In Superman II Superman realises that the Phantom Zone trio will continue to use his compassion for Humans against him so he draws them away from the City.
In Man of Steel Pseudoman just smashes through whole buildings full of people while trying win against Zod and then gets very upset about snapping Zod’s neck trying to protect 3 people.
Man of Steel throws anything good it has going for it out of the window in the final reel.
It just becomes a Kaleidoscope of CGI destruction with all the emotional investment of a screensaver.
Did you miss that Zod was doing things for completely different reasons in this movie then in Superman 2, I have to ask if you have even seen this movie since release.
In Superman 2 Zod wanted to beat Superman in a fight, so Superman running away would draw Zod away.
In Man of Steel Zod wanted to and I am quoting his own word here “Make Superman watch every human die”, so tell me does that sound like someone who would stop killing if Superman went away, Superman gave himself up to Zod earlier in the movie, did Zod give up his plans when he did that.
Under your logic every World War 2 veteran still alive should be tried for crimes against humanity because clearly every mass murderer in history will stop killing if no one is fighting him, so if the allied troops had just not fought Hitler he would have never killed a single person and the allies are to blame for all those deaths, not Hitler and the Nazis.
This “logic” only makes sense if you assume Zod had no Super powers and Superman could have just snapped his fingers and made Zod vanish in a puff of smoke.
I think Warners either needs to retire the Superman character because he is so dated you can’t tell any kind of story with any kind of conflict with him any more or they need to make a rule that every Superman story in every medium from now on has to end with time travel undoing all the events of that story because that is the only way to end a Superman story. That is the only way people will ever accept any Superman story where anything happen ever again. After all everyone is fine with Superman the movie despite the fact that the only reason people didn’t die in that one because Superman couldn’t stop two nukes at once is because he was able to time travel and undo the events of the last twenty minutes of the film, so that really seems like the only solution to the problem all the writers are trapped in at this point.