addicts with promises of delicious heroine and being surprised when junkies start flipping the tables and screaming about how stingy they are with the needles, or worse, the growing suspicion that this shit is methadone.  METHADONE.  You don't tell a junkie how much is enough, you know?  It's difficult to make money half-assing addiction, because junkies aren't great at moderation by definition.

Not that Bungie won't make a zillion dollars.  I believe it cost $500 million human dollars to make and that they more or less recouped that on the first day.  And, methadone or not, there's rewards ratios have certainly been strong enough to keep myself and many others playing more than we no doubt intended to.  It's a fun game, and sometimes there is candy.

Everybody knows about the Skinner box and operant conditioning.  But who doesn't love candy?

The Long Hello

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you're looking for some light SF reading, you could do much worse than the Long Earth. I find it interesting that people are accusing this of being stealth YA material, because it read to me much more like the classic SF stories I love which are big on ideas and light on complicated prose. I love the exploration here of the Long Earth, and western civilization's tendency to push ever westward into unexplored territory. I love the push and pull between Lobsang and Joshua as two oddballs off to explore the multiverse. I even love the attempt to work old mythology into the premise, which works surprisingly well.

This is a classic adventure story more along the lines of Journey to the Center of the Earth more than anything. The premise here is so big that the potential implications of the discovery on datum Earth and humanity as a whole are only barely touched before it works its way to the big cliff-hanger finale. I like the little touches of Pratchett's humor and I like how weird it gets to towards the end.

While other discerning readers may want to quibble about the ending, or the writing style or what-have-you, all I'll say is it consistently kept me turning pages because I had to see what they discovered next. That's good enough for me to recommend it.

-1 star for the cliffhanger ending, because I hate cliffhangers.

View all my reviews

X-men: Movies of future past

X-men:  Days of Future past is a flawed movie.  It doesn't do justice to the original comic, nor is it particularly true to the plot, but I still liked it a lot more than most blockbusters the industry craps out these days.  To be sure, it's Bryan Singer again, so if you didn't like the tone or grainy CGI look  or plastic costumes of the of the first 2 X-men movies, this is probably not the movie for you.  Or at least, none of that has really changed. But to be honest, it's the familiarity that works for me.

I still love the old cast and their interpretations of the characters.  I still love the new cast and the energy they bring to the mythos.  I enjoyed the future dystopia scenes, which mostly consist of some of my favorite mutants fighting sentinels, but found the scenes from the 70s more interesting thematically and visually.  I think putting silly comic concepts in stylish clothes from the 70s helps smooth out the rough edges of comic wackiness.  I loved the addition of Quicksilver, and his big scene is officially one of my favorites of the series.

But mostly what I love is that I didn't leave the theater with a deeply sad soul, like I do far too often with blockbusters these days.  Not because the plots themselves are too dramatic or anything, but because so many movies these days seem to be written by cynical people writing gritty reboots about how everything is shit, really, when you get down to it.  Or who purport to be upholding morals with the mouth parts while categorically demolishing the idea of moral behavior with the punchy parts.

For instance my biggest problems with Man of Steel weren't that the action wasn't good, or the plot holes, it's that the creators seemed to genuinely not understand the concepts of heroism, hope, and murder and genocide not being morally justifiable when you have it in your power to prevent it.  I left the movie feeling sad and angry about what the creators were trying to tell me being a good person is.   It felt far more like post-collateral damage rationalize of America's military violence over the last half a century, but that's another essay.

So, it was thrilling to me to see a movie whose central moral dilemma was trying to prevent someone from using their perfectly justifiable rage and pain from killing a human being, who undoubtedly had done bad things in the past and would again in the future, in order to stop a cycle of self-justified revenge on both sides that would end up destroying everyone in the end.  It was nice to see, once again, the stark judgement that Erik is not justified in aggression and oppression and violence even though he had himself been justified.  It is nice to see a movie repeat again, the lesson we all impatiently claim to know but seem to constantly forget, that our feelings of victimization do not legitimize our aggression and demonization of the hated other.  A movie that holds out the hope, again and again, that we'll get over ourselves and our pain long enough to be the first to stop the endless cycles of retribution, demonization, and rationalized aggression that we find ourselves in.

Are you human or mutant?  Are you left or right?  Are you black or white?  Are you Democrat or Republican?  Are you Russian or American?  Did that man hurt you? Who cares.  The messages of Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, MLK and Professor Xavier are all the same:  learn to care for, talk to and embrace the people who cause you pain or the future only gets worse.

Keep your gritty, soulless, pessimistic reboots.  Give me actual hope any day of the week.

Her

*SPOILERS* for the movie Her.

My summary:  In the brief window of time between birth and transcending the material universe, and artificial intelligence helps a man overcome his divorce.

We Killed the Stars

We killed the stars long ago
but left their corpses burning brightly.
We thought you'd like to see them so
we display them for you nightly.

We embalmed them all in gravity wells
put on some planets in adorning.
If you'd like to thank us, swell,
you may do so in the mourning.

Burned Bridges

Ideally
when I think of me
and I often think of me
I see my life as a gleaming city
with bridges of connection from me
to a rich network of sister cities and brother boroughs
The towers of myself sparkling silver in the sunlight
My bridges to the others spanning the miles and years majestically
With caravans overloaded with ideas and love and charity ever-flowing
across strong and well-tended roadways from city to borough to neighborhood to township
in a never-ending stream of friendship, family, brotherhood, solidarity over the age of a lifetime

In reality
when I look at me
and I often look at me
I see my life as a sloppy city
with bridges of connection from me
to the cities and boroughs that will still trade with me
The towers of myself half-built before the workers grew apathetic
The bridges to the others held together with twine, most of the time
With caravans leaving intermittently as the economy in my city, and their city allows
when the chaos in our collective internal politics has windows of functionality and diplomacy
Avoiding the burned-out bridges to cities more chaotic and sometimes more gleaming than my own
In a never-ending stream of poor-planning, missed opportunities, gratitude and hope over the age of a lifetime

I do no regret abandoning the cities
that became actively hostile or subversive
to the stability of my half-assed metropolis
But every now and again
I stand at the at gates to my kingdom
Looking past the charred remains of suspension bridges
to the towers of past ports of trade
growing dim and hazy in the distance
over time and space
dreaming of a gleaming age

Bro of Steel

It's a bird!  It's a plane!  Oh, wait, it's just some guy.  And a flock of spoilers.

When I went to see Man of Steel the other night, I made the same mistake I've made with every blockbuster I've seen the last few years:  I believed the trailer and harbored the faint hope that I would leave the theater not feeling cranky at the current state of storytelling.  Alas, it was not to be.  To be fair, I should have known better.  I've seen this movie before.   Which is a shame, because I was really hoping to see a Superman movie this time.

Frankly, we've all seen this movie before over the last few summers.  It has the same metal ships, tentacles and robots menacing the hero, the same kind of gritty debris and explosions, the same kinds of plot holes, the same cardboard thin characters, the same disconnected scenes, the same lack of reasons to care about much of anything going on on screen.  This is a problem endemic in the industry right now, so it's hardly to fair to single out Man of Steel in this regard.  To be fair, I was expecting some of this anyway, but it's not really why I didn't like the movie.  I didn't like the movie because, in their rush to reinvent superman with as much spectacle as possible, they abandoned the core principles of the character.  It's a great movie about people getting punched, but it's not a great Superman movie.

It starts well enough, with Jor-El on Krypton.  The core story here is still the same, but this is probably the most interesting interpretation of Krypton I've ever seen visually (including Kelex!!) and sets up the most interesting plot elements in the story, although even then it's not super deep.  The basic rivalry between Zod and Jor-El is not terrible (although there are nits that could be picked), and I like that Zod, while the typical movie jerk, is at least a typical movie jerk genuinely attempting to save his culture.  It's shortly after baby Kal arrives on Earth that the movie starts to go off the rails for me.

Skipping 33 years into the future, we find Kal saving an oil rig crew quite heroically when the fishing ship he's working on happens by.  This seems to bode well for the kind of man he'll be in the future.  Alas.  His next job, after swimming to shore, is working at a diner, where he backs down from a bully for fear of betraying his secret, and takes his revenge by trashing the guys logging truck with super-strength.  This was my "uh-oh" moment.  For a 33-year-old, that's not so awesome.  I don't usually look up to people who "win" arguments by slashing the tires of people they don't like when no one is looking.  To be fair, similar scenes played out in Smallville and Superman 2, but it doesn't really fit there, either.  And at least in Smallville, Clark has the excuse of being a teenager.

The problem, as we've been learning in a series of childhood flashbacks, is that in this universe, Jonathan Kent doesn't have quite the moral center he does in his other incarnations.  It seems all right at first, right up until good ol' Pa Kent mentions that Clark should maybe have let his classmates die rather than reveal his secret.  And becomes utter bullshit when his father insists his invulnerable son take shelter under an overpass while his vulnerable father rescues the family dog.  And when this predictably goes awry, waves him off, in an effort to teach him that secrets and personal convenience are preferable to doing the right thing.  Which is a lesson so well learned, that Clark wanders the world aimlessly, with no apparent sense of purpose or responsibility to use his gifts to help people.  Although he'll graciously help people who happen to endanger themselves in his general vicinity.  What a nice guy.  Ish.

This lack of purpose and responsibility plagues his actions through the rest of the movie.  When the Kryptonians show up in Smallville, and an otherwise entertaining punch-fest ensues, Kal never once attempts to minimize the damage, or put people out of harms way as he's fighting.  It's all about the punching, civilians be damned.  And clearly, people are being injured and killed in this conflict given the extent of the destruction, even though they never show it.  He doesn't even help clean up.  What a guy.

Oddly, it's the cold Kryptonian Jor-El that tries to provide Kal with a sense of purpose and responsibility.  While Lois is burning alive in a bungled attempt to escape Zod's ship, Jor appears to Kal and tells him he can save her and, in fact, all of them.  "Ah!" I thought, "I judged him too soon.  This is where he figures it out."  Alas.  The lesson doesn't stick.  For a Superman, he has very little agency.  Or character.  Or personality. 

As the final battle begins, Zod has deployed his ship and a smaller terraforming machine on opposite sides of the planet, both of which are required to start a doomsday effect to terraform the planet.  Through a profound error in judgement, it's decided that the invincible flying guy is going to assault the machine situated in an unpopulated area on the other side of the planet, instead of heading to the one currently beating the everliving shit out of Metropolis, even though destroying that ship would be just as effective.  Leaving the military to a futile frontal assault against an alien army with technology vastly superior to our own, the plan being to drop Kal's weaponized cradle on the Kryptonians.  This goes as poorly as one might expect, although with a last minute save from Kal, they successfully kill most of the Kryptonians with a kamikaze run and large bomb with the Kryptonian symbol for hope emblazoned on the nose cone in large, friendly iconography.  Which seems oddly appropriate for the American military mindset post-9/11 now that I think about it.  "Don't run, we are your friends.  Can't you see the hope exploding from our weapons?"  And that's not the worst of it.

One of the reasons Kal's decision to tackle the less-dangerous terraforming machines is terrible is how much carnage Zod's ship causes in Metropolis while Kal's busy robot-wrestling half-way around the world.  The ship is releasing a gravity wave increasing steadily in radius from around his ship, which lifts everything up, and then smashes it brutally back down every few seconds.  It is clear from the footage shown that this is killing hundreds, if not thousands of people.  By the time Kal finally gets back, the staff of the Daily Planet is nearly dead, and the carnage and debris is incredible.  Kal, in his penultimate confrontation with Zod, has just destroyed a seed ship with the potential to grow new, not-psychopathic Kryptonians and save his race.  He does this with his heat vision, growling that "Krypton had it's chance."

Which sets up the second funniest moment in the movie.  The first funniest moment is the soldier in the military command center yelling that Zod has infected their RSS feeds.  Not even their blog updates are safe!  The second starts as Kal floats down to the ash-covered hellscape in what remains of the center of Metropolis.  One of the few survivors of the disaster says, absolutely glowingly, "He saved us!"  Well, he saved SOME of you.  There's tens of thousands who were shit out of luck.  And it's there, amidst the screams of the dying, injured and trapped that are not shown, but that he MUST be able to hear in the city around him for a mile in every direction, he kisses Lois, a woman who he's spent about 20 minutes talking with, and they have a completely unearned and unrealistic moment.  It's really a meet-cute situation.  They will one day tell their children that their first kiss tasted like the ash from the remains of mommy's co-workers.  But wait, there's one final indignity.

Of course, Zod has survived the crash of the seed ship, which leads to an epic series of punches that is really some of the best super-fighting I've seen in a movie.  Which might have been easier to take if they weren't obviously killing hundreds, if not thousands, more people as they fought.  Again, they don't show people dying, but they show destruction on such a scale that people HAVE to be dying, and again, Kal never even notices that people are endangered by his actions, let alone tries to get people out of harm's way.  It doesn't even cross his mind.  It all culminates with Zod in a headlock, trying to burn unlucky citizens with his heat vision, daring Kal to kill him to make him stop.  In a final act of brutality, Kal obliges, snapping his neck.  Kal, a man of many fantastic abilities, and therefore many non-lethal choices in that situation, chooses to be a super-murderer.  To be fair, they try and make it look like the decision pains him, for a few minutes at least.  But there is no lasting weight to the decision.  The next time we see him he seems unaffected.

When we next see him, he's throwing a crushed drone into the path of his military contact, and for one insane moment, I thought he might be about to make a pointed statement about drone killings, because he's just killed someone and he's learned something about the heavy cost of murdering someone, even a mass murderer, let alone people under suspicion because of how their movements look from a telescope.  But no, he's just mad that they're spying on him, and insists on unaccountability.  Because that's how his dad raised him.

Superman is many things to many people.  To some people he really is super-bro, the ultimate bully, whose sole virtue is that he is stronger than other people.  And if that's your thing, you'll probably like this movie.  But to me, even though I have some problems with the character, what I've always found most powerful about him is that's he's a tiny, alien god, in a world made of cardboard, who takes great care every day to solve his problems the tediously moral way, instead of taking the simpler, more brutally expedient route.  He has so many choices, including ruling Earth with an iron fist, but instead chooses to do the right thing, the KIND thing, even though it is frequently personally inconvenient to him.  

I didn't like Nolan's Batman, because I thought he changed the core of the character, when he portrayed him as a man who gives up pretty quickly.  I don't like Snyder/Goyer/Nolan's Superman for the same reason.  They change the core of the character by making him someone with no sense of responsibility, no personal vision of a better world, no apparent motivation outside what other people tell him to do and a casual acceptance of the idea of collateral damage.  Warner Bros, who thought they might as well completely miss the point of Christianity while they were completely missing the point of Superman, actually attempted to market Man of Steel to churches and pastors while delivering the LEAST christ-like version of Superman ever put on screen.  Sure the symbology is there, but in giving us the form  (he's 33, he's here to save us, he has a beard, and here's some cross imagery to seal the deal), they completely fail to deliver the underlying philosophical substance of each.  In the same way that a guy dressed like Jesus isn't Jesus unless he's preaching hope, forgiveness and compassion, a guy dressed up like Superman isn't Superman just because he punches people really hard.

Look, I understand at least part of the spirit of the age.  Our institutions are failing us, we're undergoing a deconstructive movement philosophically and Superman is the next too-good-to-be-true statue we're pulling down into the nitty-gritty with the rest of us.  But a gritty reboot of Superman doesn't work for the same reason a gritty reboot of Christianity wouldn't work:  it destroys the core of the story.  You can't paint a symbol of hope on a guy and make him as flawed as the rest of us.  And you can't put him through a story where he learns nothing and holds to no higher standard and tell us he gives us something to hope for.  You can't have the villain give a speech about how Superman's weakness is his morality, and then prove it by requiring Superman abandon his ethics and adopt his enemies' values to "win".  You certainly can't call it hopeful.  

This is Superman as envisioned by Lex Luthor:  an unaccountable alien menace who's no better than the rest of us.  It's a cynical attempt to bring him down to our level, because we find the idea of an american icon NOT using "bad guys" as a cynical excuse for collateral damage, summary executions and hope bombs too uncomfortable to contemplate.  

I think we can dream up better heroes.  I think we owe it to ourselves to tell ourselves better stories and challenge ourselves to be better people ethically and philosophically, not just physically.  And while I wouldn't put any money down on the existence of Jesus or Superman, I don't see how things get better unless we strive for the ideals they represent.

We could aspire to be super instead of merely steel.